[Air-l] Affiliate Marketing

[Michael Baron]

The phenomena of Blogging is quite interesting. While the impact of blogging
on contemporary internet culture appears to be well-recognized and
publicized few people/companies have been trying to explore the impact of
blogging on e-commerce and on commerce in general.

Due to the "popular demand" (I got a lot of overseas students in my classes)
I've started a http://immigrationandstudyaustralia.blogspot.com/ Blog about
working, studying and immigrating to Australia. While I was very sceptical
about the "marketing powers of blogging" for a trivial Blog like mine, I
have followed my students advice and placed Google ads and search engine at
the top of the Blog. To my great surprise, My Blog (that is aimed at a
fairly narrow target audience) earned me about $12 in two days.

I have not done any promotional work for the Blog outside my classroom,
family and friends etc. I have not even submitted it to any of the search
engines yet! Yet, the "word-of-mouth" referrals alone appear to be
delivering a fairly good response rate.

I think it would be very interesting to do some research on the impact of
Blogs on the Internet Culture as well as on commercial viability of Blogging
(now that my Blog is earning me some minor income I am becoming a believer
in the future of commercial blogging).

Yours sincerely,
Michael Baron
Lecturer CQU (Melbourne Campus)


On 10/19/06, Yukari Seko <yukaseko at yorku.ca> wrote:
>
>
> Dear AOIRists,
>
> Hi, I am Yukari Seko, a second-year MA student at York/Ryerson University
> Communication and Culture programme. I am currently working on my MA
> thesis
> about suicidal/self-injury blogs, focusing on self-injury community at
> LiveJournal.com.
>
> As a part of my research on blog in general, I am interested in "affiliate
> marketing" system emerging in blog sphere. In my understanding, the
> affiliate
> marketing is a sort of novice method of e-business in which an affiliate
> is
> reworded for every visitor or reader provided through his/her efforts. For
> instance, pay-per-click or pay-per-sale kinds of stuff which offers the
> owner
> of site/blog by his/her promotion of sponsors (web hosting services).
>
> Currently I am writing a blog in Japanese using a blog service hosted by
> Amazon.co.jp. At the beginning of this month (October 2006), the provider
> suddenly changed the whole system and informed me that I have earned some
> e-credit because of my reader clicked the ads on my blog. It also
> mentioned
> about if I would "promote" some products made by Amazon and cooperate
> companies
> in my blog, I could gain more e-credit and get a cash back.
> I was so surprised to know that I was unconsciously incorporated into the
> affiliate marketing system. In other words, I just found myself making
> audience
> commodity for the sale of advertisers. Or maybe I am becoming an opinion
> reader
> in blogsphere... Anyways, it made me concern about the advertising
> structure of
> blogsphere.
>
> So, if someone knows any useful resources/references about "affiliate
> marketing
> + blog," could you let me know?
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Yukari Seko
> --
> M.A. candidate
> Joint Programme in Communication and Culture Studies
> Between York/Ryerson Universities
> Comcult GSA Webmaster (York)
> http://www.yorku.ca/cocugsa/
> yukaseko at yorku.ca
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-- 
"My Body is my Temple"
"Be The Change You Want to See In The World." Gandhi