If you use twitter you can easily enter into a drawing for a free conference pass to Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas January 11-13. Just tweet “I want to meet @johnandrews at ASW #asw09” and you’ll be entered into a drawing. A free conference pass is given away every Monday until Jan 5th, drawn from the prior week’s tweets.

Of course the idea is that you tweet to different people (as many as you like) since that spreads the word about Affiliate Summit. Here are the details:

• see details at  the Affiliate Summit page
• see your tweets at the asw09 tag page
• follow Twitter account @AffiliateSummit to see winners and info on other promos

I noticed that “Black Friday” is a very popular search term this month. I noticed that “Black Friday” is one of the top 5 topics on social platform Twitter. Of course there are affiliate marketing opportunities surrounding Black Friday, because it is a shopping event. Black Friday is followed by Cyber Monday, known as the biggest Internet shopping day. So obviously Cyber Monday, although not as well known as Black Friday, is big for affiliates, since millions of referring affiliate links will be driving the traffic that leads to those sales.

I noticed someone posted an Amazon.com “Black Friday” link to Twitter, using a URL shortening service similar to twiturl.com. When I looked closely I noticed it was an affiliate link to Amazon. Cool, I thought. Innocuous, harmless, helpful and covert. I wondered what sort of adoption that link experiences.

Today I noticed yet another search community member bashing affiliate links, specifically those posted to twitter. It happens too often. Why?

Spam is spam, but affiliate links are not spam. If someone posts a self-serving message to his audience and includes a self-serving affiliate link, then the audience is in control. Garbage is garbage. If you don’t like the message or post or comment or tweet, that’s fine. You are free to handle it. But the affiliate link should not be the cause for your dislike. The affiliate link is a perfect vehicle for referrals. Every industry wishes it had an accountable, trackable, meaningful means to refer potential customers like we do. And if the link is meaningful, innocuous, harmless, and helpful plus covert, all the better! But “covert” in this context is incorrect - I should say “unobtrusive“. There is nothing wrong with the affiliate link in proper supportive context. And if there is a spammy post meant only to carry a self-serving affiliate link, there is still nothing wrong with the link. The spammer might be offensive, or the post exploitative, but not the link.

I find the search community self-defeating. The world doesn’t consider affiliate links to be spam, only these self-defeating search marketers do. And the more they say so in public, the more the public is influenced to view affiliate links as unworthy. Why is that?

Commerce is something that must be driven. Commerce doesn’t happen by itself. The intent to buy might be spontaneous, by the act of buying must be prompted by some commercial driver. Sometimes it is an advertisement that creates warm fuzzy associations between a purchase and a person. The ad drives commerce. Sometimes it is a coupon that ties a purchase to an added value, causing the actual purchase to take place even in cases where the intent to buy pre-existed for quite some time. Very often endorsements drive commerce. Given no other knowledge, I’ll buy what my doctor says is best. Of course the doctor doesn’t use an affiliate link, but are we dumb enough to believe the doctor isn’t participating in an affiliate program? Have you ever heard of the pharmaceutical industry?

I think every link should be an affiliate link, because almost every link drives commerce. Someone is potentially gaining commercial value every time I link to anything that leads to commerce. Google knows this, which is why Google is a search engine. Google has gone after the ripest, lowest-hanging fruit on the tree - un-monetized value injected into the system by those who link without affiliate tracking codes. lately Google has been referring to “undisclosed affiliate links” as potentially felonious. I think that is an obscene abuse of the public trust. Of course I am not referring to “free” scams that are not actually free, lotteries no one can possibly win, or negative opt-in programs that obligate you without your explicit permission, or ones that lock the consumer into a costly situation beyond the initial response transaction. Fraud is fraud, but affiliate links are not fraudulent.

Google would like nothing better than a law (with felonious teeth) forcing all links to be un-trackable. Google will settle for a law that requires all trackable links to be highlighted as suspect, or otherwise discountable via Google’s own aggressive business tactics. That helps Google secure a winfall of profits. Strangely, it appears that many search marketers not only accept this, but support it by bashing affiliate links as unworthy or spammy. And the oddest part of all of this is… those same people tend to complain when Google doesn’t pay webmasters back an adequate portion of profits via the AdSense “Nickels for You” webmaster program.

