And are they the same? Whenever I read the NMA there is usually a section in it doing a case study or report on a certain sector and where its traffic comes from, Hitwise also release these reports from time to time. Google generally takes up about half of the traffic and has a massive lead on anything else which is what you’d expect. The two sites are generally Yahoo and MSN which again makes sense, these are all big search engines remember people go to these sites to find what they are looking for.
The interesting thing is that the next few sites are usually either Bebo, Myspace or Facebook. All social community sites, so it would seem that people are now using these quite a lot for recommendations of what sites to visit or for what sites to at least look at, they are becoming hub’s for the browsing community.
Affiliate opportunity – most definitely!
Put it this way, as an affiliate manager I look for traffic, if I need traffic to the accommodation & destinations sector and Hitwise shows me the top 5 are Google, Yahoo, MSN, Bebo and Facebook I know that we have search engines covered by both in house PPC and affiliate paid search partners and they deliver huge volume. So if these social networking sites are next in line they must also have huge volume – but how does anyone tap into it?
If you join up and post links everywhere you’ll get shot down as a spammer, this type of online community or group are harsh, you try any sort of self promotion and you’ll get shot down straight away. So you’ve got to be clever.
Travelocity did this with the travelling gnome who is basically a gnome… that travels. Easy, but its caught on and they seem to be doing fairly well of it.
One thing that does seem like na affiliate way in on this action is recent announcements by Facebook, they are allowing people to develop their own ‘apps’ with the facebook developers platform.. Basically they are giving access to their functions for people to write their own programmes and scripts, so if you’re a programmes you can write a set of scripts to work with facebook and then if someone adds your application it can begin to spread and be used.
What am I on about? Well as a quick example the application X Me. By default in facebook you can ‘poke’ someone which then on their profile comes up with a ‘morleymouse has poked you’ nothing else, nothing fancy, just a quick prod! Gets their attention and lets them know you’ve been snooping round their profile. The X Me application allows you to do other things, poke is the default remember. Using X Me you can hug someone ‘morleymouse hugged you’, you can kick them ‘morleymouse kicked you’ you can even grope them if you really feel like it ‘morleymouse groped you’ you get the idea, you type what you want. Once yu choose to install this application to your profile it has access to all your profile and integrates itself, it also alerts your other friends that you have it installed and tells them what it does so other people can install it.
So back to affiliates! I’m wondering who will be the first affiliate to generate an application to benefit themselves? I think price comparison sites and cashback sites are the ideal sort of sites to get an application developed. People would happily fill out a “I recently bought” section which could easily link to a price comparison site or cashback site, but for it to be widely adapted and taken on by a lot of members and provide something a bit extra.
Well that’s my thoughts, if no affiliates develop anything for the Facebook platform id be very surprised, there’s a lot of traffic here who will tap into it first, and who will tap into it in the cleverest way?
