What does the future hold for affiliate marketing? Specifically, what will happen in 2024? It’s time for me to reveal my annual affiliate marketing predictions. So buckle up and listen up, because you’re about to get a glimpse into the future!
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
How to Make Money from Affiliate Product Reviews
How to Recruit and Work with International Affiliates
How to Make Your Affiliate Program Attractive to Affiliates
How to Create Compelling Affiliate Offers
How to Use the Holidays to Recruit More Affiliates
2024 Affiliate Marketing Predictions
What does the future hold for affiliate marketing? Specifically, what’s going to happen in 2024? It’s time for me to reveal my annual affiliate marketing predictions. So buckle up and listen up because you’re about to get a glimpse into the future.So welcome back to my annual predictions episode.
I’ve done this every year since I think 2017, 2016 maybe. I mean, I’ve made over 50 predictions now over the last few years and today we’re talking about what 2024 holds for affiliate marketing. What does the next year mean for affiliate programs?
What does it mean for you affiliate managers out there? What’s going to happen? What does it mean for the affiliate marketers and everybody who’s involved in the affiliate marketing industry?
I’ve usually been right about these things and something like 50 of the 53 predictions I’ve made have been spot on. Mostly because I study this stuff day and night. It’s not because I’m smart or anything.
It’s not because I can literally see the future. Of course, it’s because every year, just in the past year, I’ve talked with over 50 affiliate managers I talk to about an affiliate manager every week and I’ve talked to ten specifically for this episode. I’ve met with hundreds of affiliates over the past year, over 300,000 in my life.
But I mean, I’ve cut down because as you guys may or may not know, I have an agency now. So I’m not the one who’s doing the overwhelming majority of the work. But I still like to keep informed about things and I still meet with hundreds of affiliates, probably two to 300 in the past year.
I read at least two articles a week. I’m not a big podcast listener. I don’t know if I’ve ever admitted that.
Just as a side note, I’m not a huge podcast listener, which is kind of weird hosting a podcast, but it’s just not my thing. For some od reason I’ve listened to probably just that relate to affiliate marketing and marketing. Probably 60 books in the past year that have come out since 2022 about marketing and affiliate marketing and affiliate management and things like that.
I’ve followed things on social media, of course, and not only for what I do daily with our agency, but I do it in preparation for this episode. And I know it sounds weird, but I already start thinking about this episode about halfway through the year and I’ve made notes. In fact, let me just pull my notes up here.
So number two, number three. So I’ve got seven predictions today. Number two, number three, number four, and number seven.
I all started those notes as far back as May 21 of this year of 2023 is when I started making notes for this episode. I mean, I started those over the spring and summer of this year. A few of my added within the past couple of weeks as I really started preparing for this episode.
So again, I study, I follow this stuff. Part of that is I’ve got like a 99% accuracy rate, like I said, 50 out of 53. So that’s probably 98% accuracy rate.
And I want to protect that. So those are the big things. So before we jump into my 2024 predictions, I want to touch on three big predictions that I made last year and I want to revisit those and see, okay, am I right? Am I wrong? Am I sort of right? Am I sort of wrong?
Where are we with those things? So the first one I want to touch on was one of my predictions from last year was shorter payment cycles are going to be normalized in 2023. I even said they’re going to be expected back in the day when I started getting paid 90 days after a transaction, I would say 20% of transactions got paid 90 days later.
Net 45 was the norm. And then as we transitioned to the 2010s, it became more common to get paid on the first month of the following month. So if a sale happened in October, you got paid the first week of December, and then things got a little bit more.
Most returns are like 30 days and you have to account for those. And then people started getting creative and maybe they would pay after you’ve been with the program for 90 days, we would do things like we would pay you, this is probably like 2012, we would pay you on November 1 for 80% of your October sales, and then we would pay you the rest with the November payment.
So we kept that 20% to account for returns, even though returns were usually in that industry, like 5%. We kept a little bit more, but we paid you pretty quickly. And I said, in 2023, affiliate marketers are going to be paid much more quickly.
Weekly is going to become much more common, even daily. Even real time is one of the things that I was predicting in 2023. And part of that is the trend there, I was saying, was driven by the increasing popularity of subscription models, which require affiliates to get paid more frequently to drive new customers.
Now on this one I was nearly right. I’m not going to give myself one point. Like I said, I’ve got out of 53, I’ve got 50 right. On this one I’m going to give myself eight tenths of a point. So four fifths of a point there. I said it would become normalized.
