Affiliate Marketing is Dead

Has Google done in the AffWorld?

[ghostofseo]

If you were a publisher that relied on Google for your affiliate marketing efforts, its time to re-think that approach. I had a good run for many years. Created wonderful content related to outdoor products with lots of E-E-A-T :) and saw about 93% of my traffic organic from Google. Never bothered to advertise with Google as our numbers, conversations, time on site, page views were all strong.

However Google took that funnel away, nothing has changed with the way I approach making content, infact our reviews are better now than they ever have been. We started hiring professional photographers to really make our outdoor gear reviews pop!

I was asked to lead a group talk with [] affiliates later this afternoon.

Few things I will be covering include:

-Best of Listicles Are Essentially Know that Reputation Spam is in Place.
Examples: Better Home and Garden and People Magazine Writing articles on "Best Snowboards" which are outranking me...

-Affiliate Networks working with large publishers are actually the problem. Sure Forbes can drive tens of thousands a day in affiliate commission but at what cost? What does this do to small independent publishers like HouseFresh?

-Affiliate Commission on my site is down -78.91% YTD over last year

-Sites that rely on Affiliate must diversify. My thought is you need a product to sell. Display Advertising won't be enough moving forward.

-Affiliate Sites are considered pass through sites. We don't offer any value in Google's eyes. The end funnel has us sending customers to retailers. Google can do that just fine now.

-Eventually Google will show reviews in the snippets and GSE, (they already are) there will be no need for Google to show review sites or publishers in the future. Let that sink in...

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 6:42 pm (utc) on Apr 26, 2024]
[edit reason] snipped name of affiliate program... [/edit]

[JesterMagic]

Yup it is all the big media publishers in the game for absolutely every type of product. The funnel has shifted to them. Small sites can't beat their backlink profile and reputation even though most of their reviews are garbage, old, and contain the wrong info

I think Google is giving them a bone since they are almost forced to give away their news content for free with how search works and the amount of info Google now shows from the articles within the search results.

[goodroi]

Affiliate marketing is not dead. It is much harder to generate affiliate profits from Google traffic. The affiliate approach of immediately passing users through to the merchant site can work but I'd skip that approach.

Target niche opportunities that fortune 500 companies overlook. Billion dollar companies will take the vanity terms but the niche crumbs they leave behind are worth millions. Build loyal visitors by providing real unique value. Think about how to be valuable before thinking about affiliate links.

It is also smart to diversify your revenue - affiliate marketing, offer subscriptions, sell your own custom merchandise, ad displays, etc.

[ghostofseo]

@goodroi I disagree on part of this, having just been asked to lead a Group call with affiliate sites that in the past saw millions of visitors a day and now are in the thousands.

If you made a living with that sort of traffic, hired editorial staff, engineers and then your traffic went to sh*t. You would be thinking affiliate marketing is dying. We talked about how Google may want a slice of the affiliate pie too moving forward.

Agree with you on having a product to sell, I encouraged this vs just being a "pass through site" I feel I could offer tours, maybe branded merch.

Display ads are worth nothing on my site at the moment, We saw 50,000+ visitors a day few months ago. Income was $50-$100 a day. Now we see 200-300 visitors a day. All ads taken down.

My site provides as much if not more value than any other outdoor product review site online. There is a reason I get asked to speak on panels at the Trade Shows and our Editor's Choice Awards are displayed in tradeshow booths and stickers on products you see at retail.

Rolling Stones is entering the affiliate space, as are some other major players in news media.

[mhansen]

I believe it's much more than just the affiliate model that is going to be seriously challenged in the very near future. It's the "easily replicated content" in general that's going to be consumed, filed away for AI use, then simply dismissed from search. ANY and ALL forms of AI generated answers are going to take this space whether we like it or not. Maybe not for EVERY query, but for many of them, yes - I think the days of seeing ROI are very short. "If your reviews, content guides and answers can be replaced by an AI generated response, they will be". IMO, it's not an IF this occurs statement, but how quickly it occurs.

It's also not the first time this has occurred. Back in 2006/07 or so (showing my age here, I've been at this since the 90's) there was a HUGE influx of product reviews and buying guides that basically displayed a shopping-experience type platform, but were fed with Amazon and eBay products. (You can still find WP plugins that do this, but IMO you're wasting energy). I was one of those who built some of those sites myself in my specific knowledge specialty and it all did very well... well, until it didn't. Google got wise to it because people bragged about how good it worked. Google hates being embarrassed or seeing their algorithm played, so they tweaked their algo, and after a year or two they killed off the entire "niche store" type sites similar to the way HCU has done the same, in steps.

Some of the Aff/Leadgen/MFA sites that I have seen make it through the HCU and come out better, ALL seem to have some things in common:

- They offer products through ecom or drop ship.
- They offer services, training, or some other way to monetize their traffic.
- They have a very robust social profile, that doesn't just link to their own content, but engages with their users and vice versa. (many commenters/shares per post, etc) In fact, most of them don't even link to their website outside of the single profile link to their home page.
- They have a high volume of "branded" searches for their business/website.
- They have more content than ads, and don't clutter the screen with ads.

