The following is what Charlotte Kornev had to say in response the the question, What is wrong with affiliate marketing and how can it be improved?
One of the biggest problems with affiliate marketing is the web sites we refer to.
We do our jobs getting the click throughs, but one of my highest CTRs has a web page that doesn’t do its job of selling.
I think it would help us all out a lot if more merchants made deep links available so that really well targeted advertising could show the customer what they are after, instead of a home page that may not sell them enough to browse around and find what they are really looking for.
Affiliate marketing is a really tough thing to do, and its hard to find the keywords, copy and so forth, especially in a really competitive market.
I think it wastes a lot of effort on the affiliate’s part to find an excellent product, promote it, and have such a lousy landing page on the merchant’s part that the customer just isn’t interested.
Referrals are what we do, not selling. Merchants could perhaps learn something about designing good pages from looking at successful competitors.
Do the RESEARCH, so we can all do business together.