News - Opinions

As Rick posted on his blog titled The Coming Fall Boom, he believes that this season will bring two things: A stock market dip and an explosion of internet marketing prices. While I can't comment on the first I would like to make some observations on the latter.

I have accounts at Commission Junction, Linkshare, Clickbank, Connect Commerce, Google Adsense and many others. Over the past two months I have been seeing more aggressive rate changes in advertising through some of the vendors. Each company you sign up to be an affiliate for sends updates on new commission rates, program changes, new programs available, etc. Lately these have been coming in steadily as advertisers bump up their rates. My CD Storage website has gone from $.40 per click to $.70 per click. Another site, Latex Mattress Reviews jumped from $.60 per click to $1 per click - and those are just my payouts per click. Clearly those advertisers are paying at least double those rates to get listed on my site. Search volume on all fronts seems to be rising, and everyone from mom and pop to major marketing firms are competing for the same customers again, driving up rates. I believe that this will be a period of very solid statistics for most who use affiliate or high-quality click programs. Not to mention the potential for Ebay's channel switch from per sale to per click which I am already testing on a few sites.

Ultimately if you look at the trail of commissions they all have to do the same thing. For each click that is converted to a sale, you get a small piece but all your traffic is likely lost. You have probably not created something for the visitor to return to, just a search engine ranked series of pages destined to earn you some cash. This works fine for the domainer and is in fact, a great way to supplement income that comes in spurts through sales.

However, more often I am leaning towards creating sites with real marketing deals for actual product, where I am the reseller with the order form - not just another ranked page for content without product. If this season is really going to see growth in leaps and bounds, the true beneficiaries will be the ones selling the actual item which is being marketed.