How Are Affiliate Marketers Really Using Web2.0?

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There is a lot of talk about how video, social media and web2.0 applications will impact affiliate marketing.

Why should affiliates really care about web2.0 since websites that have worked to bring in healthy commissions for years continue to bring in high monthly checks?

The basic answer to that fundamental question (which was part of an interesting table conversation at this morning’s Gospel Brunch with the Christian Affiliate Marketers group at the House of Blues here in Vegas) has to do with the way users are processing and using information and services online. Affiliate marketing sites must be useful for consumers and individuals in order to keep a steady stream of traffic and a healthy community at the site.

Affiliates are beginning to turn towards web2.0 tools (and platforms associated with web2.0 apps such as php and AJAX) to better serve the more experienced and tech-saavy audiences using the web now. A practical example would be FatWallet.

Right on the front page of this heavily visited site, Tim Storm and his company have launched a wiki. A wiki is:

is a website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change available content, and typically without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring. The term wiki also can refer to the collaborative software itself (wiki engine) that facilitates the operation of such a Web site, or to certain specific wiki sites, including the computer science site (the original wiki) WikiWikiWeb and on-line encyclopedias such as Wikipedia

The FatWallet Wiki is tied in very well to the forums section and makes use of the large community that frequently visits the site. However, what the FatWallet team has accomplished with the wiki is an incentive for users to visit the site for communal and sharing purposes. That’s what web2.0 is all about.

So, visit sites that are actively using these technologies and platforms that everyone is talking about, and see how affiliate and merchant sites are actually putting these these things in their programs. There are some creative and useful applications of these new social platforms, and if you are an affiliate or a merchant involved in the affiliate space you need to see how these technologies can apply to your program.
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