"Good" vs. "Bad" Search Affiliates

I want to thank Li for inviting me to SMG. I hope to bring to light some of the issues
that affect affiliate marketers, strategies that they utilize, and tools that
are currently being utilized.

For my first entry on SMG I wanted to clarify my view on the
“good” vs “bad” Affiliate Marketers utilizing search. Unfortunately, there are people out there that who give some
amazing marketers a bad name. For me it
simply comes down to whether the affiliate adds value to the merchant.

There are many affiliate marketers out there that are more
advanced in PPC strategies then the merchants. A quality affiliate will build customized landing pages for niches
within the merchants business. They
will target their keywords towards this niche often going deeper than the
merchant. Even if the merchant has a
quality search campaign these affiliate still add a great deal of value by
blocking competitors from the space.

As recently as a few years ago many affiliate managers rated
the success of their program based on the amount of affiliates in the
program. Now it makes much more sense
to run small controlled programs where the Affiliate Manager has more power
over who they are working with. By
manually approving all affiliates and sticking to strict guidelines it makes it
easier to weed out the offending affiliates. This includes trademark bidders or people who bid on important keywords
and send the traffic directly to the merchant’s site through an affiliate link. These types of affiliates are not good for
an individual program or the industry as a whole. It is these behaviors by individuals is what gives affiliate
marketing a bad name in the search space. They are also a major reason for the recent change in Google’s algorithm
that has led to false positives, negatively affecting the campaigns of
legitimate merchants.

In future blog entries I will go into more detail on
the top affiliates in the space as well as the offenders giving Affiliate
Marketing a bad name.