Do you think an affiliate network's job is strictly as a facilitator, connecting merchants with products to promote, with affiliates that have sites or mechanisms that allow them to promote said products?

Or do you think that affiliate networks should actually be helping affiliates to earn more. Of course it could be said they do already help affiliates. All of their innovations and widgets etc are there to help the affiliate earn more I guess, but I like to think how they could go even further and what maybe I would do if I woke up tomorrow and found myself in charge of an affiliate network.

One of the things that an affiliate network could do is to link to its affiliates sites. Affiliate Network homepages often have a decent Google Pagerank and could be considered authority domains. Affiliates often have new sites which need the helping hand of incoming links. So how about affiliate networks giving their affiliates a little boost with a plain text link.

Now, how would this work. There's loads of affiliates, and many of them, like me, have loads of websites. They surely wouldn't all deserve a link but how about if you could nominate one quality site which you wanted to receive some link love, after being approved by a moderator from the network. Even then, there might be hundreds of links and a page with that many outbound links might not be helpful anyway, so a page on the network site could perhaps just show a randomised selection of 50 sites from their database of affiliate nominated sites. Another option would be to break them down into categories and create a directory.

Most affiliate networks, I think, tell you which merchants they work with. Why not be open and proud about the good quality affiliate content based sites they have on their books.

One consideration from the network's point of view would be, why should it link to your affiliate site when you might be promoting merchants on other networks at the same time or instead of the original links and I think that would be a fair point to make. I'm not even sure if there's an answer to that, except maybe you would qualify for the incoming link (and possibly other perks, such as better commissions) by committing that site to work exclusively with the merchants of that network?

Or is this idea fatally flawed? Let me know if you think this could never work in practice.

Another idea I had, which I can't remember if I mentioned before, would be for affiliate networks to operate private noticeboards within their control panels where affiliates could post up messages finding in context links from other affiliates. Affiliates understand what other affiliates need in terms of links and if you help them in their linking strategies, that could be good for all.

What do you think - is there anything you've thought of that an affiliate network could do, beyond what it already does, to actually help you make a success of your affiliate business?

Labels: affiliate marketing, affiliate network, ideas