I’ve come out of my two month blog hiatus (caused by a perfect storm of home and business activities) to discover that yet another of the big US affiliate networks has launched a blog. As of October, Linkshare has apparently seen the light and jumped into the blogging fray. Good onya Linkshare.
This prompted me to take a step back and review what’s been happening on this front. Here’s a quick scorecard of affiliate networks and their blogs.
Google Affiliate Network
Larry Adams, the long-time Performics product manager has been doing a great job with the blog for a few years now and writes thoughtful, quality posts that give insight into the product features and direction. The change to Google has resulted in a new home for the blog, rejuvenation, and participation from other folks in the company. There is always a few comments on blog posts, and Larry does answer questions.
Content: A
Frequency: B
Community: B
Overall: B+
http://googleaffiliatenetwork-blog.blogspot.com/
Going back to August 2007 here:
http://blog.performics.com/affiliate/
Shareasale
The Shareasale blog is one of the oldest, going way back to March of 2005. Brian Littleton, backed by SAS stalwarts Carolyn Tang and Sarah Beeskow, provide a good mix of product information and promotions and new merchants. Brian injects quite a bit of his own personality into the blog with opinion pieces on industry issues as well. This great mix results in a good following of readers and some lively commentary.
Frequency: B
Content: A
Community: A
Overall: A-
Linkshare
As I mentioned in the introduction, Linkshare is the newest US affiliate network on the blog scene with their launch on October 1st.
So far, the blog is a great mix of different authors from product management, marketing folks, VPs and do-bees. It’s still the honeymoon stage for Linkshare blog, but congrats to them for a solid first month. Keep it up guys.
Update Frequency: A
Content: A
Community: C (graded on a scale since it’s too soon to tell)
Overall: A-
Commission Junction
Commission Junction is notably blogless, and as of October 1, they’re the only one of the big guys.
Given what all the other great things the networks are doing with blogs, from promoting new programs, to announcing maintenance windows, to getting the product word out, it’s pretty amazing that they haven’t got on the ball.
There’s not a complete lack of new media coming out of Commission Junction. They’ve delivered a series of enthusiastic podcasts, a skunkworks promotions blog, and most recently a happy-10th-birthday-to-us YouTube video (happy birthday CJ!).
But they somehow skipped chapter one in the social media book: “Set up a Blog”. ???
Overall: DNC
Pepperjam Network
The Pepperjam Network Blog served as the launching point for the network announcements. Things got a little dicey for a while around the launch of the network and some mud-slinging with CJ, but settled down again with some great content mostly from Kris Jones, the President of Pepperjam. The blog has a lot of promotional information about new merchant launches, which can overwhelm the rest of the stuff at times (good problem for them), but Kris does write a good amount of new product information and even some personal stuff. They’ve put out some unique stuff such as the “Meet the Affiliates” feature that’s been going steady for quite a while now. From a community standpoint, the only posts that get any comments are product-focused (indicating that’s really what people are interested in seeing.)
Update Frequency: A
Content: A
Community: A
Overall: A
http://www.pepperjamnetwork.com/blog/
Also check out Pepperjam’s Marketing blog http://www.pepperjam.com/blog/
Buy.at
No blog, but at least they are active on twitter: http://twitter.com/buy_at.
Overall: DNC
AvantLink
I don’t currently do anything in this network (not for any good reason), so I don’t pay much attention. But since they do have a blog, I’m adding them on. Like PJN, their blog is heavy on the new merchant launches and promotions, but there is a smattering of product information as well. Community-wise, it does have a pulse with the occasional commenter. I think if they went after more industry and product issues, they could get some more activity out of the reader-base.
Update Frequency: A
Content: B
Community: B
Overall: B+
http://www.avantshare.com/blog/
There are of course other smaller networks with blogs, and individual merchant programs that have great bloggers working for them. But I’ll stop there or I could spend all day on this post!
If you have a favorite that I’ve left out, feel free to comment below.
