Where Can Affiliates Find Innovation?

Sometimes being different and cool is hard. Everyone is marketing while everyone else is being marketed to, and in the mix is that occasional really cool and innovative idea or product. When you are marketing other people's products like I do, it is very hard to think on the edge of the envelope.

Every now and then I come up with a winner idea that gets attention, so I know I can do it but it requires a lot of coffee and overt stimulation. You know what helps? Getting away for awhile, listening to music and talking to other people outside the normal areas of your day to day. That gives me ideas more than anything else I do.

Sometimes I just surf around the web and find stuff to read to stimulate my thinking a bit. I like many, have a problem of being in a BOX of similarity. Find some interesting sites to explore and you will quickly get some different perspectives.


Imagine promoting this product?

For affiliates it usually comes down to new website presentations or cool blogging subjects that are not already over crowded in a particular niche. The key term is "thinking outside the box". Music is overcrowded, travel is overcrowded, tickets is overcrowded and on and on, but think about applications within those interesting and useful niches.

We have a real challenge as we move forward in this new time of economy and innovation. How do we capture the customer's interest and time on any site or blog? Create your own new social network if you want to, but I advise you to plan ahead what you want it to become. A good site for social network creation is NING.

Not that we can really do this online, but reading the story of the Pike Place Fish Market would be at least mentally stimulating, and it is interesting as heck to read. Other subjects are covered as well in this interview with Cyndi Laurin. It is more about conventional business models, but reading it gives me a jolt and causes me to think about conventional web business models too. All things apply similarly in principal at least.

My idea here for affiliates who publish seo content for marketing, is to branch out sometimes and try to be thinking on a different plane while trying to assimilate knowledge that can be converted to the web in some way or another. We cannot toss fish back and forth here, but what can we do that is "like that" or simulates the activity itself? That is the exercise I try for when I do this. Hunt down interesting things and learn about them. Later, you might be able to call on that new stuff for something you need to do online.

Finally I want to suggest that you need to look for new products to promote and write about. New and unfamiliar to you is the key idea here. Start looking through the inventory your affiliate merchant partners offer. Maybe there is a lonely niche there waiting just for you! then you can apply some new ideas to marketing it, and you can make a fortune!