Segmentation of Affiliates, Social Networking and the ‘Thick Long Tail’ by Matthew Wood

Talk to any paid search affiliate marketing company about the long tail, and you can guarantee they are adopting the methodology with their paid search campaigns to generate sales at low cost and thus achieve a higher ROI. mention the 'thick long tail' however and they will probably be baffled as it’s often foreign to their current activity.

Affiliates use different methodologies to drive traffic and for some time they have been segmented into five or six different segments, we're not just talking about the vertical segmentation but the activities used by affiliates to generate traffic to advertisers. These can be summarized:

Paid search affiliates, generating traffic through Adwords, MSN, Yahoo! And other niche SEM channels
Content driven affiliates, through editorial, blogs, RSS, product feeds and syndication.
Reward and Loyalty affiliates, with large numbers of loyal users.
Email marketing affiliates with large opt-in databases.
SEO / organically optimised affiliates with broad or niche content.
Technology driven affiliates, creating widgets to tap into social communities such as facebook.
Social media affiliates, with user generated content, reviews, blogs, niche communities and networks of friends or individuals.

Each group needs a special tact of management as they have increasingly different requirements from their networks and affiliate managers.

It's the final two groups of affiliates that through user activity can generate the ‘long and thick tail’ – building both loyalty and sales through the power of user generated content, word of mouth, reviews, and more recently video. The recent phenomena of how shoppers are taking cues from one another rather than institutions and brand activity offers a great opportunity to capture the user loyalty and drive sales.

(source forester research & CJU EU 2007)