Wayne Porter writes:

To networks- In today’s environment there is a good chance you may strike gold, and if you don’t- you can refine your strategies. That way on the next trip down your chances are better. Also remember not all gains are monetary in nature.

If you are looking for gold, you need to set up a mine. Most mines in the affiliate landscape are large, expensive and complicated machines. They require lots of person power to get operational and sustain a level of efficiency. Money is the oil which keeps the moving parts properly lubricated so that the mining machines can continue to churn out gold.

Mines are set up all over the affiliate (and online) marketing landscape to find gold. Most of the places where these mines have been set up are near shallow deposits of gold, such as page views, email, banner ads, search engines and traffic from point a to point b.

However, the gold is getting harder to mine because companies in online and affiliate marketing are having to dig deeper and deeper into the soil to find the gold which was once right below the surface. The streams of traffic which used to flow from point a to point b are now becoming less of a rushing river and more of a slow trickle. Panning for gold in those streams is getting less and less efficient.

So, networks and agencies are interested in finding the gold in the new landscapes of Second Life or Widget World. There has to be gold there, all the research says. Pundits and affiliate geologists keep pointing to the great untapped potential of the mountains in the social networks range. Some prospectors have hit the hills in search of that gold, and some have found a few nuggets, but the Klondike rush is still yet to come.

What will this Klondike rush into these new landscapes look like?

Second Life is complicated. It’s buggy. It’s not easy for new users. You can’t kill anyone. You can’t carjack. You can’t even hit people. Here is the flat-out funniest account of a first impression of Second Life that I’ve ever read. Do yourself a favor and read that.

So, what’s the point of Second Life? Specifically, what do we, as marketers, have to learn and gain from that platform?

Why even get involved in Second Life, or widgets, or social networks, or “web2.0″ or any of these buzz words?

They are complicated to participate in, even more complicated to run, fuzzy in their long term sustainability and even fuzzier in their ability to be monetized.

It’s true… they are.

Most importantly, you cannot set up a large scale mining operation with complicated machinery that worked so well in the other parts of the affiliate marketing landscape. Placing large mining operations to hunt for the gold hidden deep beneath the surface of Second Life and Widget World is futile and will only return fool’s gold. Companies such as Reebok have begun to realize this fool-hearted attempt.

So, what are we marketers to do? We must have gold to feed our system. We must have money to keep the machines operating.

Not all hope is lost.

There is an answer and there are ways to tap into the deep vein of gold that exists in Second Life or in widgets or in “web2.0.” However, it requires a special tool that many claim to love and use, but few actually put into use beyond sharing the dull sledge hammered tool called “links.”

That tool is affiliate marketing, and affiliate marketing holds the most promise for being able to tap into the gold that does exist in social media and emerging social platforms. Affiliate marketing programs are relational and founded on human to human interaction. They resist becoming mechanized and they cannot be efficiently made into large mining equipment.

Instead, affiliate marketing is like the most powerful force on earth - water.

Affiliate marketing is fluid, finds cracks, causes slow but powerful change, exposes the natural resources of an area in a way that is sensitive to the general ecosystem and always seeks out a path influenced by gravity and inertia rather than an artificially imposed destination.

Allow your program to flow. Allow your program to find cracks and explore without attempting to blast away the existing landscape of a program. You will be surprised at the results and soon the large and expensive mines which you once ran will be be obsolete.

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PREMIUM Contributors:
AffStat 2007, SecondLifeVideo.com, Marketing Resources at Cumbrowski.comAdJungle Banner Management

Contributors:
AffiliateTip Blog, WaynePorter.com, 5 Star Affiliate Forums, Fraser’s Affiliate Marketing Podcast, Jim Kukral Caddy 4 Hire, Mike Payne - PartnerPerform.com