Affiliate marketing needs to get past links for it’s own good.

Marketing success is directly connected to attention. Attention is increasingly being measured in other ways that in-bound or out-bound link traffic because of the connectedness offered by new social platforms.

Steve Rubel makes some very intriguing and insightful points in a post today about Twitter, which I think extends to all of online marketing…

Now, here’s where it gets interesting. Will people spend less time writing blogs and more time Twittering? I posed this question on Twitter and got a resounding no. I am not so sure.

What about one’s Technorati link authority? It feels far less relevant now given the newfound pulls on our attention. All of them are measured in friends and connections, not links. This is the emerging currency of influence.

Influence. Attention. These are things that we need to start figuring out how to measure (or monetize if you’re so persuaded). We’ve relied on linking to do that in the past and present, but the efficiency of such a link based economy just doesn’t hold up in the face of the way the web is developing (not to mention the mobile web).

All of these are big questions. What I believe, however, is that our attention span will hit a wall. It’s why people migrate from site to site and few have staying power. If Twitter continues its meteoric rise, then we may well be witnessing a changing of the guard. That doesn’t mean blogging will go away. But it will surely morph in Twitter’s wake.

Twitter and blogging are just one example in a larger scheme that applies to the entire landscape of online marketing. The way customers, shoppers and individuals use the web will continue to evolve and change… so let’s keep an eye to the future as we work through the daily grind.

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