Audio & video content for affiliate marketing
The biggest Internet story of the year is reportedly YouTube, the site for sharing videos. In fact, YouTube leads the list of Top 10 brands in the UK in terms of growth recorded in the Jan-July period of this year, which mainly consists of social neworking sites and image/ video sharing sites.
Considering how popular video content has become, I’d think voice and video content will probably become part of an affiliate marketer’s content mix, sooner rather than later. Of course, both audio and video have been used by several Internet marketers (including affiliates) for quite a while (they are generally an integral part of the ’squeeze page’ sites); however, I have hardly seen them being used by those who operate on a portal model. With affiliates under considerable pressure to differentiate their content from the merchant site, may be this kind of content could change things for the better and be the next wave..
Yet, integrating audio and video content by affiliates definitely has its own challenges. One is the cost of creating the content, though this can partly be justified if it leads to an increase in the number of visitors (ie. lower cost of content per visitor). The second aspect will be the main impediment: the cost of bandwidth. Even while the cost of bandwidth has gone down in recent times, it can still be substantial if the volume of traffic is high. These costs put pressure on an affiliate’s already-thin margins and put question marks on the viability of using such content.
What’s the alternative then? May be, merchants/ affiliate networks can incentivize affiliates by bearing some of the costs of creating new types of content to promote their products and advertisers, respectively? That’s certainly an investment and will require some brave decisions, but if current trends are an indication, the investment will pay itself off pretty soon.
