Great to know there is still interest out there on finding out more though – if anyone has any suggestions about things they’d like us to cover off in the future then let us know! We’ve got a fantastic project that is about to go live which will hopefully cover some of these things off but we like to make sure.

Thanks for reading,

Fi

I can’t say though that I’d agree that there isn’t any value on discussing the very basics of affiliate marketing, or any other subject. In my own life I find myself reading ‘introduction to’ books on subjects I already understand well, knowing that their will always be something in another thinkers philosophy that will make me rethink things I may take for granted.

It would definitely be interesting to hear more of the nitty-gritty aspects on Fiona’s approach.

I wouldn’t be concerned with giving away secrets of success. Consider the ‘celebrity chef’ business model, they will give away all their best recipes, tips and tricks – without worrying that someone is going to take their ideas, open up a resturant next door and put them out of business. They understand that it’s more important to be known, they know that if they kept everything to themselves the public wouldn’t know anything about them and so it wouldn’t matter how good a cook they were.

Jason from 37Signals talks about the concept in a talk he gave at the IDEA08 conference. Check out the podcast, I think you’ll love it http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/idea-2008

To touch again on authentic conversations, with blogging (among other platforms) I believe you could abstract the chef model into a framework where you can take the founding concepts behind the digital marketing you practice today, discuss them, and use collective intelligence to evolve them, for free, into the practices of tomorrow.

I like that you have told me what would be appropriate and that you feel this post is dangerous. It is wonderful that we have this medium to be able to give opinions on any matter and I am glad you found me.

Personally, I wouldn’t want to talk about what affiliate marketing actually is, as I would hope that anyone reading this post would understand it already. Our existing and prospective clients have extensive knowledge about online marketing and I would not want to teach a granny to suck eggs. The reason for Fiona guest blogging here is to highlight what we do at Equator and to show that we do it well (just click the links to our nominations for the A4U awards).

To write all that you ask will take me time and I will blog about some of these issues that you request in the future. More importantly though, I would not want to give away all of our secrets on the successes we have with our clients or we may not get the industry recognition we currently enjoy!

I feel it’s very dangerous to use a channel like blogging for what is essentially just a sales message. Many have tried and quickly learned from immediate backlash that the effort in publishing unauthentic messages was misconceived.

What would be appropriate would be a brief talk through on what affiliate marketing actually is, what happens over the lifetime of a campaign, what pitfalls agencies, clients and affiliates have to watch for. Tell stories about what has worked, what hasn’t and what you’ve learned from the experience. Tell about what’s wrong with affiliate marketing and what needs to change.

Could you say for instance, what would be the benefit of using an agency to manage an affiliate scheme over a client using a highly-structured web application similar to adwords that would allow you to upload assets like buttons and widgets and choose which affiliate communities and demographics you’d like to proposition, and track it all in on a dashboard?