Affiliate Marketers: SEM Friend or Foe?

[5starAffiliatePrograms]

Article from our sister site Clickz -
Affiliate Marketers: SEM Friend or Foe?

Interesting take on the Affiliate Marketing game and how it fits into the overall SEM strategy - written by someone who comes from the SEM side of Internet Marketing. Can't say I agree with the article, but then again, it focuses heavily on Pay Per Lead and CPA programs, which is only one aspect of our industry.

I of course don't like the depiction of affiliates as "low hanging fruit pickers" but then again, if I was coming from the SEM side of the game I maybe would see things his way too.

"Marketers often believe they've made their lives simpler by shifting risk to a third party. That may be true, but chances are in the typical affiliate relationship, the situation results in the affiliate just going after the low-hanging fruit. After all, the affiliate is likely involved in this style of SEM for several marketers simultaneously. Because it's investing its own money and time in the campaign, efforts on the easy pickings."
Read the rest then come back to discuss your thoughts.
http://www.clickz.com/experts/search/strat/article.php/3585526

Linda

[grasshopper]

i found this article to be pretty poorly reasoned. the author contradicts himself when he says things like:

"you'll be disappointed if you rely on your affiliate partner to be aggressive in the marketplace"

and then goes on to claim that:

"Once [the primary company] enters the marketplace alongside their lead-gen partners, they find the keywords that drive the majority of volume and potential profit are locked up by those partners."

maybe he's describing a different kind of affiliate marketing than i'm used to, but in any worthwhile industry that i've ever worked in, the vast majority of traffic comes from a handful of conspicuous terms. and these terms tend to be highly competitive - hardly the "easy pickings" he describes.

any company that doesn't have its act together enough to realize the value in doing their own SEO in-house from the start will have to play catch up if they've been paying affiliates to get the traffic for them. but that's a simple statement of fact, hardly an earth-shattering realization.