Just a quick post: I was over at the Traffic Café and saw something I just had to re-blog, because I like it so much. By the way, if you haven’t already, go over to the Traffic Café and subscribe to that blog. It’s one of the gems out there, run by Jonathan Gunson, who gave this awesome interview here on RQR, not too long ago.

Anyway, on to the actual topic. About once a month, something or other happens, that gets a lot of people all worried about the “end of online marketing”! Be it a new feature Google introduces (personalized search, anybody?), some rules changing (e.g. new Facebook advertisement rules), marketer’s accounts getting banned (AdWords, Blogger,…) or anything else along those lines. Whenever something like that happens, you can count on a lot of wailing about how the days of making easy money online are finally counted etc. etc.

Well, here’s an interesting counter-argument:

Automation software for Internet marketing purposes: It’s all the rage right now, and has been for quite a while. There are numerous offers for programs that will automate all kinds of tasks from distributing articles, videos or bookmarks to completely creating or re-writing content (shudder). Look at a few discussion threads about automation software in a forum and you’ll quickly realize that bots are at the centre of many a heated debate. Some say that automation is all rubbish and never really works like it should and others swear by it.

In this article, I introduce three concepts that are essential to understanding the use and misuse of automation bots.

Affiliate marketing is an attractive business model, although the real reasons for this are rarely stated. They tend to get drowned out by all the hype. Contrary to what your average sales-pitch would have you believe, affiliate marketing isn’t super-easy and it very rarely, if ever, makes anyone rich over night. It also involves actual work, actual investments and actual effort. Just like a “real” business. Go figure. In spite of all this, there are still many reasons to love affiliate marketing. The foremost can be summarized in just one word: Scalability.