Affiliate marketing is not about quick profits, sleazy promotions or fly-by-night operations.
Rather, affiliate marketing offers people the opportunity to make a living by producing web content. That content can be determined by a person’s passion, interest or savvy, but at the end of the day it’s a very democratic way to do marketing.
Instead of having to build a website that has the arbitrary watermark of being taken seriously (one million viewers), affiliate marketing offers anybody with enough passion and voice the opportunity to support their work and eventually grow that into a full time business.
So, I was frankly astonished when I read a piece by Anne Kadet about the last Affiliate Summit West and affiliate marketing in general in SmartMoney Magazine. It is a poorly written piece of journalism or opinion and is comparable to an 8th grade history report on the French Revoluition (having taught 8th grade, I think I can make that comparison).
Shawn Collins summed it up Kadet’s piece in video form better than I can in text:
Kadet‘s surface appraisal of the entire affiliate industry falls short of many of the criticisms or questions she could have raised about affiliate marketing had she dug a little deeper.