It is happening, it is increasing, but it is not what I would call normalized. And in fact, the very few programs are doing daily and almost no one’s doing real time. I thought we would get to a point, I don’t remember if I set a specific number last year, but I thought we’d get to a point where as much as 5% of programs were doing basically daily or real time payments.
I don’t think we’re anywhere close to that. I did a survey, I surveyed over 300 programs and I didn’t find a single one that was doing daily or real time. So again, is 300 representative?
Yes. Does that mean that no one is doing daily or real time? Of course I know there are. I have heard of them. I mean, I remember hearing of these back in seven, eight years ago. So I’m sure there are.
I just don’t know of them. And I’m assuming that if I survey 300 affiliate programs in various niches, retail product, lead generation, CPA offers financial nutraceuticals, you name it. I’m assuming that if I survey 300, it probably means that we’re not at the 5% mark that are actually doing this.
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That said, I’ve noticed an increase in weekly payments and I’ve noticed an increase in affiliate programs that are really eager to pay sooner, whether it be that they’re paying twice a month or they literally go from paying like middle of the following month to early the following month or they’re doing things like I’ve done where we paid most of them pretty quickly. I’ve noticed an increase in those.
I’ve noticed a shortening in return periods from an average of close to 30 days to an average of more like 17 days. And again, I don’t think there’s any programs that have a 17 day return period, but there’s a lot that have a ten day, a 14 day and then some that have a 30 day. So it’s averaging out around that 1718 day mark.
So because of that they’re paying quicker. They’re able to pay quicker if you have a 14 day return period. What I can do is I can safely pay for all the sales that happen in the first half of the month.
I can pay those the first of the following month and then I can pay two weeks later on the ones that came from the second half of the month. This is true with one of the programs that we’re managing with our agency for ERC guaranteed, they do the ERC payments from the government that as a result of COVID the US government is basically giving money to companies that were affected by Covid. So if you’ve got two or more w two employees, you probably qualify for some sort of an ERFC payment.
And basically this company helps file those. And the commissions are unreal. Literally the average commission is like $9,000 per transaction.
It’s crazy. The money is insane. So by the way, if you’re interested in being a part of that, you can text me 260-217-4619 just text me and say, hey, I’m interested in the ERC program. Or if you go to mattmcwilliams.com/ercg for ERC guaranteed, I’ll put that link in the show notes and you can go check that out.
But yeah, that program, we’re paying weekly on that one and it’s consistent every single week we’re paying out. Now, part of that is because there’s no returns in that industry. Why would anybody, you know what, I know the government just gave me $200,000.
So the affiliate is going to make roughly on that transaction, going to make like four or $5,000. Don’t quote me on the exact amount. I got to have to do the math in my head, but the affiliate is going to make about 4000, $5,000 on that $200,000 transaction.
Why would the person return that? Say, you know what, I don’t want the $200,000. I’m going to return the money. That’d be weird, right? So because there’s no returns, we’re able to pay weekly on that. And in fact, if you produce a lot of volumes, we’ll pay daily.
Literally like three business days later you’ll get paid. So it’s awesome. But that is not one that I’ve seen fully take off. Although it is happening. It was probably a safe prediction to say they’re going to be faster. Of course payments are faster.
My best guess is the average affiliate across all niches, in all industries probably getting paid a few days faster in 2023 than in 2022. And we’re going to continue to see that. It’s probably going to be more like 2025 before it becomes quote unquote normalized.
The second prediction I made was that social media is going to shift to shopping and education, with video becoming again more and more like video has been around for a while, but it’s more and more popular in social media. And so I said that we’re going to see two big changes. Number one, education is going to be the focus.
We’re going to have a deeper focus on education, and secondly, we’re going to have a big lift in live shopping. And as predicted, we did see this in 2023. There was a huge jump in both of those where social media became more of an educational platform.
And then the live shopping, which is basically, if you think about it, it’s like an average person doing a home shopping network on social media is really what it is. And the third one was that affiliates will share more with each other, be more collaborative and partner more. And I talked about how, yes, other affiliates are our competition, but we can benefit by working together.
The old rising tide lifts all the boats, right? So we talked about copartnerships, literally just two partners working together to promote something to both of their audiences. That goes along with one of my 2024 predictions about split commissions, which we’ll talk about in a little bit, where you can split the commissions between two affiliates.
