Preaching & Teaching: Remember the Affiliates!

Last Friday I gave a presentation at the American Chamber of Commerce in Osaka Japan. Naturally the talk was about affiliate marketing and I built my presentation around the assumption that company reps might want to learn how to use the power of affiliate marketing in their respective business. As it turns out, many of the attendees were more interested in how to use affiliate marketing to generate revenue for their sites or blogs. In other words, I went in to talk to merchants and instead I found myself addressing the other side of performance marketing: the affiliates. Or at least, potential affiliates. Fact is, there are more affiliates than there are merchants in the world and as a consultant I find myself spending most of my time addressing the needs of advertisers when in fact I need to start paying more attention to the agents of performance success: the publishers. It still surprises me to learn that there are people out there actively writing content for a site or blog, generating traffic and respectable search engine rankings, yet their site lacks any kind of advertising or affiliate revenue. If more people knew how easy it is to turn their hobby into cash, affiliate marketing could really take off here in Japan. So here’s my slightly late New Year’s resolution: I Tony Torres, hereby promise to spend more time with potential affiliates and teach all within earshot how they can utilize affiliate program offers to turn their blog or hobby site into real revenue. At least I didn’t have to promise to loose weight.