Current Mood: Erm…

Yesterday, I saw an offer from a merchant that’s really lucrative for affiliates. But, since his specs aren’t something that fits me, I can go ahead and say my real opinion of it…

He’s smoking something.

Not the guy that they stuck into publicizing the offer, but the actual merchant. See, this merchant is paying $50 for ONE PAGE of boring info-content dreck. Er…I mean, a “content rich” page on either a content site or a site that’s dedicated to promoting his category of stuff. And, the site must be on its own domain, or “loved by the search engines” (or very similar wording), too.

Clearly this merchant is after branding:

The merchant knows this kind of a page is nothing but a branding page, hence the $50. But since he’s making this offer to affiliates, he’s also promising double commissions! So what’s wrong with that? 2×0 = 0, that’s what. If they want to make any commissions, they’d better put a real sales page up. If affiliates just wait for the branding effect to kick in, their cookies will be long expired!

So what’s “smoking something” about this merchant’s plan? He seems to want branding and possibly a pop in his own search ranks. But:

1. Branding Takes Ages.
It could be months before he sees an increase in type-ins.

2. Branding takes a LOT of exposure, over a long period of time, before anything happens!!!

As in hundreds of sites of exposure. At $50 a pop, that’s going to get damned expensive. I’m sure they’d say they were rich enough to afford it. But from what I’ve read in the Wall St. Journal, NO company is “rich enough” to keep wasting money. Financial inefficiency adds up!

3. He’s paying WAY too much. Doesn’t he know he can get people to post for way less? Granted, 90% of those aren’t “loved by the search engines.” But not banned is good enough, as long as they’re getting some traffic.

4. He isn’t getting any SEO value from those “SE loved” sites he’s after: Affiliate links go through the network’s server before redirecting to the merchant–leaving the Googlebot on the other side! Check the robots.txt at the affiliate network. Usually bots are banned from their redirectors.

So, I pronounce his plan to be made of lose.

Still, it’s worth $50 to anyone willing to put a page of not-salesy-enough c*ntent on their site, so if you’re interested in parting that merchant from his money, leave a comment to that effect, and I’ll drop ya a link to the forum where they’ve got their affiliate manager peddling this. There’s probably a deadline, so look at the date on this post first. (If it’s a year later, I’m not going to try to refind that link.)