I talked about working with other affiliates to create joint content, introducing working together with other programs to introduce each other’s affiliates. That’s something that we’ve been doing a lot and it is working really well. I talked about maybe hosting joint live streams and adding bonuses to each other’s offers so that it increases trading backlinks and things like that to improve search rankings.
All of these things. Yes. I saw this so much more in 2023.So of those big three, I would give myself 2. 8, like I said, 2. 8. I was a little off on the timing of the first one, but I’m going to give myself some credit because we are seeing more of that. Okay, now for my 2024 predictions.
Number one, and this is an easy one, affiliate marketing is going to continue to grow and grow and grow. Here’s a fun fact for you that I found. I did not quite realize it was this high. I thought it was like 10%. But as of the middle of 2023, affiliate programs now account for 16% of all online orders in the US. Think about that.
If you think about the total number of online orders, all the people that buy toilet paper. How many people buy toilet paper through an affiliate link? Probably less than 1%.
When you get like a blog that you follow a deal blog and you follow a deal blog and it’s on sale, you might buy it through an affiliate link, but most of the time, not most things. You need it and you buy it. When I look up a book, I just go to Amazon, I look up the book and I buy it.
That does not go through an affiliate link. So when I think of my own personal stuff and I’m in this world, yeah, 80% of my transactions, I never even think to go through an affiliate link. But 16% of all orders in the US.
We talked about this a few episodes ago and it’s increasing globally as well. I don’t have stats for it, but I’ve got to assume it’s probably getting close to that 10% mark that’s going to pick up by 1% a year. Probably.
Affiliate marketing is growing rapidly. Check this out. Projected global spending in 2024 through affiliate programs, $15.7 billion. It is growing rapidly and it will continue to grow in 2024.
It’s been growing by at least 10% a year for something like 15 to 18 consecutive years. Safe bet it’s going to continue to grow by that rate. This is an industry you want to be a part of, is what I’m saying.
When I got into the game in 2005, it was so mysterious and kind of dark webbish that people were maybe reluctant or that’s not like real marketing. And then 2010, it was kind of like, oh yeah, maybe you have one, but it’s small part of our business. Then we started getting social media around 2015 when it really started picking up.
And it’s like, I need to be on Twitter, I need to be on Facebook, I need to be on Insta. And then a few years later I need to be on TikTok and all these things. Like, that’s where I need to put all my marketing dollars.
Like this affiliate stuff is dying. It’s growing by 10% a year or more every single year for over a decade, almost two decades. It’s kind of like saying, don’t put your money in the stock market because that one time it really went down.
Most people don’t realize. Just a side note, stock market. If you took your money in 1928, the year before the Great Depression started, the big stock market crash of 1929, you put your money in in 1928 and pull it out in 19, 48, 20 years later.
Which is how the stock market works, by the way. You would have made like tripled your money. It was unbelievable. The returns you would have got were unbelievable. Yeah, you would have gone through some tough times, but then you would have come out on the other side. Affiliate marketing is the same way.
It might not seem like it’s growing, but it actually is. It might be hard to get into it, but once you’re into it and you get things going, both as an affiliate marketer and having an affiliate program, it’s totally worth it. Number two prediction.
Let’s talk about AI. This is the elephant in the room. So much is changing and there are a lot of things I see happening in 2024, some of which have started here in the last few months of 2023, and they’re basically going to get put on steroids next year.
So for affiliate programs, my first thing to look at is affiliate networks and other tools for affiliate program AI is dramatically reducing the time it takes to recruit affiliates. It is dramatically improving the quality of affiliates that we recruit because we’re improving fraud detection and things like that. We’re not picking up kind of lame partners.
So if you’re in a network, and I highly recommend shareasale Awin, those are some great networks. Those are the networks that we use. If you’re on those, you can use AI to recruit affiliates.
The just boring, time consuming, mind numbing tasks like screening applications, selecting potential partners, identifying and recruiting affiliates, all of that is being driven by AI. So these platforms, they’re able to analyze potential partners. You can accept and decline affiliate applications based on a set of criteria.
Yeah, you have to teach the AI just like you do. If you want to create content that’s authentic and you’re using chat, GPT or Claude or whatever, you have to teach it by doing what you load 100 of your best performing emails into the sentence say, these are my best performing emails. I want you to create content like this.
And it learns and it does it. So the same is true with accepting or declining affiliate applications. If you train it, it can start making those decisions automatically.
