My reply to the central point of Colin comment - Affiliate marketers are lazy is something I agree with. I do some affiliate promotion and nothing in it is PPC led - to get enough visitors to make it economical I need to get plenty of visitors and I aint paying no one for them. Most affiliates who make money rape PPC programs looking for the high yield low cost terms - which are generally brand or derivations of brand.

That said often affiliate management agencies don’t help affiliates enough to actually make the investment in an SEO led site viable in the short and medium term. So many agencies rather than going to network shin digs and getting pissed should be sitting down and working out what would make a program work harder. Simple things like if a client is selling something give and affiliate a form to plug into their site to give a direct interface to their booking engine - the affiliate convinces of the reason to buy and the affiliate agency/merchant should make the integration to sale as easy as possible. Some other stuff could help - if you’re going to change promotions make a dynamic banner where the message can be changed at network level and is then automatically on all affiliate sites (dunno if I just gave away one of the projects we’ve been looking at hopefully some network will take note).

I guess its simply time that online companies sit down and have a look at what they’re doing and start evaluating not just the money they want to make but the likely compromises their brand is going to have to make. Viral sounds sexy but if you only sell holidays in Newcastle your target market is limited, if you do email how exact is your information and do you target your siloed users accurately, does your SEO leave you open to new markets not within your traditional demographic and do your affiliates respect you and your brand or are they simply leeches.

Sorry about the post length comment