Social and affiliate marketing combine to create a revenue perfect storm

Affiliate marketing is a fairly commonplace practice these days - especially given how easy it is to set up on high paying affiliate networks like PeerFly.

After all, what could be better than taking a cut for selling a product or service that you didn't have to develop, don't have to distribute, and don't even have to process payment for?

The problem for affiliate marketers is that there is so much content and competition for traffic that it is very difficult to get eyeballs on content so that traffic can be funelled and converted.

What affiliate marketers need, the social marketers have.

Social marketers have the ability to create content that can go viral. In other words, they share their content on a social network and the people who read that content, if they're so inclined, can share that with their friends who share it on in turn. This can lead to rapid, global exposure for a blog or article.

The affiliate marketers dilemma

The question is then, why aren't affiliate marketers social marketers? The answer is that they are, or at least try to be. The problem is that social networks are full of people who want specific information or pure entertainment. They don't want to have to read about the latest discounted product that is sure to change their lives, blah blah blah.

Trade-off between marketers and traffic

So affiliate marketers need a way to leverage the power of social marketing to drive traffic through their affiliate links, without harassing or spamming their networks of potential customers. The way they do this is to provide unique, interesting, and engaging content that is focussed and tailored for their specific target audience.

In other words, marketers have to give people what they're after in return for their traffic, which can be monetized using the affiliate links. Up until now, this effectively meant that affiliate marketers spent hours racking their brains to come up with new and interesting content that would drive traffic.

Marketer's dream

topulo.us is a free, socially integrated platform for making and sharing predictions. What's great about this service is that any prediction comes with up to three reference links. This means that all an affiliate marketer now needs to do, is think about the future of their particular niche, make an interesting prediction and reference their own website, affiliate products or brands.

Good predictions can easily go viral, and they take with them the affiliate links that are used as a reference basis for the prediction itself.

See it in action

For example, take a look at the following prediction:

Portal 2 is going to be the biggest game of 2011 on PC, xbox and playstation

It's interesting. It's realistic. It sparks debate on various social networks, and can you spot the affiliate links?

For now, topulo.us allows affiliate links to be added to predictions with no charge. However, this is likely to become a premium service in the near future, so best climb on the bandwagon while you can.