Education is a potentially lucrative vertical during times of economic slowdown. As consumers face lay-offs, they start considering other career options and looking into furthering their education.

We recently had the chance to ask Gen Tanabe of SuperCollege.com about how the company is using social media and where they see affiliate marketing headed in the near future. A portal that helps consumers get into and pay for college, SuperCollege.com offers college and scholarship search functions, forums, and a variety of expert pieces that college applicants can use to find a college that’s right for them and the resources to finance their higher education.

In another installment of this interview on the 5 Star Affiliate Programs Blog, Gen discusses how community, content, and affiliate reporting and management are behind the success of SuperCollege.com.

Share Results: What verticals do you focus on?
SuperCollege: We are exclusively focused on higher education including graduate and adult student learning.

SR: What do you think about the growth of the affiliate industry in the coming years?
SC: We like the pay for performance model. As a mid size website, we don't generate 100 million pages views a month, and with declining CPMs, we have found that display advertising is making up less and less of our overall revenue. Affiliate revenue, on the other hand, is growing and when the offers are targeted, we see it easily outperforming display ads.

SR: Do you use Social Media for driving traffic? If so, which channels do you use and how do you use them? To build community? Retain customers? Acquire new customers?
SC: We do use both Facebook and Twitter as part of our social media strategy. To some degree this has come at the expense of our blogs which we no longer update as often. We find that we are getting more response to short messages sent out through real time channels than posting a blog entry.

SR: What are some of the trends that you see emerging in affiliate marketing in the coming years?
SC: Our hope is that more advertisers join programs like ShareResults. It's nice to be able to work with a small number of affiliate networks and choose the best offers for your users. We often test new offers and having them all within the same network makes this type of testing extremely easy.

So we hope the future brings more automation to the process of optimizing offers. It would be great to get away from individual tracking links and just place a single piece of code on all pages that can be controlled from a dashboard. Right now affiliate advertising is still time intensive and optimization usually requires a person crunching some numbers. We love to offload this process of the affiliate network!