Will Affiliate Marketing Make It?
I love affiliate marketing… well, I love the idea of affiliate marketing. Or rather, what I think the idea of affiliate marketing might be… there seems to be a good deal of discussion on that recently.
However, I increasingly despise how affiliate marketing is being done on a daily basis. We’ve killed the message and elevated the messenger. We praise the keyword buys and the meta tags while we look past the content.
These days, being a professional affiliate marketer entails knowing how to game Google, Yahoo, 2nd tier search engines and Digg but requires very little knowledge of how to actually produce interesting or worthwhile avenues for the marketing of products or services or content.
We are the meaningless middle-people of the internet.
“I am Jack’s medulla-oblongota.”
What are we contributing? What kinds of wonderful products or services or ebooks or experiences or emotional bonds are we offering?
We’re skeptical of the littlest innovation. We scoff at “new” without seeking to understand it. We laugh at those who have creative ideas. We marginalize those who don’t subscribe to the dogma of keyword buys and SEO miracles. Besides grafting the short term intelligence of gaming systems by tweaking code, we haven’t contributed to the overall experience of web users, as a whole, in years.
What happened to us?
If affiliate marketing doesn’t get back to the message and the content and the meaning and the soul behind what we do, we face a very hard road to obscurity, inefficiency and ultimately market irrelevancy. Perhaps we’re already there, but I’m holding out hope that we’ll find the magic again. I hope.
