The state of Affiliate Marketing

The affiliate marketing industry has an overall poor reputation. Especially within the email marketing realm.

In my experience many of the companies and partnerships formed take on one sole purpose. To acquire data (email addresses) and spam that data with a variety of network offers that may or may not inbox.

Many affiliate networks are pretty lenient with who signs up to send out their partner offers, and policing of affiliates lies mostly on the individual companies themselves.

Now I know there are many entrepreneurs who identify as an affiliate marketer and are not just blindly sending email offers to data, but my point is there is a large enough portion of the industry that certainly is.

And listen, I know millionaires left and right that run this model as a part of their business. With enough scale and processes in place for cultivating engaged users (openers and clickers) there is a huge business here.

But I’m always asking myself the question: How sustainable is this model?

Or is it at all? Especially when you consider all of the evolving changes we see from Gmail and other ISP’s alike.

Let me say that I am not directly “knocking it” by any means. I myself dove into this exact model amongst other things in the past year, and it’s not easy.

As the saying goes “if it was everyone would do it”. Your juggling email platforms, fighting with compliance issues, and trying to weave your way through a pile of crap.

The actual user and human element is all but lost in this model. Scaling to substantial volume is the key, so playing around with smaller sets of email data won’t make you the big bucks.

As we move into 2019, there is a shift occurring that is forcing many entrepreneurs to address integrating more of a “publisher” type model that lends itself to far more sustainability.

When I say “publisher” I am speaking to the variety of landing page campaigns that are starting to transition into more branded senders and online brands.

Many entrepreneurs have put all their eggs in the lead gen basket and have neglected the branding component and connecting more with their subscriber base.

There is a nice mix to be had here, one with a tremendous upside to new revenue opportunities outside of the typical network offer.

This isn’t a mandatory shift by any means, as there are many companies hyper focused on simply lead generation.

However the ones that have tried to merge the two efforts, there are some ways in which to adjust and make the leap forward to establishing some real digital assets.

A few ways where I see the shift happening:

• Establishing a single domain relatable to your audience.
• Creating a content rich site that adds value to the subscriber.
• Sending info based newsletters, and not just affiliate offers.
• Creating a brand that can attract direct CPM advertisers.