Affiliate marketing expert, Rae Hoffman, has written a brilliant and provocative blog post on, what she perceives to be, a strategy based affiliate evolution taking place over the next three years. An evolution that may see some affiliate marketers go out of business.

Rae Hoffman’s post gives ‘seasoned mid-earnings level’ affiliate marketers pointers for surviving this evolution. And yes, we’re talking ‘survival’ – according to Rae, unless affiliate marketers adapt to the changing environment, they’ll soon be going back to a J.O.B.

If you’re involved in affiliate marketing, I urge you to read Rae’s post (see link below). You may not agree with all of it, but it’s worth thinking about. For now, here’s a quick summary of the 18 take-outs I got from Rae’s article. They’re all things affiliate marketers must do to get through and beyond the affiliate marketing evolution:

1. Buy ‘brandable’ rather than keyword-rich domains.
2. Create unique content.
3. Enable a dialogue rather than just a monologue on your site.
4. Use good design and usability principles on your site.
5. Prepare now for expanding your site and business later.
6. Differentiate your site and business, and add value to what you offer.
7. Don’t lock yourself into one affiliate program per item type – use multiple programs.
8. Sell advertising on your site.
9. Develop a cost per action (CPA) strategy and integrate CPA offers on your site.
10. Use non-website based communication methods e.g. build an email list, recruit subscribers to your blog feed, etc.
11. Become a merchant.
12. Approach merchants you want to be an affiliate for… even if they don’t have an affiliate program.
13. Gather, evaluate and use metrics about your prospects, customers, sales, etc.
14. Develop strong, reliable sources of non-search engine derived traffic.
15. Understand social media, personalized search, etc.
16. Utilise traditional media methods such as issuing press releases.
17. Update your link building approach.
18. Develop key relationships within your niche.

You know, I’m getting the overwhelming sense that Rae is advising affiliate marketers to run their business like a… business!

Source: Rae Hoffman, “How to Survive the Affiliate Evolution,” SugarRae, June 14, 2009

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Affiliate Marketing, Feature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.