Radio Hosts, Television and Affiliate Marketing

All of us in the Internet Marketing field know how lucrative affiliate marketing can be. If we don’t know it from an experiential standpoint we know this from all the promotions in our inbox and all the guru’s claims of success.

Companies such as Amazon.com have built their entire base and company on affiliate marketing. Ebay has just revamped their entire affiliate program and dumped Commission Junction and finally implemented their own affiliate program.

More advanced companies such as the two above have made it so very simple to allow their affiliates to create rss feeds with their own affiliate id automatically embedded. They can then create huge websites or blogs using these feeds.

Many businesses with affiliate programs are finally figuring out that datafeeds are needed by their affiliates and have made them available so we can build huge websites or blogs with datafeeds. In fact datafeeds there are wordpress plugins that use datafeeds to automatically built product websites that get ranked higher than the manufacturer’s website. Check out Niche-Content-Stores.com for a variety of affiliate sites built with datafeeds….I think you’ll be impressed.

The advances in affiliate marketing are just staggering. In the past it took a programmer to take advantage of all that is available and those of us with little knowledge of these things just used a plain old affiliate link…some articles…maybe a few reviews and a mailing to out list to generate some decent affiliate sales.

That was a very brief and incomplete history of affiliate marketing

I don’t know if anyone has noticed…but the broadcasting industry, radio and television, are finally getting into affiliate marketing. Some in more subtle ways, others are getting pretty aggressive.

I heard one of the local TV News broadcasters talking on a radio show about how they (television) are trying to figure out how to best utilize this new medium of the interent…youtube and all things online. Folks…they really are confused…but once they get a handle on it, mark my words, they will be major competition.

In fact, that night I took a break and watched an episode of a program…I think “Burn Notice”, at the end of the show they advertised their website and the fact that you could watch episodes that you might have missed. Now get this….finally, and this is the first time….the announcer said “at the website, you can purchase a dvd of Season X. They were promoting the dvd of the show from the website….that’s a big step. Because they didn’t mention any phone number or any other way to purchase the dvd.

You might not think that’s a big deal. The point is, they are using the television show to drive traffic to their website. Most of us don’t have a tv show.

The next step would be for them to figure out that they could increase their profits, more importantly build a huge list by developing an affiliate program and encouraging affiliates to promote the dvd. In this case they could actually give all the profits to the affiliate and have a list the niche focused and an fanatical base of people interested in their subject…in this case the television show “Burn Notice”.

Sorry this is a little long and I digressed from my original thoughts on radio shows:)

Over the past year I’ve noticed radio hosts participating in affiliate marketing. Now, you won’t see books on how to monetize your radio program with affiliate programs, but nonetheless, someone in radio land has figured out how to make a few extra bucks.

There’s a radio station in Chicago, WLS, and they advertise several products and services the traditional way…product description and then a phone number. But then they advertise the advertiser’s website and tell them to use a promo code….what do think the promo code is for…obviously its at the least a tracking id but more probably an affiliate id. I’ve seen them advertise a florists, online data storage such as Carbonite.com, books, and services.

Another interesting concept I’ve seen the radio guys do is to interview a book author, and afterwards they tell the audience to visit the stations website and click on the…..what….amazon link for the authors book. Imagine what kind of commissions they might pull in from a large audience like Chicago….

Or what about some of the large Syndicated radio programs. Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, CoasttoCoastAM and many others. They all do the same thing, interview the book author, then send the audience to the station website and tell them click on the “book link” on our site. Or in some cases they use a promo code.

My theory is some sneaky internet marketer has betrayed us and revealed out secrets to these guys and sold us out for 30 pieces of gold

Tags: affiliate programs, affiliate marketing