Monday, October 13, 2008

Affiliate Marketing - with the "world ending" will it be more or less important

Interesting piece by Elisabeth Osmeloski over at SearchEngineWatch called "the New Era of Travel Affiliate Marketing". She briefly discusses three topics:
  • Size of Travel online affiliate market;
  • Changes in the landscape; and
  • Impact of Social Media to travel affiliate.
Worth a read.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

affilaite marketing is a good counter balance to the expense of google adwords.

recently we reduce spend on google by 30% and put it into sales efforts of our affiliate system and it's paid off.

signed up two of australia's biggest hotel chains, major holiday rental portal and dozens of small sites which after just two months have all made up for the loss in adwords traffic at a much better roi.

adwords is still very important, though must be offset by more cost effective and brand building means, in my view.

this is an interesting article titled "Figures urge need for Google bypass”

includes a quote from Rod Cuthbert "It (google) is uncomfortably powerful in its breadth and reach across the market.”

Tim Hughes said...

great comment Steve - thanks

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JugglerX said...

She knows what she is talking about.

"The biggest change over the last several years has been the effort to reduce cannibalization by affiliates, with the OTAs and direct travel suppliers beginning to enforce restrictions with regards to SEM and keyword bidding strategies to maintain trademarked terms and related search traffic."

I remember when I used to bid on major travel portals brand name keywords and use their URL in the destination. $0.10 a click...Imagine That!

They used to phone me up and ask me how I was generating so much money. When I told them Google Adwords they were like huh, what's that?

Times have certainly changed. Now affiliates need to actually create their own content. And well, thats just to much like working for a living..

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