Affiliate Marketing Magic

In early 2007 I was invited to a marketing meeting of a brand new start-up in a multi billion dollar niche market to evaluate and critique their online marketing and overall marketing strategies. While I am busy with other projects (aren't we all) I decided as a favor to one of the executives to sit and evaluate and share my opinions.  After looking at their site and overall strategy, (online and offline) I bluntly told them that their strategy "sucked."

They showed me that their monthly ad budget was over 50k per month and hard and soft costs were even greater. I shared my opinion that by cutting their advertising budget and investing into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and a robust affiliate program; they would definitely see a much higher Return on Investment

This got their attention as almost every one of these top executives had no idea of the difference between paid positions via google Pay Per Click (PPC) ad words and organic search positions. One thought that the #1 organic position took "big bucks" to get……It just shows how much mis-information there is out there.

Affiliate Marketing.

In July 1996, Amazon.com launched the first affiliate program on the Internet. As the story goes, Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of Amazon was talking with a woman at a cocktail party about how she wanted to sell books on her web site. After that encounter, Bezos thought about having the woman link her site to Amazon and receive a commission on the book sales. This was the impetus for creating the "first on the Web" Amazon.com Associates Program.

Before Amazon

In February 2000, Amazon.com announced that it had been granted a patent (6,029,141) on all the essential components of an affiliate program. The patent application was submitted in June 1997.   The internet's dirty little secret was that there are many adult sites that dabbled in the affiliate marketing concept before Amazon picked it up. In fact, the adult sites came up with many of the best (and worst) marketing concepts that are used in the mainstream today.  The consensus of marketing folks and adult industry insiders is that Cybererotica was either the first or among the early innovators in affiliate marketing with a cost-per-click program.

What is an affiliate program?

In many programs, an affiliate earns a commission for each sale he refers to the lead site. For example, the woman at the cocktail party would be paid by Amazon for any books sold through the woman's personal website. Think of it as a referral fee.

In my meeting with the executives, I said, imagine that you have thousands of foot soldiers and college students referring their friends leads to your site or business. Sure, you may lose a small amount of money from the commission payouts but the growth of your business would be staggering. Plus, you just saved yourself 50 thousand dollars a month in advertising dollars. It doesn't cost alot to start this program.

I told them I'd sleep on it and get back to them regarding a marketing plan that would be a win-win for both of us. A few weeks went by and I consulted with them, but after some time I realized this company had some challgenges beyond marketing.