Top Earning Affiliate List Reveals Good and Bad Marketing Techniques

Jeff Moolander has brewed up a real tempest in a teacup by publicly advertising and selling — to anyone who asks for it — a list of top performing affiliates. Selling information that was originally obtained with an understanding of confidentiality is a very serious matter. But our take on the controversy is that little of the ire which Moolander’s move has generated comes from concern over breaching confidentiality: rather, it comes from worries about having black hat or other illegitimate techniques exposed to affiliates’ competitors.

The Top Performing Affiliate List

Moolander’s Top Affiliate List claims to provide marketers with "access to over 200 of the most productive retail-focused affiliates". The site goes on to say that "Each has been scrutinized and hand selected for the ability to consistently produce sales transactions and/or leads for large and small marketers alike." Comments directly from Moolander indicate that information about the identities of affiliates included on his list was acquired from his former and current employers in the affiliate marketing space (including Performics and Afftrack). While he doesn’t come right out and say it, this implies that either the information was stolen, or that it was sold illegitimately by the organizations involved.

I want to make it clear from the outset that at AffiliateInsight.com, we do not approve of breaching customer or affiliate confidentiality under any circumstances except those required by law.

We’re pretty skeptical, though, that the controversy surrounding Moolander’s list has much of anything to do with the ethics or legality of protecting confidentiality. We’ve had a look at the details of the affiliate list, together with the extensive commentary about the announcement on ABestWeb and several participating blog posts, including:

(And before continuing this discussion, we’d just like to point out: Whoa! Is that a heckuva lot of free advertising Moolander has managed to get for himself, or what? And it’s all happened within a couple of weeks of that first ABestWeb posting on 22 June…)

So what is all the fuss really about? As far as we can tell, it’s driven by two factors:

Affiliates’ general lack of awareness about how much intelligence is regularly gathered by their competitors, and
Affiliates’ worries that illegitimate (black hat) marketing techniques will be exposed.

It doesn’t seem to be driven by worries about affiliates being bombarded by too many new business opportunities from merchants (although, to be fair, one or two bloggers have mentioned this as a concern).

What Do Your Competitors Already Know?

We already dedicate a significant chunk of time to competitor intelligence, as do most top affiliates: we want to know who is operating in our areas of the competitive landscape, we want to know what they’re doing, and we want to know how well it’s working. Successful merchants likewise already dedicate time to gathering market intelligence. This simply one of the tasks that successful businesspeople do.

The fact is, your top competitors will not just suddenly happen upon some list from Jeff Moolander and say to themselves, "ooh, gosh, wouldn’t it be useful to find out something about what others are doing in this space?" — they will already have been doing this for a long time! They will already know how to use the WHOIS database (a large part of the list information comes from WHOIS), and they will already know how to use a whole host of other publicly available tools to identify top performing sites and analyze what makes them tick.

And because Moolander’s list covers several different industry verticals, but only 200 affiliates in total, for any given vertical it is unlikely that very many top affiliates will actually be listed. The end result is that this list is not likely to tell your existing competitors very much more (if anything more) than they already know. Nonetheless, there may well be some use for the list to fill in missing blanks, to cross-check existing competitor profiles, or to kick-start research into new verticals.

Do You Engage in ‘Black Hat’ SEO or Marketing?

On the other hand, those who engage in ‘black hat’ search engine optimization techniques (e.g., cloaking, etc.) really do have something to lose. If you engage in black hat, then your number one rule for continued existence is: stay below the radar. If you use these illegitimate techniques to gain an edge in affiliate marketing, then you really will have a strong interest in not having your work exposed to the world.

Black hat search engine marketing and other black hat marketing techniques rely on not being found out: once these tricksters’ exploits are discovered, they are normally easily and swiftly defeated with technological solutions by the search engines and others.

The Real Impact of the Top Earning Affiliate List on Affiliate Marketing

In our view, the real impact of the list will be minimal: it’s primarily just another get-rich-quick scheme by someone who has helped themselves to originally private information, cast aside any ethical or legal responsibilities, and decided to sell it to those who are either gullible or who recognize that it does have some marginal usefuleness. Like so many get-rich-quick schemes, we wouldn’t be surprised to see Moolander launch an affiliate program of his own, to help promote his affiliate list, once his free advertising dries up!

But having said that, there likely will be at least one specific side effect from the availability of the list. While it won’t add anything to the market intelligence arsenal of those who already know their way around this space, it will lower the barriers to entry for others who can get a comparatively cheap start by parting with some cash but without having to do any real work. For the less savvy or the less experienced marketers out there — and I mean both on the merchant side and on the affiliate side — this list will give them a little boost that they otherwise would have had to have worked for.

In addition, the list may help trip up a few black hatters out there, in which case, we say good riddance.

How (Most) Top Affiliate Marketers Really Compete

Last but not least, despite having extolled the virtues of gathering competitor intelligence, it’s worth noting that the most successful marketers achieve top performance by innovating and creating. Setting aside the fleeting success that some enjoy via black hat trickery, the real core of marketing (and of business in general) comes down to doing something new and different and useful — or, at least, doing something old but in a different and useful way. Paying too much attention to what everyone else is doing is a great way of ensuring that you do it, too…

This article was last updated on Monday, 11th July 2005 at 5:53 pm and is filed in the General Internet Marketing section. You can leave a response below.