Social Media Marketing is Getting Hot for Affiliates in 2008

Social networking was definitely the biggest story in affiliate marketing in 2007, as merchants and affiliates tried to convert the huge surge in user traffic on sites such as Facebook and MySpace into a viable sales platform. As 2008 evolves, expect affiliates to exploit social media marketing (SMM) for SEO, controlling search engine rankings through links and growing fan bases on the sites above, plus destinations such as Digg, YouTube, Del.icio.us, and many more.

New avenues for SMM magnetization are also opening up. Facebook's social ads, for instance, despite initial consumer privacy concerns, can potentially compete with Google AdSense. 2008 should also see a boom in niche social media interest sites in areas such as travel and home and garden that affiliates can align their affiliate program verticals with.

Video should also prove a major marketing trend in 2008. Over 48% of Internet users visited video sharing sites such as YouTube in 2007, and advertising during video content is expected to spike by more than 70%. Affiliates experiment with attaching their own video ads to content, and especially affiliates who are using their personal identities to promote through blogs and social networking.

2008 brings better targeted ad technology from affiliate programs, packaging everything from news feeds to video, games, music and more into one vehicle that users can drop on their desktops, blogs, social networking sites or start pages. Actually affiliates need to expect more from their affiliate efforts and are going to maximize their affiliate marketing revenue in 2008.