Last night I found an interesting post arguing that running an affiliate program helps make good publicity for you.

In the world of online affiliate marketing, there are tons of "review" sites that rate the products with the highest paying commission as best – and they often have bad things to say about competing products that don't offer affiliate commissions.

I think that this article is true to a point, but I have also found out that having an affiliate program can cause people to say bad things about your product, too. Some affiliates will be so desperate for attention that they will make outrageous claims or say the program they are promoting is a scam (!) in order to get people to click through and take a look at their pitch. For example:

To be a successful affiliate marketer, you have to have thick skin and be prepared to let people's opinions and criticisms roll right off of you.  People are going to write, talk and blog about any product that is worth mentioning. There's no stopping that. Therefore, I think it's best to give people incentive to promote your product, sell for you, and say good things about it by offering an affiliate program. That way, you have some degree of influence - but never total control - of what affiliates and reviewers say about you.

What do you think?

In the online affiliate marketing world, new products, new offers, and new systems are being created all the time. Affiliates must constantly evolve or else get left behind.

As more and more people get interested in making money online, high search engines rankings are much harder to attain. In the past, some affiliates created sites with nothing other than banner ads and affiliate links to products they were promoting. To combat this, search engines (particularly Google) have gotten better at finding thin affiliate sites and weeding them out of the search results.

Say you have a resource site about snowboarding equipment. In the 1990's it was possible to rank your site with minimal content that had enough keyword-focused text. But search engines evolved and got smarter, and with the advent of "Search 2.0" they started looking at more off-page criteria - like the number of links pointing to a site. The newest major evolution is search technology, TrustRank, looks at how highly respected the sites that link to you are. So just one link from trusted authority site is possibly much more valuable than 1,000 links from low quality sites.

As Wikipedia rose up and became one of the highest ranking, most trusted general information sites, it bumped thousands of less-trusted affiliate sites off the front page.

But now there's a newer and bigger potential threat to your affiliate site's front page spot, Google's Knol:

Knol is the name for Google's upcoming user-generated content project that is similar to Wikipedia in some ways, but is different in others. Knol will feature single author-written articles on all major topics, but it will allow users to comment, rank and vote on these knowledge articles.

So in the near future, an affiliate site on a popular topic or brand will have to compete with Google's universal search (images, videos and maps in the search results), Wikipedia and also Knol - all of them will be taking up spaces in the "front row" of the search results.

Now is the time to get started on making your popular affiliate sites credible,  strong and trusted enough to compete.