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Where do you see affiliate marketing, the web and your sites standing in 2 years and in 5 years. Do you thing you will still be making money in that time?
Chef Brian
The way things are going currently, I think affiliate marketing is here to stay. But.. 5 years is like 50 years in the world of internet. I don't think anybody could hazard a guess on the future of afffiliate marketing in 5 years.
Ashwin
That is one thing that is a bit scary in this business, so much work, so much time. It can all end at any moment, not to be negative but I think you have to relize that the internet moves very fast and often people or websites can be left behind.
Hopefully things that I am working on now will be making me money in 2 years, 3 would be great and much past that.....well just to hard to say. In my own opion ;-)
Cheers,
Chef Brina
1. Merchants become more restrictive on who they allow to be affiliates. Obviously the merchants want quality, targeted traffic and they will probably be looking for sites that can generate that as opposed to banner farms and sites like that.
2. More exclusive agreements. Rather than accepting an infinite number of affiliates a merchant might want 15 or 20 quality affiliates. This would save them the hassles of working with affilites that don't generate any sales.
3. Merchants seek out individual affiliates as opposed to affiliates seeking out merchants.
I think the main question that will need to be answered is who will drive the market? The merchants or affliates?
Chef Brina ???O#U008q3e0
LOL
Point 2 - Not very sure. How does a merchant determine the quality of an affiliate without working with him/her in the first place?
Ashwin
A lot of this would depend on the affiliates reputation. If they have proved themselves with other merchants they would earn a good reputation. Also, a site like CJ would be able to recommend good affiliates to its merchants so they could go after them.
Commissioned Sales is the second oldest profession. Come to think of it, most members of the oldest profession are commissioned reps for their pimps...
Anyway, I digress.
It's been around for years, and it will continue to be around. The "affiliate" of today will start to evolve into what we think of as an "Independant Sales Rep" and you'll start to see companies bringing this sort of model in. More and more, the Sales Rep's web site will be responsible for not only getting the folks in (which they have to do now), but they'll start having to qualify and close the sale before sending the customer off for the parent company to handle collection of payment and distribution. The big winners in all of this will be places like "E-Bay" (if they ever get their act together and get off of CJ's very limited program) and Amazon (who have already started this).
They'll win because they have a very diversified product line (Amazon's starting to pay commissions for referals to zShops and Used Goods merchants now, too). Their marketing web sites will pick a specific niche area (be it HDTV and Home Entertainment, Kitchen Gadgetry, or the current favorite Books).
The deal now is that as these large places with huge arrays of all sorts of products have no way to get people to even "know" that the products exist - there are just too many. I bet not many folks reading this knows that you can go to Amazon and buy a 2002 Ford Mustang (nor that you can set up your own online car store through them) So, if they encourage and enable niche groups to set up their own specialized site and optimize for that target product, qualify the lead and have the person ready to put it on their card before they even hit the parent company's site, they get incredible amounts of benefits.
This is the way it shall evolve, like Real Estate or Auto Insurance brokerages. The focus will move from "marketing arm" to "sales arm" and that'll suit me just fine.
G.
Yes, that is how I have been thinking about it. My goal is for full time in the next 12 months and I can see it happening in 6 if things go well.
I thought today I will tell folks I am "in sales". If they prob deeper than so be it. Of course I also thought a custom license plate that said "Affiliate Man" would be cool ;-)
Cheers,
Chef Brian
And they should be good and ready to pay a premium commission for that service.
If you plan to get into Affiliate marketing full time, a few words of caution & advice.
1) Diversify - Select affiliate programs from different merchants & different categories (Software affiliate programs, finance related affiliate programs and so on). Never put all your eggs in the same basket.
2) Use different marketing strategies - if you are using pay per click search engines now, don't expect to use PPCs 5 years from now. You will never know - Overture may close shop in 2 years.
Getting into affiliate marketing full time is riskier than investing in stock market!
Ashwin
Thanks for the tips and stratagies, so far so good. I have developed my main site and "link out from it" linking to my "type a" sites. I have created two sites one of which is still in developement, these sites target two very different programs. I will continue to seek out new programs and niches. I am thinking about getting into ppc, right now everything is coming in from google, yahoo and the other smaller engines. About %40 of my income is coming from cmp programs from my main site and is used for "seed money".
My first year was spent creating my main site and now I will branch out and test the waters with "type a sites".
