Picture this: you are the marketing director at a large internet retail firm. The owner walks into your office and says “I want you to rethink our entire internet marketing campaign and spend as much money as you need to.” What would you do?
After you got over the shock and realized the pressure, you would probably turn to your whiteboard and start drawing a chart that looked something like an explosion. Then you might go about signing up for different kinds of ad networks and possibly even outsourced program managers to keep track of and optimize everything. If you are like most internet marketing professionals today media buying would be the main focus.
We would like to suggest an alternative. What if instead of pouring that unlimited budget into ads you spent as much money as possible developing an affiliate program and recruiting quality affiliate partners? One company we speak with frequently has taken this approach. About a year ago they got sick and tired of managing complicated ad campaigns across a plethora of advertising networks offering innumerable types of media options so they dropped their advertising, joined all the large affiliate networks, and started contacting every large affiliate blog, and possible affiliate partner they could find. Pretty soon they had recruited several top affiliates and the list kept growing. Their affiliates did all the advertising for them, and in many cases did it much better and more efficiently than they could do it themselves. The affiliate route made much more sense for them in the end.
