Is affiliate marketing the future of blogging? This is a very interesting question to ask and to answer as well which is why, we will be talking about this topic in today’s article. Affiliate Marketing has been a recent phenomenon in today’s world of internet marketers.
You see, internet itself is pretty new in most parts of the world and the concept of affiliate marketing is not old either. Do you really think that this is going to be the future of blogging? Let’s try to dig in deep and find answers .
Affiliate marketing is basically promoting products or services from other people and trying to get a commission out of it when people buy products or services from your promotions. So for example, if you are an affiliate marketer for Amazon then you will be promoting Amazon’s product and if people buy using your links then you get a commission of 6-8%.
Now, do we think affiliate marketing is the future of blogging? Let’s try to understand blogging a bit more before we answer this question. Blogging is when you talk about your topic of interest on a web platform. This is a culture developed in the last ten years of the internet industry. Previously, people used to talk about their topic of interest and that was all about it. There was hardly anything related to making money at that time. Then, the dynamics changed with the invention of Google Adwords.
With Google Adwords and the other ad programs that were launched, internet marketers came into the party. This is the time when the affiliate programs also came in with interesting offers to attract the marketers. This was basically the invention of affiliate marketing and this is where it all began.
Now, bloggers and marketers were smart enough to quickly realize that they can provide value and earn bucks at the same time. This was an interesting invention and this lead to the creation of a lot of affiliate marketers. The affiliate marketing industry started to become stronger and bigger and today, we see thousands of affiliate marketers who are also successful bloggers at the same time.
Is it same to be a blogger and an affiliate marketer? No it is not. There are a lot of bloggers who do not promote anything and most importantly, there are bloggers too who only depend on advertisements to earn. Remember, those who depend on advertisements to earn are not affiliate marketers. The visitor does not have to buy anything from their website’s links for them to earn anything.
So, let’s go back to our basic question once again. Is affiliate marketing really the future of blogging? We think it is! If you spend a few moments and do a Google search about anything that you want to buy, all the results that you will see on your homepage are product reviews which are linked to affiliate sites so that when you buy these products, the bloggers earn something out of it. Now, if the passion of these bloggers is to talk about that specific product then there is nothing wrong in that. A blogger can simply talk about a product or a niche and put affiliate links here and there. The problem starts to occur when a blogger starts promoting bad products only because he wants share from the sales of that bad product. This is why you see great reviews of bad products around because the affiliate marketers want a bit of the pie. This should never be the case and this is where things went wrong.
Great affiliate marketing programs are another reason why the interest is so high among bloggers to be affiliate marketers. Previously, the bloggers only had options of doing CPA marketing and some other related non-important marketing. Things have changed and all big companies now have their own affiliate program for the bloggers and marketers. This is why you will see many good and reputed websites also joined in the world of affiliate marketing.
To help you understand how big the industry has become, let’s give you some information. Brands such as Amazon, Ebay, Alibaba, Walmart all have their own affiliate programs and they all try to grab as many affiliate marketers or bloggers as they can to stay ahead of their competition. According to Amazon, more than 20% of their total sales come via their affiliate marketers. Now, that is a huge number and this number is increasing every single year which tells us that more and more bloggers are getting into affiliate marketing.
Now there are two angles to look at it. When the affiliate marketing boom happened, two types of marketers joined the party. Obviously, those who already had an establish blog and decided to earn a bit extra money joined the affiliate programs to test their luck. On the other hand, internet marketers who did not even have blogs also joined the party only with the intention to earn extra. Now, this is not wrong because some of these internet marketers actually ended up having brilliant blogs with so much value that they even surpass the previous ones who only cared about value and nothing else.
At the end of the day, we have to agree to the fact that this is what happened and this is what is going to happen in future too. More and more bloggers will join the party and the big companies will also keep on offering interesting deals to attract the affiliate marketers. So, if you have a blog today or if you are interested to earn via affiliate marketing, it is a good time to join the party. The industry is in its growth stage now which means that there is meat for everybody and the companies are not that tight in terms of accepting affiliate marketers. The scenarios will definitely change in near future. If you want to make sure that you don’t miss out any opportunity, do not waste time and join an affiliate program with your blog immediately.
