How AM Has Changed In The Last Few Years, And What You Should Be Doing About It (12)
How AM Has Changed In The Last Few Years, And What You Should Be Doing About It
As an addon to my yearly post about what verticals and traffic sources are working for AM right now, I thought I'd do an additional post tracking other changes in the industry.
Affiliate marketing is growing up fast as an industry, and it's easy to miss or underestimate the ways in which the market, the technology, and the opportunities out there are changing.
So here's a summary of the trends to watch, to take advantage of - or to sit back and go "I'm glad we don't have to do it the old way any more!".
Disclosure: some of the tech I mention here - Funneflux and Adplexity - is funded by STM Ventures, who are part of the same company that runs STM. I'm not involved with those projects, though.
Technology
Having a tracking server is no longer mandatory. It used to be that you couldn't get started in AM without installing a tracker on a remote server. Now, multiple services including Voluum, Adsbridge and Thrive offer hosted trackers so you can get started quicker and have less maintainance overhead.
Trackers have really grown up. Just a few years ago, the options for tracking were pretty badly outdated, hard to use, and required customisation to do even comparatively simple things - anyone recall the hacks to get split-testing working for landing pages? But that's totally changed. FunnelFlux is my personal favourite tracker for highly advanced features, but all the mainstream new wave of trackers are just amazing compared to what came before.
CDNs are easy to use and comparatively affordable. Three or four years ago, serving ads to a far-away geo meant tracking down a hosting company there, or accepting slow load times. I remember the hours I spent looking into South American VPS providers! Nowadays, any number of CDNs will deliver your pages fast and incredibly cheaply. If you're not already using a CDN you definitely should be.
S3 and similar services mean you don't need a lander server. If you can avoid having a server, you should - they take time and money to maintain and have downtime, security, and other problems. Being able to just throw all your landers up on Amazon S3 or a similar service is a huge change for the industry.
Spy Tools are far better. Some people love them, some people hate them, but spy tools have gone from "kinda good" to "scary good" in the past few years. Adplexity's my usual go-to option: the depth of data you can grab from any of the top tools on what's working right now is just insane.
Ecommerce got WAY Easier. And I don't just mean Shopify here, although they're obviously the biggest and best-known player by far. Services like Gumroad, Stripe, Squarespace, and yes, Shopify mean that it's far easier to set up an actual honest-to-goodness store than ever before, giving people with AM skills a way to use those to sell other products.
Programatic Mailing Lists Mailing lists have quietly been getting a lot smarter lately, with services like Drip offering all sorts of clever ways to segment and target your mailing list, trigger automatic mails for anything from upsells to renewals, and generally squeeze the most out of any list you have.
The DNS space is starting to become competitive. For a long while DNS providers were Just There, and some of them were pretty terribly slow. But people are starting to pay attention to DNS speed now, and it's becoming the new thing to optimise in your setups for maximum impact
Machine Learning Is Arriving Slowly. It's still not mainstream in the space, but companies like Monetizer are starting to use ML to analyse what offers work best. We've had Machine Learning come up in talks at both AWA and AWE last year, tools like WEKA are starting to make ML techniques accessible to normal affiliates, and at the high-end more and more superaffiliates are starting to use machine learning tools to analyse their data.
Google Translate Gets Uncannily Good. The advice on using Google Translate for landers and banners used to be "DON'T!". But Google have just unveiled their new machine-learning based translation, and it's good enough that the advice is now "yeah, you probably can use it". That's a huge change for anyone operating outside languages they're fluent in.
Culture And Community
The space is becoming more professionalised. The early days of AM were the Wild West: lots of guys who had figured out there was money to be made on that there Internet. That came along with a lot of shady behaviour, scams, and a few high-profile flameouts which cost a lot of people a lot of money. Now the space is becoming increasingly professional: companies are larger, more stable, more skilled, and less likely to post pictures of their founder posing in front of stacks of cash on his Lambo before they vanish owning millions six months later 
Professional conferences specifically aimed at paid-traffic affiliates. OK, I'm biased as hell here because I'm the MC of the Affiliate World Conferences, but I do think they represent a huge change for the industry. Worldwide locations, really high-quality information from speeches, and a specific focus on what we do as paid traffic affiliates make a huge difference and a huge impact for attendees.
