A recent article by eMarketer shows how ad money is shifting away from traditional media and more towards digital channels.

How will this affect marketers having affiliate programs?

* link to full article is below

Now, for anyone selling online WITH affiliates, this should create a further boost to their income, as most affiliate marketing traffic is already in the digital space:

• Email marketing - one of the top traffic sources on the internet today. This is also where the spammers concentrate, however there are thousands of email marketers with legitimately built email lists who are mailing their audience with targeted relevant content plus offers that convert.
• Interactive - a catch all category for blogs, websites, banner ads, software (with built in affiliate links), contextual (e.g. adsense) ads. Affiliates use SEO to drive traffic from their own sites to advertisers/merchants, or buy traffic with banners or contextual ads which appear on other sites.
  
• Search - ads showing based on searched keywords - e.g. AdWords, Yahoo! paid search, MSN search, 2nd and third tier search engines. Models are pay per click, per impression, per call, and even pay per keyword. Affiliates use direct-linking techniques to drive targeted searchers to the merchant, or to their own landing pages where they review your product or have other ways to motivate the buyers to take action e.g. offer a bonus.

Even in the following non-digital channels there are affiliates who are active, and they shouldn't be discounted so soon.

So as the shift in spend moves further towards digital, we may see MORE activity by savvy affiliates in the following channels, as ad pricing drops.

• TV - Affiliates in this space are not easy to spot. However some are playing in the poker space with "educational .net sites" being advertised which are clearly affiliates for the .com money sites. Also, I've seen some infomercials for business opportunities, where the url is traced to resolve to the money site via an affiliate link. Some ads seem to run over a long period, which indicates that for certain niches it can be profitable to be an affiliate using the TV channel.
• Direct Mail - I haven't done much research in this area but it's quite common to see internet marketers using direct mail to promote their affiliate programs (I get postcards all the time) and some will include OTHER marketers' "free" products within their own product delvieries, and earn money on the back-end as the affiliate for those OTHER marketers. This is a tactic recently used by Frank Kern, Mike Filsaime, and also John Reese.
• Print - Offline print advertising is getting cheaper for affiliates to try out some campaigns. It's not expensive to buy an $8 domain, advertise it in the paper classifieds, and measure the response to an affiliate offer. As newspapers get mroe desperate for advertising cash, the ad prices may drop and you may see more affiliate marketing show up in this channel.

So the bottom line is that merchants should ensure they are in all digital channels, and consider accepting specialized affiliates who play in the old media channels - the savvy ones will bring you customers that you never would have gotten yourself. Also because it's performance based marketing, you don't need to take the big risks that are associated with offline marketing up front costs.

For marketers AND affiliates, always test your advertising channel ROI and don't forget the old media - it's not dead yet and so you just might be on TV one day with your own advertisement :)

EMarketer article

--- (Edited on 9/16/2009 12:19 pm [GMT-0500] by Peter) ---