For those in the affiliate marketing business 2007 may well be remembered as The Year of the Spy.
In the years leading up to 2007 it was still relatively easy to set up a profitable pay-per-click advertising campaign for almost any affiliate program.
But while it could be done, at the same time it was becoming increasingly complicated.
By the end of 2006 competition was hotter than ever.
There were thousands more affiliate marketers than ever before jostling for a position.
They pushed up the costs of advertising and pulled down the profitability.
It used to be fairly easy to test affiliate products.
Now if you're not careful you could lose your shirt.
Perhaps then it is little wonder that throughout 2007 some of the leading affiliate marketers have "outted" themselves as spies.
They have admitted to spying on their competitors.
You cannot really blame them.
Why invest thousands of your own dollars to research and test possible affiliate products, when you can lurk in the shadows and spy on other people's activities? Anyone can search at Google and see what other affiliate marketers are advertising.
The difficulty is in doing this for many different search terms, and then doing it again and again until you establish the trends and patterns.
Which affiliate products are quickly dropped by other advertisers? Which ads keep running? Which ads do affiliate marketers not only keep running but increase their bidding position? The solution was to create software that would continually send requests to the search engines and keep a database of all the ads that were showing for any particular query.
Once it became known that this is what the super affiliates were doing, a bunch of software applications were quickly developed and brought to market.
Brad Callen's Keyword Elite was one of the early software applications to spy on competitors' ads.
Undercover Profits, Google Cash Detective, ZamDoo and Affiliate Elite soon followed.
These tools are not cheap.
They cost hundreds and even thousands of dollars.
But to affiliate marketers who spend hundreds of dollars in advertising every day, these competitor analysis applications enable them to quickly determine which ads are most likely to be profitable and which affiliate products are not worth even trying.
It's an edge that is certainly worth paying for.
And it is no wonder that with most of these tools they sold out soon after their launch.
In the years leading up to 2007 it was still relatively easy to set up a profitable pay-per-click advertising campaign for almost any affiliate program.
But while it could be done, at the same time it was becoming increasingly complicated.
By the end of 2006 competition was hotter than ever.
There were thousands more affiliate marketers than ever before jostling for a position.
They pushed up the costs of advertising and pulled down the profitability.
It used to be fairly easy to test affiliate products.
Now if you're not careful you could lose your shirt.
Perhaps then it is little wonder that throughout 2007 some of the leading affiliate marketers have "outted" themselves as spies.
They have admitted to spying on their competitors.
You cannot really blame them.
Why invest thousands of your own dollars to research and test possible affiliate products, when you can lurk in the shadows and spy on other people's activities? Anyone can search at Google and see what other affiliate marketers are advertising.
The difficulty is in doing this for many different search terms, and then doing it again and again until you establish the trends and patterns.
Which affiliate products are quickly dropped by other advertisers? Which ads keep running? Which ads do affiliate marketers not only keep running but increase their bidding position? The solution was to create software that would continually send requests to the search engines and keep a database of all the ads that were showing for any particular query.
Once it became known that this is what the super affiliates were doing, a bunch of software applications were quickly developed and brought to market.
Brad Callen's Keyword Elite was one of the early software applications to spy on competitors' ads.
Undercover Profits, Google Cash Detective, ZamDoo and Affiliate Elite soon followed.
These tools are not cheap.
They cost hundreds and even thousands of dollars.
But to affiliate marketers who spend hundreds of dollars in advertising every day, these competitor analysis applications enable them to quickly determine which ads are most likely to be profitable and which affiliate products are not worth even trying.
It's an edge that is certainly worth paying for.
And it is no wonder that with most of these tools they sold out soon after their launch.
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