Digital Nomadism Has Gone Mainstream. Airbnb. Co-working spaces all over the world. Etc. Where digital nomadism has been around for a decade or so, in the last few years services have really started to spring up to support it. It's now almost trivial to decide "hey, why don't I go live half-way around the world for six months?", and affiliate marketing meshes incredibly well with that lifestyle.
Affiliates are in demand from networks. With more networks than ever before springing up, there's more choice in offers and it's easier to get into a network when you're just starting. Just turn up on STM or go to a meetup and you almost get hunted down by networks eager for you to run traffic to them! Get on this trend whilst it's hot - at the same time, affiliate networks are getting squeezed on margins and are starting to consolidate.
Broadband almost everywhere. Not just important for co-working, but also for new markets and hiring opportunities. There's almost nowhere in the world that doesn't have fast internet now, meaning you can hire from anywhere and serve your ads to anywhere all at the same time.
Slack The online collaboration/chat clients that were available 4 years ago just sucked. Ask any of the STM old-time mods about the chaotic disaster area that was our massive, disorganised collection of Skype chats and email threads! Slack has a huge impact on anyone's ability to run a remote business or even just a mastermind. (Tip: this space is still evolving. Keep an eye on Discord in particular for voice chats and larger communities.)
And that's my list! But I've probably missed some things - what would you say are the biggest developments outside verticals and traffic sources in AM in the last couple of years? Let us know below!
Thanks for giving a wider view.
Issac
I've been in the industry for less than 2 years, and so many things improved.
It's insane how fast things change and evolve on the internet. I can still remember my early days as an affiliate - I shared a dialup (56kbit/s) connection (then ISDN) with a bunch of friends, we paid $5 per 1GB !!! of bandwidth to our hosting company ... there were no spytools, no VPN tools, no CDNs, no education or courses available ... sounds like another world to me now
The difference in accessibility for non-hardcore techies is the really amazing one to me.
It's no longer a choice of "learn Linux system administration, pay a sysadmin, don't use tracking - pick one". It's actually user-friendly these days! (Ish).
I think you nailed it with that perspective. Having been one of the co-pioneers of aff mktg and seo, I feel so old (it's been over 22 yrs now!) when I think back to the early days. Even when I think back to the mid 2000's, anything prior to 2007 was a decade ago!
This is the natural progression of healthy markets at large. Things become more efficient, faster, profits versus known risks are weighed and applied. Things become a lot more finely tuned and practices become standardized. But that's not to say that there will never be noobs or shady fuckers, because for every 100 guys that make it through the filter of death aka make it through the 3-4 yr wringer of the industry and still stick it out, there are thousands that are just finding the pay to click/paid to read emails, fill out surveys, mystery shopping etc and all of those early things along with "wow, you mean I really can make gobs of cash with a blog?!"...
Be proud of your wins and learn from your losses. I'm glad to finally be out, and most things I relied on are outdated and outpaced by the faster slimmer line of tools, apps, etc. I'm glad about it. If it were in trouble there wouldn't be this much innovation or money flowing around.
Love it or hate it.. doesn't make a difference. Learn from it and help yourself grow and profit. That's what it comes down to.
Thanks again for making me think back to good times.
Originally Posted by Jon Fisher
Glad to meet another dinosaur!
old man voice...
Back in my day, "tracking solutions" consisted of 10 lines of php that smaxor put out on oooff.com. And most of the time we never had any pants on!
Originally Posted by barman
And true.
Originally Posted by Jon Fisher
It's crazy to think almost none of the tools available to affiliates were available under s decade ago! It just makes you wonder what will be on the market ten years from now.
-Zach
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