Affiliate marketing has changed a lot since it started. With the ever-changing Google’s rankings and the growing popularity of social media, affiliate marketing has been evolving to adjust and grow.
What is affiliate marketing now and how is it different from what it used to be?
What’s the future of affiliate marketing?
To discuss affiliate marketing, Jim Boykin, founder and CEO of Internet Marketing Ninjas, and Ann Smarty, IMN’s analyst, were joined by Truman Hedding, the branding expert with years of digital marketing experience.
Truman Hedding is a growth hacker, PPC and video marketing expert, speaker and a successful agency founder.
In its early days affiliate marketing heavily relied on Google rankings. Once an affiliate marketing starts ranking for a relevant high-intent search query, it basically became a super affiliate.
These days, Google’s algorithm is much smarter giving preference to merchants and applying strict guidelines to affiliate review sites. It has become much harder for an affiliate site to rank.
However social media provides new opportunities for people who want to build an affiliate income.
Affiliate marketing is also social media influencer marketing these days, although there are of course still a lot of great affiliate website that rank in Google as well.
If a company wants to sell more products by having other people promote them for you, start looking for influencers that have engaged following and that following is your target demographics.
Affiliate marketing can boost sales by 60%-70% but only when it’s done well.
If you want it to work, handle it as a relationship building program: Provide your affiliates with content that will help them generate more sales. Consider hiring a dedicated in-house person that will develop relationships with your affiliates and provide resources for them to succeed.
Affiliate marketing has gone a long way. It has gone through changing algorithms, stricter regulations and new technology. But the affiliate marketing is nowhere close to being dead.
