Izea does affiliates: First Impressions – lots of potential and limitations, too.

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Well, Izea has been slowly building out the SocialSpark platform for quite sometime. It’s moved slowly from Beta to full launch, and it’s becoming increasingly sophisticated in a number of ways.

As a blogger, though, there are some problems that I’ve had with the platform, most of which is that I’m not getting enough work from them to be really bothered. Still, I’ve maintained my blog in the system to get access to the stats, keep an eye on SocialSpark and perhaps be able to take part on a better level in the future. So I’m keeping an open mind.

Izea Does Affiliates

Recently, though, Izea expanded the platform even more by adding affiliates . I’m naturally interested in affiliate marketing so I was pleased to see this opportunity in the marketplace. You can take a look for yourself.

socialspark affiliates

There are only limited opportunities right now, but the payouts are quite generous. A smart blogger, for example, could easily attract extra income to the blog by posting certain affiliate type banners and links on their blogs. Of course, one has to ask the question: are blogs could places for making conversions? So far, I’ve not had much success with conversions, so I’m not convinced yet. But that may be due to my own limitations, rather than anything problems inherent in using blogs for affiliate marketing.

There’s a big but. It doesn’t seem to work like traditional affiliate programs. Why? There’s a time limit to the opportunity of one year. This would preclude certain types of sites that would be built to a longer time horizon. A friend of mine has just spent a lot of time and money building a website to market lawncare products and services, it’s taken him months to build his website, do the SEO, and start the marketing via AdWords. If the marketer only had a window of 12 months to pursue an affiliate program, it just wouldn’t make much sense: the first three months would be gone in the build-up period.

Since SocialSpark is simply trying out affiliate programs at the moment, we’ll see if they take a different tack in the future on this issue.