My hats off to the ShareASale team. Brian and team blog. And they blog well, as can be evidenced by their “Month of the Interface” in February. However…

• Where is Commission Junction’s blog (or wiki or podcast)?
• Where is Linkshare’s blog (or wiki or podcast)?
• Where is Performic’s blog (or wiki or podcast)?
• Where is Clickbank’s blog (or wiki or podcast)?
• Where is Digital River’s blog (or wiki or podcast)?

It is 2007. This is an industry founded on interactions, communication and innovation. Blogs are not essential to your bottom line, but they are a cheap, easy and incredibly valuable potential space of interaction with your affiliates.

Blogs imply that your user base or your affiliate base has a voice and you are interested in interactions outside of the proprietary walls of your network where you set the stage for interactions. Forums are great and can be highly productive, but blogs are another creature entirely. In the end, blogs show effort. And that effort does not go unrewarded in the long term.

A blog is a way to make explicit your message. Networks who don’t blog don’t have messages that they’d like to share.

A few CPA networks have tried their hands at blogging but the results have been disappointing…

• CPA Empire’s Blog
• FeedRex (Rextopia’s blog which in disclosure I started but has become more of a “new offer” platform rather than a discussion platform).

There are some examples of companies that “get it,” though…

• Pepperjam has a blog that’s worth reading and subscribing.
• Outside of the pure network realm, InsureMe even has three blogs aimed at affiliates, agents and insurance seekers respectively and all three are done very well.

What if a CJ or Linkshare took the initiative to have a blog focused on affiliates, one on merchants and one on network issues?

If there are any network blogs out there that I missed, please include in the comments and I’ll include here in the post. However, the lack of blogs from networks in our industry is concerning. Why aren’t the networks blogging?

What are the networks (both affiliate and CPA) afraid of?

Is there a place for blogging in affiliate marketing?

If you need an answer to that, head over to BUMPzee right now and check out the vibrant and very strong collection of almost 250 bloggers and heavily involved readers who could be making your network lots of money right now.

Sponsored by:
Register for Affiliate Summit 2007 East Miami - July 8-10, 2007

PREMIUM Contributors:
AffStat 2007, SecondLifeVideo.com

CostPerLove Contributors:
ShareASale, AffiliateTip Blog, WaynePorter.com, 5 Star Affiliate Forums, Fraser’s Affiliate Marketing Podcast