“Is affiliate marketing dead?”
– Every affiliate marketer ever
Is affiliate marketing dead? Raise your hand if you’ve heard that one before. That’s what I thought. Every time someone mentions affiliate marketing, someone else inevitably mentions that they heard that affiliate marketing is dead. They heard it from someone else. They saw it in an email from a supposed guru. They found it in a fortune cookie. Whatever the source, the message is always the same. Affiliate marketing is dead, right?
I’m here to tell you that is absolutely NOT the case! Affiliate marketing is alive and well, and I’m going to prove it to you.
But first… what IS affiliate marketing, and why is it so powerful?
So, affiliate marketing is actually really easy to describe. Affiliate marketing involves an advertiser and a product owner, the product owner being the one who has a product or service that needs to be sold online.
Okay, now… they can set up an affiliate program where someone like me can sign up to actually get an affiliate link then start promoting their products and services online. I can earn commissions every time somebody clicks that link and orders a product or signs up as a lead, or whatever other action that this product owner wants to be done. Every time that happens I get a commission!
Pretty sweet, huh?
I will get my link and promote that link online so that every time somebody clicks on it, it’s tracked through an actual tracking platform. Sometimes the product owner might actually own their own tracking platform or they might put their product on to another affiliate network, it just depends on what they choose to do. I can work directly with the advertiser, the product owner, or I could work through an affiliate marketing network such as a CPA network.
There are many different networks online with hundreds and thousands of products that can be sold. When you sign up to a network you get access to many of their products and services that are available, everything is tracked through that specific network and if you get people to click your affiliate link and they actually buy something or become a member of the service you’re promoting… you will then get credit for that sale and will be paid for it.
I put these affiliate links in my paid advertising, my blogs and other various websites that the network and product owner allow in order to get clicks which will be tracked by the tracking network and that’s how everything works in a nutshell.
For example, if you are an Amazon affiliate then you can sign up to Amazon, get links for certain products and if you give that link to somebody through an email saying something along the lines of “hey check this out, click this link you might want to buy it” then as soon as they click that link and they actually buy that product you just told them about, you would get paid by Amazon. This is a simplification of the whole process of course, but you get the general idea!
Now, there are other examples such as Clickbank and various CPA Networks as I’ve mentioned before, and all of these networks and products are available to affiliates… basically, everything mentioned and more is available to affiliate marketers to sign up for so you can then start promoting products and services using your affiliate link. You also need to know how to get traffic to your link in order to be a successful affiliate marketer.
So Is Affiliate Marketing Dead?
Let’s answer the question of “is affiliate marketing actually dead”. Well, that is actually ridiculous to think about because marketing and selling things online isn’t dying at all. Anybody saying this is completely wrong and in fact, the opposite is quite true.
There are so many new worldwide users of the internet that it’s only growing, which means there are more people going on to the internet, there’s more opportunity for affiliates to find traffic online and you just need to know where to get that traffic in order be successful… okay?
The people who say that affiliate marketing is dead, are usually the people that have tried affiliate marketing and perhaps failed at their campaign. Or they had a campaign running where they focussed only on one type of traffic source or maybe they were focused on one type of offer and that offer went away or that traffic source stopped working.
Then poof all of a sudden their affiliate marketing business died. That is why people say affiliate marketing is dead because they actually have one campaign or one source of traffic that died and then all of a sudden the business is over. They don’t accept the responsibility and instead blame it on the entire industry which is just wrong.
Let me give you an example. Back in the early days of Google, it was really easy to rank sites so you could actually set up a website as an affiliate, stuff it full of a bunch of keywords that were related to whatever product you were promoting and it would likely be on the first page of Google.
With just some simple back-linking strategies you could get a bunch of shady backlinks to your websites, or you could just stuff your sites with a bunch of keywords and all of a sudden you would be at the top of Google ranks in a few days!
Google decided to set up new algorithms once this got out of hand which means that basically within a day all of these affiliates that focused heavily on exploiting the system at that time lost out on all of their commissions because the next day they were getting zero traffic.
They set the whole business up around an exploit and then once that exploit happened to get patched the entire method died along with a ton of “businesses” around it.
For those affiliates exploiting the system, affiliate marketing died. Had they built their business using multiple facets of traffic and using white hat methods to build organic traffic and building a real following then their business would not have been affected and they would have had a long-term strategy.
This is why I look for new affiliate marketing campaigns and build them out first by sending paid traffic to several different offers.
I test them and see what is converting and what is actually working for me, once I find an offer that is working what I will do is I’ll actually set up an authority market and authority website, basically a full-blown website around the niche or topic or product that I’m actually promoting. That way I can build multiple channels of traffic from all of the other areas including Facebook, social media sites like Pinterest or YouTube videos.
I can create a full Authority website around that and then I’m getting traffic from multiple-different areas and I’m not trying to focus on one exploit or one thing that I can actually exploit to get a bunch of traffic for a short period of time.
I find other offers that are available which are similar to the offer I’m running so that if the offer does go away there’s always another offer that is available. This works really well when you choose evergreen niches like diet or skincare or the make money online niche.
All of these niches have multiple products that you can promote which means it’ll never die, there will always be people looking to lose weight, there will always be people looking to appear younger and there’ll always be people wanting to make money.
All of these niches, including many other niches, are evergreen niches that will never die. As you continue to build your authority sites in the back end you can continue sending traffic as an affiliate to your landing pages while finding new areas to focus your authority sites around. This strategy will work forever in my opinion, it is the best way to set up affiliate marketing campaigns.
Here is a video about choosing evergreen niches.
Final Thoughts
Affiliate marketing will never die. There’s just way too much traffic and there are always going to be companies that want affiliates to work for them so that they can pay people to sell and promote their products online. It is a very easy way to make money, as an affiliate, opposed to being a product owner. I’m going to talk about that in my next videos where I’m going to talk about the advantages of being an affiliate versus being the actual product owner.
So what do you think? Is affiliate marketing dead, or do you see as much growth potential in it as I do? Let us know in the comment section, and be sure to visit us at PowerhouseAffiliate.
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