As technology continues to be an important tool for online marketing it comes as no surprise that 2005 was an active year for affiliate marketers. Whether there were new challenges, improvements, or opportunities, 2005 brought about many interesting events and things to keep an eye on, heading into 2006.
The first on the list is social bookmarking. The past two years have been very eventful for sites and products that allow users to share and tag bookmarks. This means that large amounts of private content is published on public sites, making them accessible to wider ranges of audiences. The site that has led the way so far is del.icio.us, which was recently acquired by Yahoo!. They were followed by Furl and a handful of other similar sites.
This opens up opportunities for additional revenue generating channels for affiliate marketers, as these social bookmarking sites make the sharing of links a backlink popularity prospect. After Google’s recent Jagger update, search tests have found that social bookmark sites have begun to appear on the first page of search engine results pages (SERPs).
The major social bookmarking sites allow users to store and tag links and pages. Tagging is merely providing a descriptive category for the link, which will allow users to browse or search on requested categories. Because of the widespread popularity of this relatively newfound service, it’s inevitable that a wide variety of unique users utilize the service, which translates into links and categories that relate to a vast number of virtually every imaginable topic found on the Web.
This is both social bookmarking’s strength and weakness. The large number of unique subjects is poorly organized, which reflects the inability for some users to clearly define their topic.
The searching aspect of social bookmarking holds an advantage over traditional search engines. This arises from the recommended nature of the results that you will find on sites such as del.icio.us and Furl.net. Users may find it more appealing to make use of sites that have been under the scrutiny of fellow browsers as opposed to clicking on sites that a more impersonal and less social search engine may spit out.
For affiliates this means the potential for more traffic that social bookmarks can draw to their sites as well as merchant sites. Complemented with RSS feeds, and it’s clear that social bookmarking can be a very profitable tool for affiliate marketers.
LookSmart, who acquired Furl a few months ago, has taken the social bookmarking aspect of the service and combined it with a search engine, article directory, product listings, and a list of recommended sites for virtually any desired topic. This means that a user can read articles on the benefits of exercising, find a list of local gyms, and get recommendations on which gym to join all in one site.
The second technology in line for discussion is e-mail marketing. Despite the fact that growing fear of e-mail viruses, overflowing inboxes, and progressively more advanced spam filters have slightly darkened clear skies, studies show that e-mail is still an effective tool for online marketing. Approximately 93% of Web users check their e-mail regularly, clearly making it the most popular online activity. Industry reports indicate that about 28% of marketing e-mails are opened, with 3% getting a click. E-mails containing over 20 URLs have twice the chance of receiving a click.
However, Web innovators have developed the Abuse Reporting Format, or ARF, in order to combat the annoyance of spam and to avoid more governmental involvement. This allows e-mail users to simply “unsubscribe” to e-mails that they are not subscribed to. Senders prefer receiving this notice much more to being reported as a spammer. Due to the benefits to both the recipient and the sender, ARF should see wider implementation in the coming year.
Lastly, merchant data feeds have seen increased popularity and effectiveness in the past year. Sites that feature products from a vendor with more than a small number of offerings demands constant updating. If the number of products and types of products continue to grow, this could create difficulties in keeping up with the updates by hand coding. This is where merchant data feeds become helpful.
Most merchants provide one or more ways of providing an affiliate with a frequently updated catalog of products. When this list is provided, it comes in a form that is automatically imported and displayed, which is called a data feed. They come in a variety of file types, including text files, Excel spreadsheets, and XML files. They can also be delivered through various mechanisms, including e-mail attachment, XML feed, ftp, and dynamic SQL query of a vendor’s database.
This allows fresh content to be continuously placed on the site, which means its search engine ranking will be kept high. Also, as visitors to the merchant’s site spend less time searching for their desired product, conversion rates and commissions will subsequently increase. The fact that these data feeds are easy to implement is also a key advantage to using them.
Installing a data feed requires knowledge of ftp, which is relatively simple to learn and use. The most efficient kind of merchant data feed sets up a direct connection to a vendor’s database, which requires specific arrangements with the vendor for secured, usually read-only, access to the merchant’s directory of products.
These developments in marketing technologies in 2005 have given affiliate marketers even more tools to use in their pursuits. Not only are they relatively simple to utilize, but they hold the potential for huge benefits. There is little doubt that these and other new technologies will only grow in importance in 2006.
Sources:
Network
