No, affiliate marketing won’t be dead soon. It’s a growing industry.
No, you’re not too late to get started with affiliate marketing, it’s still worth learning about and building an affiliate business.
With that said, let’s go more in-depth to see the size of the market but also potential future opportunities and threats.
The business model of affiliate marketing is fundamentally sound:
- Companies need to sell their products and services.
- Affiliation gives them another way to do that.
- And consumers have more ways to discover products and don’t pay a different price for the product.
Everyone wins.
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Be prepared for changes
Inevitably there will always be changes in the industry, such as networks closing down and new networks and programs opening. That’s why you have to stay nimble and be prepared to make changes at any moment. At times it can be hard if a high-paying program closes down with short notice.
We live in a rapidly changing world and new trends appear at any moment. Those new trends can provide an opportunity for profit.
Let’s have a look at some other potential catalysts for growth, as well as risks.
Potential catalysts for affiliate industry growth
- a continually growing global population
- more poor countries becoming connected to faster internet
- developing economies, such as India, becoming wealthier and opening up new markets
- the number of social media influencers continuing to grow
- advancement in software and tools, such as WordPress, making it quicker to create affiliate content
- advancements in AI making it easier to create affiliate content, lowering costs and increasing profits
- companies wanting more flexible costs switching from fixed-cost advertising to affiliate marketing
- the metaverse (if it takes off) there could be potential for affiliates to develop services that are experienced in VR, such as virtual malls, with the final product purchase being transacted through an affiliate agreement.
Potential risks to the affiliate industry
- increased adoption of voice assistants, users may spend less time reading articles
- advancements in tools and software such as WordPress could make it so easy to create and own a high-quality affiliate website that the competition is so fierce everyone’s profits are small and spread thinly
- Google continues to increase it’s focus on it’s own services and ad space in it’s search results, to the detriment of organic listings
- global supply chain issues as experienced during the pandemic
- the metaverse (yes, we’ve put it in opportunities and risks!), users may spend less time engaging with affiliate content
All of the things above are just a few thoughts! Nobody has a crystal ball. Have a think for yourself about what you consider future areas of potential growth as well as risks.
The affiliate industry is growing, it’s never too late to start
There is no evidence affiliate marketing will die. In fact, don’t just take our word for it, there’s expectations for it to grow.
According to this data by Statista the amount spent on marketing using the affiliate marketing industry is expected to keep growing and reach over 8 billion US dollars by 2022! And according to Google Trends the interest over time hasn’t been reducing. In fact, if you look at these stats you’ll see over the last five years the chart has gone up.
This data means you can have the confidence to invest in an affiliate marketing business because it’s far from dead. It’s a robust and well-established industry.
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