Affiliate marketing for smaller players is still too focused on local markets. If, for example, you are the owner of a website in the UK, and you want to sell advertising or even books on your site, the majority of affiliate programmes on offer will ask you to decide: are you selling to a UK audience, to a US audience or to different European countries?
You can’t do them all through one affiliate site. This is a distinctly web 1.0 approach to what is potentially a huge revenue stream.
You see, when it comes to affiliate marketing, there’s real money and real opportunity here at the Long Tail, where small sites and bloggers earn their crust.
Take thatdanny.com as an example. It is a relatively young blog (launched in May), but it is picking up traffic quickly. As is the pattern with most varied websites, my traffic is quite international. My Entela Hysko story is still getting significant traffic from the Balkans and South West Europe, some of my stories get distinctly American traffic, while others are more UK or more international (for example the Photobucket story).
So I I get a good mix, but then what happens when I start looking at affiliate marketing? If I sign up with TradeDoubler (UK), I can sell Dell computers, or British Airways flights or iTunes downloads, but only to UK users. If I sign up with Amazon.com, I have to sign up separately to Amazon in each country, and if I show products from the US site, it is unlikely that a European will buy them. You get the gist.
In each of these programmes you have to dig deep to find the companies that trade internationally, and then you find yourself with an extremely narrow product list to promote to all your visitors. For example, on ShareResults you can promote Ipsos polls, or Mate1 dating. On TradeDoubler you can promote Paddy Power Bingo, who are happy to take users from any country and pay the affiliate for any user. But with such a short list of possibilities I can’t really offer much to my users - and here I am, ready to put those banners on my site…
Why British Airways, an airline with an international site, will only allow you to sell to UK customers is the kind of backward thinking that ignores the huge potential of Long Tail affiliate marketing. And why would iTunes, part of a global company, only allow UK affiliates to sell to the UK, unless they sign up separately to each of the other programmes? This boggles the mind; It just doesn’t make sense.
Affiliate marketing naysayers will immediately counter that there are lots of reasons why this is, for example:
- American affiliate marketing sites are often focussed solely on the American market and are therefore less interested in international markets, or
- Of course, you could geo-target your visitors with your two dozen affiliate programme based on where they come from (if you expect a blogger to do this, you’re kidding yourself), or
- Perhaps I am forgetting that in many cases the local market company is not a subsidiary, but a completely separate legal entity (aren’t there technical solutions that distribute customers to the correct site, so that you can get the sale? Of course there are), and finally,
- Cross border technicalities, tax and currency issues make this sort of affiliate management very difficult, or not profitable enough.
And to that I say: yes, but. Yes, there are all sorts of reasons why affiliate marketing is currently focussed on local markets, but those who will manage to become truly international - will reap the jackpot, not just from the big guys, but from me and all the billions of little worker bees, here on the long tail. Ignore us at your peril!
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1 a make money blogging carnival - July 4, 2008 : SuccessPart2.Com // Jul 4, 2008 at 4:01 pm
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