This month I"€™m pleased to interview Richard Kershaw who is an active affiliate who uses paid and organic search to drive sales through his clients"€™ affiliates programmes. I was keen to tap into Richard"€™s expertise from following his commonsense comments on the UK Netmarketing discussion forum and his own Quality Nonsense Blog. I also wanted to get an affiliates perspective on trends in affiliate marketing. Q1. How do you see the balance between the importance of SEO and PPC focused affiliates changing in the future? (With merchants getting more refined in paid search and putting more attention into SEO plus the search engines apparently trying to exclude affiliates, will this make life too difficult for small-to-mid size affiliates?) [Richard Kershaw]: As far as PPC is concerned, there"€™s a pincer movement between Google and merchants. The AdWords platform is getting more complex, while traffic prices are on the up thanks to…