So it can just decline an affiliate or an accepted affiliate. And initially I start with declines because if I’ve got a program where I’m getting 50 applications a day, I don’t want to have to look at 50. There’s 15 of them that it can auto decline based on criteria that I’ve taught it.
And then I take a look at the other 35 and then two weeks later it can auto decline 16 and then two weeks later it auto declines 17 and two weeks later and you so on and so forth, to the point where pretty much I’m never manually declining anybody. And occasionally I’ll do spot checks on that stuff, by the way, to make sure it’s not declining somebody it shouldn’t. And then I start to teach it, okay, here’s how to auto approve.
Like, okay, these are the ones. And so the next day, out of the 30 that are left, it auto approves five. And then a couple of weeks later, it’s able to get to six.
And before you know it, I’m at auto decline or approval of 40 of the 50 people that are applying every day, and I only have to look at ten. That’s a massive time savings. Another way it can help is providing personalized affiliate support, which we’ll talk about a little bit later, detecting fraudulent activity, looking at the data and saying, I used to have to analyze this data and use my brain to look at this data and say, oh, this is what I should do.
I can teach it to help me doing that. Basically, it’s doing the grunt work, and that allows me to use my brain more to not do the grunt work. And so we’re going to transition affiliate managers from Firefighter mode to actually like creative mode.
It’s going to be really cool. And I’m going to share more about a specific way that we’re using AI. In my last prediction, this was going to blow you away. All right. For affiliates, obviously, content creation, again, same thing. It’s doing some of the grunt work.
I’ll give you an example of how we use AI to create content. I will take not probably this one, because this is all about this podcast episode is specific to a very short period of time. If you’re listening to this in 2025, that’s weird.
So this is a bad example, but last week I talked about how to write product reviews. In the week before that, I talked about how to recruit and work with international affiliates. What I’ll do is I’ll take multiple episodes and I’ll get the transcript, which is powered by AI.
Of course I’ll get the transcript, and then I’ll say these episodes are, there’s overlap between them. Let’s say there’s five categories, but I’ll tell them in different orders. And I’ll tell like this one story that goes with category a and this other story with category b, and I’ll tell AI, put this into a sequence and put it into order.
These are my words. I spoke them. But I need you to organize this data and give me subheadings and things like that and we’ll take that content and create an epic blog post with 4000 words that ranks number one on Google for key search terms.
And the amount of time it took me to create that blog post, in addition to recording was only maybe 2 hours. My team can create that whole thing in 2 hours. That opens up my brain to think.
I talked about this last week when I talked about product reviews, how affiliate marketing SEO is going to change. Like it’s always changing. And ranking high on Google is important, but there’s also Bing, there’s Duckduckgo, there’s other search engines.
But ranking high is important and you have to rank high. And it’s hard to rank high for a lot of search terms just because in the past I used to spend 10 hours writing an epic article, it’d take me a week. We were to release one a week.
Even after I wasn’t doing it, and I have a team doing it, it would still take us. We’d only release like two a week because it would take them 15 hours to do all the stuff and to create the images. Now we can do most of that with AI, it takes two and a half to 3 hours to write and create the images, which allows us, even at 3 hours, that allows us one full time person.
We could release 13 a week. It’s two a day almost. It’s crazy.
So we’re able to spend our time doing other things and strategize, right? All right. Number three prediction for 2024 is about voice search. It’s increasing, it’s increasing, it’s increasing. Check this. This is mind-blowing. I like these fun stats. More voice assistance. So echoes.
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I can’t say the other works. Then it’ll start talking to me. I can’t say the other one either. But the Apple voice thing, I can’t say the other one either because we have three. It’s just kind of weird. The nest, I guess I can say that.
The Google Nest, more of those are predicted to be in use by the end of next year than there are people on the planet. billion of those devices. And again, we’re a perfect example.
I have an echo here. We have an echo upstairs in the kitchen. We have a Google Nest in the living room. And like four Siri devices. Five. Two iPads, two apple watches.
So seven. I mean, even if you just count the non Apple ones, we have three. In this house, there’s four people. So that’s a great example. I mean, it’s pretty close to being more. And so voice assistants are going to be used more frequently, not only to search, not only to find out random things.
Like, my son is obsessed with asking when was this company founded? Or when was this car created? Because he loves cars. He’s like, how many goals did Messi score last year? And things like that. He’s just obsessed with those factoids, right?
