I know how tiresome it might be to hear that everybody around is making their millions in affiliate marketing and you can’t even make it green to stack at least a few bucks. Not for money, just for the belief that there is still something left for a solo marketer. For people around it seems so easy, but not for you. You have got it all perfectly set: racking, servers, offer from a trusted affiliate network, self-made landing pages, but the profit is simply not there. It all seems as a big spectacle where you are definitely not playing the leading role. Is it because affiliate marketing is dying or is it because it is simply not for you?
The good news is that affiliate marketing will never die. Not because affiliates somehow made a deal with the devil, but simply because, in essence, it is an optimization process, not a creative process. The concept is very easy: if you divide anything by two halves – one part will be bigger than the other. This is it. You buy any amount of traffic – you divide it by two, get rid of the one which is less efficient and this is how you have it optimized It seem simple but it is where the magic happens. When big advertisers buy a chunk of traffic for a certain amount of traffic – there is a traffic that works better for them and there is the one that works slightly worse. This difference is the opportunity for an affiliate marketer. It is one of the reasons why advertiser with the best conversion rate on the market can never buy all the traffic out there. This is why the bigger you become – the harder it is for you to compete with the rest of the hungry small- marketers who can compete with you for tiny pieces of traffic that are being lost in the avalanche of the traffic coming to the product of the advertiser.
Now, there is another interesting peculiarity of affiliate marketing that makes it different from any other business. The peculiarity that makes a bright future described in the previous passage a bit harder: it is very easy to scale a small success that you saw in your affiliate campaigns and a huge profit can be built over a thousand small campaigns that generate 10 dollars each. There are ways for doing it for different traffic sources, verticals, and products. For example, it is very hard to spend millions from a single Facebook account, but once you discovered a combination of the ad, product, and targeting – what you need is to do it thousand of times in order to become rich. A few years ago you could not create multiple accounts on the same traffic source exactly because by doing this you messed with sources algorithms and could buy a ton of traffic by multiplying the number of your campaigns.
I see push traffic is being used a lot, especially by beginners exactly because it is very hard to scale. It is unpredictable, very hard to optimize, it has an inconsistent conversion rate and it is fully blind meaning there is no way you can see where the traffic coming from, but the worst one is that you can not effectively scale it without putting a lot of manual work into it. All this makes it uninteresting for big affiliates. Find out how to scale it without drowning in the hours of management and it will make you rich. That’s why Facebook is still around. It is very difficult to set up all those campaigns. Banning account after account Facebook slows it down and makes the process of ad creation almost intolerable. There is nothing left for big gambling advertisers but to create a good margin opportunity for affiliates by posting their offers in public.
I know it has been said a number of times that you need to find something unique or creative in order to make it work. I go further – unique is not enough. A fresh landing page will surely add up to your campaigns, but that will be a pity 3 per cent. Affiliate marketing can not be seen as work anymore in the sense that you can only create decent campaigns and wait for the profit – it might never come.
Affiliate marketing today is much less the process of buying. Look at the job market – no one needs media buyers anymore. Elite profession once becomes obsolete just in the span of a few years. Media buyers become “hands” who manage campaigns channeled to the sophisticated infrastructure designed to convert traffic for advertisers. An affiliate marketer today is a person who can create such infrastructure. Whether it is software that allows efficiently buying traffic from thousand of Facebook accounts, a talented manager who can outsource a manual job of the campaigns management to the cheap labor – it is not the buying process, but more a product management.
Talking about the practical appliance of what has been said, I would like to highlight a few directions for affiliate marketers which still have a relatively low entering barrier or which allow solo affiliates or small team to earn their bread:
– Whatever you can run on push traffic because of its scalability constraints described above;
– Dating vertical because of the abundance of the CPA networks where you can send your traffic after it was paused by an advertiser practically creating an opportunity to earn, but not the opportunity to significantly scale the business;
– Facebook/Google traffic because of its inaccessibility for most products listed on the affiliate networks;
– SEO optimized websites created.