Re: Social - I follow several thought leaders on Twitter and see the sites that are being shown as examples of super-high quality content sites, with unique original images and tons of first-hand user experience, video reviews of unboxings, etc. These sites SHOULD have passed the muster of Google under previous changes, but they didn't. One site, who had +1.5m pagesview a month prior to Sept, has a FB page with nothing but links to each review he writes and not a single comment, share, interaction with users etc. It has very few branded searches and it's highest volume KW's were all [this stuff] review, or [this stuff] versus [that stuff], etc. The content was TOP SHELF, but the only way they got traffic was from search queries.

Conversely, a recipe site, which have seen their entire ecosystem decimated as well, gets 40 comments and 100's of shares per FB/Insta post. They do not link to their recipes on the FB posts but share just pictures and the basics of the finished product, then tell people to search for "brandname + recipe", or to DM for direct link. They're traffic from search exploded!

Basically, the ones I see staying the course and thriving today are in demand OUTSIDE of search, or in demand for things OTHER THAN just search generated traffic leading to revenue.

FWIW, I'm as tired as everyone else trying to keep up with their algo, but when the water changes direction, we have the choice of fighting it, or moving with it.

Long ago, I read the toilet book (-50 pages, large fonts) "Who Moved My Cheese". It's about Hem and Haw, two mice stuck in a maze where they get fed cheese in the same exact spot every day. One day the cheese is no longer there and they have to figure out how to find food or starve to death. Hem sits there day after day waiting for the magic cheese to appear and he slowly dies of starvation. Haw took the other approach, explored the maze, and found plenty of cheese in different places within the maze, survived and got fat. Right now, we all need to decide if we're Hem or Haw as it relates to the world of search generated traffic.

[Whitey]

Customer’s and search aren’t going away even with Google’s ensh*tification.

The answers to add value as an affiliate are out there, and if you find it, you won’t be chasing Google.

To solve the problem, Doctorow has called for two general principles to be followed:
The first is a respect of the end-to-end principle, a fundamental principle of the Internet in which the role of a network is to reliably deliver data from willing senders to willing receivers. When applied to platforms, this entails users being given what they asked for, not what the platform prefers to present. For example, users would see all content from users they subscribed to, allowing content creators to reach their audience without going through an opaque algorithm; and in search engines, exact matches for search queries would be shown before sponsored results, rather than afterwards.[8]
The second is the right of exit, where users of a platform can easily go elsewhere if they are dissatisfied with it. For social media, this requires interoperability, countering the network effects that "lock in" users and prevent market competition between platforms. For digital media platforms, it means enabling users to switch platforms without losing the content they purchased that is locked by digital rights management. [en.m.wikipedia.org...]

[seokees]

Would a clean website (no ads, forms, aff links etc), just an email subscription box be a good pivot for aff marketeers? From within the email list (indirectly) working with affiliate income. Will that be more agreeable for the bots?

[ghostofseo]

- They offer products through ecom or drop ship.
- They offer services, training, or some other way to monetize their traffic.
- They have a very robust social profile, that doesn't just link to their own content, but engages with their users and vice versa. (many commenters/shares per post, etc) In fact, most of them don't even link to their website outside of the single profile link to their home page.
- They have a high volume of "branded" searches for their business/website.
- They have more content than ads, and don't clutter the screen with ads.

Conversely, a recipe site, which have seen their entire ecosystem decimated as well, gets 40 comments and 100's of shares per FB/Insta post. They do not link to their recipes on the FB posts but share just pictures and the basics of the finished product, then tell people to search for "brandname + recipe", or to DM for direct link. They're traffic from search exploded!

This is huge info here. I will try the social trick and see what happens. Thanks @mhansen for contributing to this thread.

[ghostofseo]

I finally finished my article about how Google wants to kill my site, and small independent publishers.

[edited by: not2easy at 7:20 pm (utc) on Apr 25, 2024]
[edit reason] see Charter [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]

[Whitey]

@ghostofseo Glad you found an answer with @mhansen ‘s post. There’s some other good input from others in the above posts to.

A lot of content is better suited to social communities. Owning your platform, content and end audience is better than chasing an intermediary opaque algorithm. Then Google may (will) start to chase you :)

[ghostofseo]

A lot of content is better suited to social communities. Owning your platform, content and end audience is better than chasing an intermediary opaque algorithm. Then Google may (will) start to chase you :)

@whitey with the win!

Yeah having our own channel we control is best. I like my Newsletter wish it was 10x. I wonder how people would feel if my site had a popup to signup for a newsletter?

Social I am bad. In person and online so that ones tougher for me :)

[Whitey]

Social I am bad. In person and online so that ones tougher for me :)

If people like your content, that is all you need to get started. Start small, consider localization, niche, personalize service perhaps and grow when the positives start to spring up. So to take it forward, find help from an expert on social that can give you feedback and/or implement. Being focused on SEO only can cause one to have "blinkers" on to great opportunities. Good luck.

[ichthyous]

The information on this post is exactly what I was looking for...thanks for the great feedback! I was considering joining affiliate network for my articles, but after reading this is seems that the returns are very low now. I do not run any ads or any affiliate anything on my site now.

[Kendo]

My comment is not related to Google but other affiliate marketing is hard hit also, mainly because no-one knows how to add affiliate links to CMS like WordPress and making a plugin for each and every CMS is a pain.

The affiliate links I am talking about is what we have been using for more than 20 years... the affiliate displays our banner and anyone who clicks on the banner is logged as an affiliate customer so that if and when a sale is made, then the affiliate gets paid commission of 10-20% or more.

The only hope would be if the affiliate can make a widget for the advertising banner.