Affiliate Programs and Affiliate Reviews
Everyone talks about building an online community that drives “viral” marketing — but how exactly do you accomplish that? Viral marketing is not about setting up a forum and hoping people will come. It’s not about launching the 3,009th Facebook application that will sink quickly into obscurity. It’s about driving a value chain and meeting a need. Users need to get something in return for what they put in.
Legend has it that the inventor of chess was so wise that when the king asked him to name his reward, he replied that he only wanted one grain of wheat for the first square, two grains for the second, four grains for the third, eight grains for the fourth and so on up to the sixty-four squares on the board.
As I watch the world economy spiraling downward, I thank my lucky stars that I happen to work in one of the few industries that is expected to grow despite the downturn. Nonetheless, online retailers are going to face slower growth than we were all predicting even a few weeks ago, and the industry is being forced to completely reevaluate budgets and priorities.
We’ve all done it. The holiday season was crazy, the busiest ever. We missed feature lockdown by a mile, cramming in every last bit just as things began to seriously ramp up. The servers went down on Black Friday. A database crash prevented us from processing returns for four agonizing days. Somehow we managed to survive.
The Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass lives in a very curious world where, as she explains to Alice, “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” I think that sentence sums up the world of e-commerce with uncanny accuracy: No matter how hard we work to knock items off the priority list, there are always new ones popping right up to take their place.