Here’s a snippet of me talking about bloggers as the next super-affiliates at the last Affiliate Summit.
Yeah, I could have been a bit more dynamic. I wasn’t feeling well that morning. I’m usually way more upbeat.
I make the argument that the webmasters of 10-years ago are now the ones who are reaping the benefits of online riches. They learned how to be online marketers and capitalized on their knowledge. The same is true for bloggers today. In time they will learn how to become online marketers.
The difference is, bloggers have it much, much easier than the webmasters did. Trillions of pages of user generated content from bloggers will flood the Internet making it unavoidable that you will at some point in a search find blog content. When those bloggers figure out how to effectively monetize that content, they will reap the rewards.
Actually, every super affiliate have a blog, and it's really rare to see one of these old "marketers" without a blog.
In 2008, I don't think that it will be an option to do business online without a blog.
Gotta disagree. It looks like most super affiliates don’t have blogs. They’re too busy working on their websites for shoppers. You don’t need a blog to do business.
Once again Trust, you missed the point. In time they will learn, and when they do, they’ll have so much shear volume of control in terms of indexed content that they will be able to do very well, across a long tail that is.
When I say “super-affiliates”, I mean that as a metaphor for successful. I don’t think every blogger is going to be Fatwallet, no.
@Franck, I agree.
I don’t know. But when I see merchants listing their top affiliates or talking about their top affiliates, I’m not seeing bloggers. Also in terms of what is being produced, I see more informational content coming from bloggers, not so much sales type content. And when it comes right down to it, it’s all just html on a page, that’s what a spider sees. As far as content production, forums kill blogs. And then you have stuff like this coming out: Google’s Blogspot Contains 75% Spam. Search engines know that since a lot of this is free for users, it attracts the spammers, I would downgrade it. You’ll have some successful bloggers, their are successes everywhere but as a whole, I don’t see them being dominant at all. And I can understand why you would say that since you do blog consulting, askablogger, used to (still do?) blogkits etc. And that’s not a dig at you but when I read stuff it’s good to understand the perspective of the author, where they’re coming from, any biases.