Cheers,
Chef Brian
<crystal ball> I see a time of consolidation... of affiliate types "going corporate"... forming specific marketing organisations based around tightly focussed sectors, rather than the loose coalitions and 1 man operations that currently exist... and putting the merchants right under the cosh. Within 2 years, full-blown "affiliates-r-us" outfits will be cherry picking the merchants/products they wish to deal with, and this will be the norm. They will be able to dictate large chunks of the merchants backend processes and software etc. In return, they will provide large quantities of highly targetted traffic, and the sales that go with that </crystal ball>
I think its inevitable really, as the whole thing matures. Internet purchasing continues to to grow strongly at a time when the world economy is a bit shaky. In the UK and to an extent the US, consumer spending has been the powerhouse keeping everything ticking over. I'd bet that a fair chunk of that "extra" spending has taken place over the web, and it'll keep growing. In times of uncertain economic conditions, consumers become more focussed on "value" and the e-shop is one of the prime places to find it.
I disagree. Many of the most successful affiliate programs have thousands of affiliates 90% of affiliates probably don't sell a single product, but if you've got 30,000 affiliates, you don't care because you are still making lots of sales.
"Affiliates who sell to exist," or content publishers.
"Affiliates who exist to sell," or online retailers.
In some topic areas, such as travel, content publishers are valuable to merchants because they can deliver highly targeted audiences for big-ticket products and services. However, it's important for content publishers to earn credibility with readers by maintaining a clear distinction between editorial and advertising. That's why I'm unimpressed when I get e-mails from affiliate-program managers at hotel booking engines, travel agencies, etc. that promise to make their e-commerce tools look like part of my content site. I DON'T WANT their e-commerce tools to look like part of my content site--I want my readers to know that, if they click on the Widget Travel link, they'll be buying a car rental, railpass, sightseeing tour, etc. from Widget Travel--not from me. For a site like mine, affiliate marketing is "pay for performance advertising," not a way to become involved in direct sales.
Bottom line: In the future, some merchants may look for affiliates who are independent reps, while others will look for affiliates who can deliver specific groups of readers (like a newspaper, magazine, or TV station). And a few merchants may be smart enough to offer programs for both salespeople and content publishers, with a different commission structure for each.
"Affiliates who sell to exist," or content publishers."Affiliates who exist to sell," or online retailers.
Very important distinction. People who belong to affiliate programs sometimes (in my experience) see only their ends of the spectrum. There are those of us (myself included) who create content because that's our goal - solely to deliver good content. However, whether it be because we want to recommend books and make commissions on that (why not, if we're going to recommend them anyways) or if it be because we need the money to sustain our sites, our sites exist for content.
Once an affiliate marketer friend of mine was horrified to hear that I took all the affiliate links out of one of my content sites ("What's the point of running the site?!").
I remember that I was horrified when I found out there were people who try to make a living off of affiliate programs - and that there were some who were succeeding.
I was a party to a start up back in 1999 that based it's revenue plan on advertising and affiliates. Not only did none of the affiliates ever pay up, but their returns were tiny. I had friends who tried similar affiliate programs but failed, though they had good content sites.
In my tiny world view at the time, since it didn't work for me or any of my friends, it simply didn't work. I know better now of course =)
I have been trying this affiliate thing for some time, prob about 3 years on and off. Of those three years the last 15 months has been centered around creating one great site with content that people enjoy. Now I am focusing my efforts towards building content to drive sales and it is working. Each month I see better results, more clicks and more checks.
It takes lots of work, the ability to change tatics on a dime and time. Surely there are those marketers on webmasterwold that are making far ... far more than me. At the same time many do fail, I think always trying new things and ideas is important in affiliate marketing.
As for the topic of this thread, in two years I feel my sites will still be pulling. Five years is too far ahead for this crystal ball however ;-)
Cheers,
Chef Brian
I've been to your site as I am a constant lurker on this forum. I work in the restaurant biz and I also see affiliate programs as a good medium to earn an income via the internet.
I don't know how your type A sites are coming along but I do feel that your high content recipe site will be able to generate income in five years and probably much more than it does now.
My reasoning is this: Content is the cornerstone of your recipe site and as long as you continue to build quality content the traffic will come in.... If your affiliate partners go under you can just find new ones (I also expect affiliates will have allot more merchants to choose from in the future). Your content is the bridge to your merchants.
As long as you continue to build and maintain your content I think it is highly likely your website will be profitable in 5 years time.
Jesse Newhart
I could see some affiliate marketers needing to learn from folks like sports stars, who have substantial earnings but a relatively short career. Sometimes they are examples of what NOT to do! If you have big earnings in a short time, the challenge would be to manage your money wisely so that if things change you don't sit there wondering where it all went.
