Comments on: Affiliate Marketing is Bullshit. Jason Calacanis Affiliate Summit speech Las Vegas February 2008

By: Minor Leagues | Bronte Media

Minor Leagues | Bronte Media — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 09:31:32 +0000

[...] Marketing. The industry itself is hyper sensitive to being called shady, as evidenced by how well Jason Calacanis managed to play the industry like a concerto fiddle. And there are no shortage of folks who tirelessly defend that the industry is [...]

By: Evan W

Evan W — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 02:47:07 +0000

Just found your site and its great! I concur completely with the organic strategy. Its very hard to maintain but worth it if you are willing to write like an animal. Hope to work with you in some capacity in the future.

By: Is yours Fat with a Long Tail?-- Affiliate Dogma

Is yours Fat with a Long Tail?-- Affiliate Dogma — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 21:46:49 +0000

[...] Read this and you will get a better idea [...]

By: Tara

Tara — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:56:31 +0000

Your advice for high quality sites isn’t just what Google is looking for (and visitors for that matter!) - it’s what merchants are looking for too. I’ve seen things move along the years from merchants being happy to just reap in the sales, to becoming more demanding of quality sites to partner with. It’s the right way forward for all parties! That said, its difficult to turn a cheek at the easy moolah - for both affiliates and merchants.

By: blair

blair — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 12:04:46 +0000

A brilliant post Kieron. You have made the point perfectly about high quality, unique, content driven sites being the way forward. And I tend to agree with you and Jason, there are far to many crap affiliate sites out there. People just need to get back to basics and build sites that people actually want to visit and use. It ain’t rocket science!

By: Lammo.net: Affiliate Marketing Blog » Maintaining a sensible weight is the key to a healthy affiliate lifestyle

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 17:22:23 +0000

[...] to be Fat More and More - No, I’m not talking about my ever-expanding “affiliate belly”, although I do [...]

By: Keith

Keith — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 13:42:06 +0000

100% agree with you Kieron.

I have long argued against the view that Google ‘hates’ affiliates - it’s just not true - what is true is that Google ‘hates’ crap and a lot of affiliate sites (yes including some of mine before anyone throws that back at me) are crap.

We’ve been building on slow steady growth for the last 6 years and it is now really starting to show big results (when one of my sites appears above the BBC and Yahoo for current results or is the only affiliate site on a page of Google results otherwise dominated by the broadsheet newspapers then I know I’ve got it right :-))

The gravy train may have slowed down but the slower it goes the longer it can last before it runs out of steam.

By: Kieron

Kieron — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 22:08:14 +0000

Ian - no, I have much thicker skin than that

PPC Coach - yes he is known for having strong opinion, but in my book thats a good thing. I blogged about his speech because I thought it was really good, and I support most of what he said.

By: PPC Coach

PPC Coach — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 21:24:51 +0000

Remember this guy is known for being the godfather of link baiting and will say anything he can to get exposure. He’s a great marketer that way because there is no such thing as bad publicity. Keep that in mind when listening to his speech, the bottomline is he got exactly what he wanted, thousands of bloggers blogging away discussing either how stupid he is or how brilliant he is for “taking a stand”.

I admire his PR skills.

By: Eric

Eric — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 03:33:18 +0000

Jason is only saying this because it backs up his current position in Mahalo: slow and steady growth. Unfortunately, his Mahalo is doing far worse than some of the “trash” sites that are focusing on the cutting-edge.

What Jason fails to realize is that marketing will never go away and a large portion of the money to be made on the web is made in capitalizing on cutting-edge trends.

Slow and steady growth is good, yes, but by no means does it guarantee success. The web changes so quickly that the best business strategy is to capitalize on BOTH solid, reputable businesses (the models of which may go way of the dinosaurs) and also cutting-edge trends (which have less hope for the future).

Quite frankly, a large portion of affiliates simply market better than their affiliate company. Nothing wrong with this. Just because they aren’t employees of the affiliate company doesn’t mean they aren’t providing a more persuasive or further reach value. Google also fails to realize this.

As Larry Page said several years back, there is no such thing as spam. Marketing is marketing. In this world, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.