I have tried to understand this perspective, but failed. We webmasters inject value into the web, but are supposed to refrain from trying to track that contribution for some return (because affiliate links are spammy somehow?), and then we are supposed to participate in Google AdSense to try and eek a minimal fraction of the earned profits back, at the whim of Google, which takes the lion’s share?  That’s way inefficient, and wrong.

Instead, how about we stop bashing affiliate links, track every link we create, block Google from monetizing that value we’ve injected into the world wide web, and then we all participate in a giant tracked link share system that returns a fair portion of the profits according to each of our contributions to driving the commerce that led to those profits? Wow..that’d be great! Feel free to stop listening to anyone you find off-putting.

On second thought, that’s what we are doing with our affiliate links, isn’t it? Nice! We’re on the road to a better web world! Maybe it will eventually lead to a fair trade web.

I hope that people will consider contributing to that Greater Good by stopping the tarnishing of affiliate linking, and refraining from related self-defeating activities like “voluntary disclosure policies” and “nofollow” and “colored hats” for web publishing tactics. Despite what Google wants you to think, you do not need to highlight or disclose your affiliate relationships except in limited, government-regulated markets (like pharmaceuticals, licensed professions, etc) or in certain situations where fees are paid for promotion, or where you (or your affiliate upline) are actually defrauding the consumer. The FTC is a consumer advocate,not Google’s private police force: “The FTC works for the consumer to prevent fraudulent, deceptive, and unfair business practices and to provide information to help spot, stop, and avoid them“.

One of the good things about the modern social web is the associated ease of communication with distant colleagues… people who do similar work, but with whom I would not otherwise communicate. Professional associations and meetings used to enable such connections. Today meetings bring us the face-to-face aspect of professional relationships, but  we largely make our connections ourselves, online.

Older generations would probably misunderstand an incoming email from a stranger that was on topic, specific, and interesting. I find it enriching. Lately, however, I wonder how many professional SEO practitioners actually do their homework. It’s not wise to talk specifics here, but consider the case of the exact-match, premium domain name deployed for search marketing such as lead-generation.

An SEO emails me with evidence and comments about the significant extra power Google is granting exact-match domains these days.  The exact-match site sits at #1 in Google for a very competitive search query, known to be a target of some very dedicated (and expensive) SEOs, funded by seriously aggressive businesses. How can one compete with that, if there can be only one exact-match .com domain?

With one look at the site, I noticed a very nice implementation of a modern content SEO strategy I use myself inmy work as an SEO consultant. Nicely done, I thought to myself. I didn’t even check the back links because I would rather look at the #2 and #3 sites. Given the content strategy at work in the #1spot, the status of #2 and #3 might tell me more of the story than a back link analysis. Sure enough, both #2 and #3 are old-school (circa 2007) content strategies.

I write “old school” partly in jest,  but I am serious. It’s not so much that I expect the SEO to have evolved so far that 2007 methods are easily recognized as “old school”, but that difference in this case is really quite obvious. Anyone looking at #1 would notice the difference. Non-marketers would even remark about how different the content is on the #1 site, compared to #2 and #3.

The SEO really needs to do hir homework.  That SEO home work is not “learn the latest content strategy from active SEO communities like the seobook.com private forums” (although that would be a valuable move for any SEO today), but rather pay attention to the ranking sites. Anyone would notice the difference in content between these sites I looked at this morning. An SEO should not only notice the difference, but wonder about it, ponder it, and be enlightened by it. We marketers look at web content differently than “regular people” do. We study keyword spaces. We see things regular people don’t see.
I think that any thinking SEO who didn’t already know about this particular content strategy would recognize it and learn it quickly from this query/SERP. THAT is the SEO homework. Pay attention to the SERP. Don’t be blinded by some internal belief system (”the exact match domain is all-powerful”), but rather look objectively and see what is there before applying SEO assumptions.

In this case, as in many others I have seen, the exact-match premium domain is icing on the cake but not the recipe for success. The content would have done extremely well on a lesser domain. I think back links could have made up any difference.

I consult to several premium generic domains and the irony is not lost on me - the greatest value that premium domain may bring to the extremely competitive keyword space is the mythical barrier it represents to SEOs who don’t do their homework. Bravo, I say. Bravo!