Is Affiliate Marketing Really Dead? [LNIM160]

Recently, Neil Patel gave a great keynote at a big conference. Some people took away the message from his talk that “Affiliate Marketing Is Dead.” I agree – but not in the way that you think. I talk all about the difference between what Neil was talking about and what I mean when I talk about affiliate marketing in this episode.

Also, I take a look a at a really cool tool for helping you come up with those pesky blog post content ideas.

Show Notes For The Is Affiliate Marketing Dead Episode

I’ve been off the mic a little bit as I am focusing on a project that I have been trying to get done for years: my affiliate marketing course over at http://latenightaffiliate.com/. The fact that I’m still going to release the course is a hint that I definitely do not think affiliate marketing is dead, but let’s talk about why this is my mindset.

It’s alive and well and growing — at least the kind of affiliate marketing we’re going to talk about. And on top of that, I think it’s still the very best way today for you to build a long term asset online, part time.

There are two kinds of affiliate marketing: the one where you review a product or compare multiple ones; and the other is where you build a site in a niche that you care about, add value over a long period of time, get traffic and convert and make sales for the rest of your life. The latter is what I have been talking about and this kind of industry is growing. About 15% of sales on the internet are affiliate sales, so it’s going to last for a long time.

But there’s an evil kind of affiliate marketing that people engage in and it’s been around since I started. These include sites with fake reviews or phoney new articles and misleading ads — a woman losing 750 lbs., for example, by taking this such and such pill. In my point of view, this is the kind of dark affiliate marketing that Neil Patel is talking about.

Part of the reason that this kind of affiliate marketing is on the ropes is because sites like Facebook got busted for facilitating these poor-quality, sketchy ads for money. So yes, affiliate marketing is in trouble and if your brand of internet marketing is one as such. You are in trouble and it’s not a great business model long-term.

The value-based affiliate marketing though is here to stay. It may change forms over the years but it’s always going to be around so feel comfortable about continuing to invest in this business model.

Now the question is, why is that a good place to start?

Affiliate marketing is a good place for people to start building a business because:

You learn a lot of valuable skills such as market research and being decisive on what to promote. These are skills that you can take with you forever.
You learn to get content out there — how to write good copy that helps people get to a purchase, for example.
You get to understand how money moves around on the internet.
You learn how and where to get traffic and how you can do that using organic search, social media paid search, or whatever is needed to get traffic.
You learn how to capture email addresses and build a list.

Affiliate marketing – the kind that we are encouraging in this show — is very, very much not dead. It is alive and well and we’re going to crush it this 2019!

Here is that video from Neil Patel’s keynote:

Links Mentioned In This Episode

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Episode Transcript

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