• elynn
• Mar 5,2008
• In: Chat

Jason Calcanis at the Affiliate Summit

If you’re in affiliate marketing, but you haven’t heard of Jason Calcanis then go read up on him. Seriously - I’ll wait. Back now? Whether you agree with him or not, he’s a lightning rod for controversy on the web. And he made some interesting statements during his keynote that I really think are significant.

Recently, I was speaking on a podcast for a friend, and I mentioned that I thought splogging was dying, and that blogs were going to suffer the repercussions of splogging. Well, you would have thought I was kicking puppies. Not only did my business partner and I get attacked by several folks listening who just couldn’t believe what we were saying, but they didn’t even understand the point I was trying to make. So when I read some of the things Calcanis was saying, I said to myself "Yes, somebody gets it. This is exactly what I was trying to express!"

Look folks, I did NOT say blogging was dead. I still blog (you’re soaking in it right now!) and I will continue to do so. But splogging is polluting the pool, to the point that it’s beginning to affect legitimate bloggers. Search engines are becoming wary of blogging in general and are making it more difficult every day to get page rank on a new blog. Who cares about page rank, the postie crowd asks? Well, I do for one! Look, maybe you’re content to earn $5 a post talking about the same credit card ads and mortgage refinancing opportunities daily. But when you accept those advertising bucks, you’re sending a message to advertisers that devalues blogging in general. You’re saying "I think sending your information to 100 unique visitors a day is worth five bucks." And guess what? It becomes a race to the bottom - soon advertisers believe that $5 is the correct pricing for that exposure and stop paying anyone more than $5.

Not to mention the shoddy and absolutely reprehensible posts some of you put around those advertisements. I’ve seen better English from my friend’s kindergarten students. Misspelled words, randomly linked key phrases and just flat out incorrect information. Anyone reading it knows it’s a paid ad, and they write off not just YOUR blog, but blogs in general the more of them they see.

The death knell for me of splogs? When big companies start hiring people to setup splogs for them - and some of them are. There are so many splogs being created DAILY that it is becoming impossible to sort out the wheat from the chaff. And that means the big engines (like Google and Yahoo) are going to start making it harder for ANY blog to get noticed.

My advice? Don’t splog. And don’t put all your affiliate marketing hopes on blogging. Because in the near future (perhaps very near) you’re going to get burned. Affiliate marketing should be a long term game,  not a way to make quick bucks.