But we’re going to not only use it for that, but we’re going to use it for purchases. The value of voice assistant transactions just for ecommerce from 2021 to 2023. This is an estimate because 2023 is not over, up 400%, 4.6 billion to almost $20 billion. So if you think about this, how do people use these voice commands?
Search for information quickly. What is boom? How do you boom? So you got to make your content easy to navigate. Make it easy to search on your content. That’s the thing is it’s looking for the exact query.
Voice searches are mainly on smartphones. So once they search, they’re going to be reading, they’re going to be looking at. Obviously, your site has to be mobile friendly. This is something that’s really easy to forget sometimes. Most of us aren’t creating a page on our phone. We’re creating it on our desktop.
We’re creating it on our laptop on a 28 inch monitor. So it’s really easy for me, like, oh, that looks great on the 28 inch monitor. How does it look on this tiny phone?
If you hold up your phone, if you have a monitor, monitor, like I said, even a 21, 24 inch monitor, it’s kind of weird. I remember back when the standard monitor size was 15 inches. That’s smaller than the average laptop size.
Now the average laptop screen is 17 inches. I think it’s kind of weird. But if you hold up your phone and realize just how much smaller it is, I’m doing it right now, then my monitor is crazy.
And then the other thing is voice search. SEO is very wordy but also very specific. People talk to their voice search kind of in a more conversational way.
So they’ll ask for whole phrases versus. When we go to Google, we type in like best mexican restaurant in Fort Wayne. But we would say to Google, when is the best mexican restaurant in Fort Wayne, Indiana?
And that’s probably the bad example because again, we would be longer with it. Even so, adding faqs to your pages for SEO, you will start to pick up on those long tail keywords. Don’t forget, especially with voice search now, it’s always been a thing, but long tail, you might get five people a month for 17 different long tail keywords on a single piece of content.
That’s 85 people a month searching for that long tail content. So adding faqs that have the specific questions that people might be searching for is one way to look at that. The other thing is just, again, going back to product reviews, that’s what people are searching for, people are searching for product reviews.
When they’re asking what’s the best so and so, they’re looking for reviews, especially with pricier things, not mexican restaurant. Right? What’s the best adjustable mattress for a senior citizen with lower back pain?
They’re looking for a product review. So getting your affiliates to write product reviews and then include make sure they’re ranking for those long tail keywords is key because people are looking at product reviews more and more. It’s more important than ever.
In 2024, I talked about this the last episode. This is a common theme I’m hearing from others. I’m going to link to the last episode and to two reports that I put together in the show, notes about how to write a product review post that ranks and converts.
And then I’ve got a review post guide for you affiliate managers. Both those links are in the show notes, so go grab either or both of them so you can look at those. But again, it’s more and more important than ever because people are looking at those more because it’s easier to look for them now.
They know how to find them with their voice. Search prediction number four for 2024, split commissions are going to become the norm. More and more networks are adding the ability to do split commissions.
What is a split commission? Well, a split commission, simply put, is where you take part of the commission and give it to one affiliate and part of the commission and give it to another. So let’s look at a nutraceutical product.
I’m working with a big nutraceutical company right now, so let’s look at that. I’ll just tell you how we’re doing it. So in the nutraceutical world, this particular company, we have a commission of 25%.
So if you’re a blogger, you’re a podcaster, and you talk about this nutraceutical, you’re a youtuber, whatever, you’re on social media and you talk about this nutraceutical and you send traffic to the link and they buy, you make 25%. But we also have some coupon codes out there and we have some promos that we run and we have affiliates who promote those, and they rank really high on search for those terms and people will go back to Google. Oh, that can get a discount.
I’ll search. So here’s the question. How much value does that coupon affiliate bring to the table? Should they get the full 25% or do we lower their commission like 1520 years ago? We had the choice between paying them the full commission or less of a commission, and the original affiliate completely got screwed. And that was part of the deal.
We all know that. But it’s like, dang it, that kind of sucks because they brought them to the table. Who did more work, the person who introduced them and got them excited about the product or the person who closed the deal.
So with split commissions, you’re able to say the original referral, you’re getting 20%. The coupon affiliate, you’re getting five. Now, if it’s two content affiliates, then that’s a different conversation.
Maybe we go 50 50. But you have the opportunity to do split commissions now. And I’m telling you, like, these already exist and they’ve existed for a decade on some network, but most platforms still don’t have them.
