This is a follow up piece to my previous post about affiliate marketing’s current state.

In that post, I wrote…

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.

Affiliate marketing is an amateur sport. It works best (most efficiently) when it is done by individuals communicating to others the content, products, services, goods or ideas that they are passionate about, despise or have some authority when discussing.

In order to make affiliate marketing a professional sport, we have to add on layers of difficulty and expertise such as search engine gaming and social media manipulation. On top of that, we create elaborate tracking systems based on pixels and cookies and redirects to try and secure our self-assessed needed position in the marketplace.

However, added levels of complexity only complicate the free market, and eventually the market will find a way to stream the traffic where it is most efficient to flow. It’s the same principle that we see in the development of “oxbow lakes” along rivers.

An oxbow lake is a type of lake which is formed when a wide meander from a stream or a river is cut off to form a lake. They are called oxbow lakes due to the distinctive curved shape that results from this process.

It is the nature of things (such as water and web traffic) to seek out the most efficient channel for travel. Adding layers of complication into our programs to help provide a safety net for our own existence as an industry seems a troublesome route.