traffic into cash
PREDICTION:
By 2010, most people using the Web will also be resellers for affiliate sponsor programs, in some form or other. Methods of promotion are going to greatly diversify, and virtually all products and services will be available for sale through affiliates.
This is going to happen for three reasons:
1. The insane popularity of blogging is bringing awareness of how easy it is to make money online to a critical mass in the general population.
Result: Blog growth rate increases (spikes) and the percentage of active blogs engaged in affiliate/income-oriented activities also increases.
2. When the number of active affiliates online climbs into the tens, then hundreds of millions of people, no industry on Earth will be able to ignore the immense opportunity and/or the risk of allowing competitors to enter and entrench first.
Result: Even the most Web-irrelevant businesses will come online to grow and to defend marketshare. Giant global consumer brands will spawn affiliate programs for everything from Nike running shoes to Marlboro cigarettes.
3. Google is in the midst of transforming the basic way it assigns PR. People have been talking for months about Google’s shift from relevancy (mathematical) to trust (subjective?) as the basis of PR. But there’s been little discussion of likely methods and mechanics. This is an example. Google loves blogs. The reason (in a diatom shell): because blogs are easy to crawl, and because the blogosphere provides the acrchitecture needed to make a Commercial Meritocracy of the Web, which is another way of saying “Trust-Based”
As I commented to Richard Edelman on his blog,
“There are the links you can buy, and then there are the links you are given…”
An even simpler breakdown:
1. Google has “told” us that blog-to-blog links are going to be very, very important to PR.
2. Bloggers are motivated — to make money, to exercise Netizenship and to have effect.
3. Even if they never make a purchase themselves nor refer a sale, bloggers who “vote” for companies by linking to their blogs will confer awesome benefits (collectively) to the companies that inspire them.
3. Companies (and organizations of all types) are going to come after the “voluntary link”, the Trust Vote.