Affiliate Marketing of the Past: Direct Promotion

When I initially read my first eBook (The Life Empowered System) about affiliate marketing, it spent a lot of time stressing the ease of direct promotion. Let me explain what I mean by direct promotion...You can go to an affiliate site and get a weblink that will direct whomever to a website selling products with your "tag" associated with it. If that person buys the product, you will receive a commission. In direct promotion, you will send the person who clicks your ad directly to the link that your affiliate tag is on. Therefore, no landing page. You bypass the middle man and go straight to the product.

What has happened? Why doesn't this work anymore? One big reason is that a lot of people were doing it (and making a fair some of money!). The only overhead costs and time came with promoting the link. The bigger obstacle came late last summer (2005) when Google announced that sponspered links can have only one link per search. Before, if you typed in "DishNetwork", you may find 10 or more affiliate links directly to the DirectTV website. The normal rules of high CTR and price applied...that was it! Now, we have to fight for that one position. I tried to actually promote DishNetwork this way and my ad was never seen! (I was not prepared to pay higher than the top bidder).

Believe it or not, it is all for the better! This new rule improves the quality of your searches and weens out a lot of the marketers who really are not that committed to the programs. Also, the greatest thing about eBooks is that they usually do update them regularly and once you buy it, you get the updates for free. The new version of the Life Empowered System no longer focuses on this type of marketing. It now focuses on more modern approaches such as blogging. Again, I highly recommend this program!