You don’t have that on Infusionsoft, you don’t have that on lead Dyna, you don’t have it on Kajabi. Some of these, they might have changed since I said it, but most systems don’t have it. It’s going to become more and more the norm in 2024 because affiliate programs are demanding it, because they don’t want to have a binary choice between evil and less evil or bad and less bad.
They want what they want. I want to be able to offer a split commission. The technology is really easy because it’s been around on some of the networks since 2010, so make it happen.
And I think we’re probably going to see at least 20 platforms in 2024 adopt that as something that they offer. And the ones that don’t, they’re going to get left behind. So if you’re listening, you run an affiliate network, you run an affiliate software, affiliate tracking software.
If you don’t offer split commissions, I’m going to tell you right now, by 2026, you’re going to be out of business, and by the end of 2023, you’re going to lose ten, maybe as high as 15% of your customers. And it’s going to be really hard to get new customers to come on board. So you want to make money, you want to get new customers, offer split commissions, because it’s just becoming more and more the norm.
Number five prediction, third party cookies, they’re gone. For affiliate marketers, they’re gone platforms. They used to be able to follow potential customers across numerous websites.
That’s what ultimately led to all the worries about privacy. And so I’m going to tell you right now, Google is they’re phasing out third party cookies. I believe by the end of 2024.
So they’re going to go away. You just got to get rid of them. Thankfully, this is not going to have an impact on affiliate tracking because most affiliate tracking is done by first party cookies.
So we don’t have to worry about that. But we do need to be aware of that as affiliate marketers because we need to work on ways that we can identify how do we track these people ourselves for knowing what’s working.
So first, party cookies, everybody’s saying like, we’re going cookie, let’s know. First party cookies are not part of the bad cookies, all right? But we do need to know how to collect information about prospects, how to collect information about customers.
And so three ways to do that. Number one, opt ins. That’s zero party data. When you bring them to a page, rather than say, here’s the offer, go to the offer, you actually require them to opt in. You create a bridge page. You require them to opt in to see the offer.
The beauty of that is now you have their email address, now you have their information, now you can follow up with them. If they don’t buy, you can follow up with them. You can follow up them with other things, recommend similar products, and you can learn about them through that opt in.
Secondly, referral codes. Referral codes, an exclusive coupon code or something like that, bypasses cookies because it adds another layer of tracking onto it that you can use. Okay, this is the person who did this, blah, blah, blah, right down the line.
And then the third thing is just having a way to organize and understand your data, again, using zero party data. Great, you’ve got that information. Well, where are you putting it?
Using Google Analytics to view consumer behavior, look at demographics. Google Analytics four uses first party cookies now, and so we’re able to track all of those things. So those are some of the important ways to overcome this cookieless world, even though really we’re not going to be fully cookieless.
Right. All right, prediction number six, affiliate marketing is going to become even more international in 2024. Now, I touched on this earlier, and I actually discussed working with international affiliates just two episodes ago.
So if you want to get ahead of this trend, go listen to two episodes ago where I talk about recruiting and working with international affiliates. So that’s specifically for those of you who are in the United States but want to work with affiliates outside of the United States. Just to be clear, if you’re in Germany, you’re already working with international affiliates in that sense.
But affiliate marketing, like I touched on earlier, 16% of all online sales in the US, it’s closing in on 10% and probably will hit that mark this year for international sales. So we’ve got global audiences. I mean, I remember, gosh, when I got into it, 2005, we had 400 affiliates.
I think we had one who was international and he wasn’t that big. Fast forward to 2008. I think we may have had three or four, and all of them were in Canada or UK and they were working with predominantly us audiences and then 2011 in the guitar learning niche and in music learning.
I would say maybe 5% of our affiliates were international and again predominantly with us markets. And most of those affiliates were, I mean, off the top of my head, the UK and Canada. We had one south African, a couple of Australians.
I remember we had a german affiliate that was probably like our 25th biggest affiliate. Now, some of the programs I work with as high as 15% to 20% of the affiliates are internationally based and they account for roughly 15% to 20% of total sales. It’s a huge thing.
And so it used to be that some countries were off limits, they had too high of a fraud rate and things like that, and that’s not the case anymore. Especially again, going back to the AI side as an affiliate manager, country of where they’re at, where they’re based is a consideration, but you’re allowed to not just look at that and kind of like when you got to make those quick decisions. I got three minutes sometimes in my busy season when I worked with shutterfly, 100 applications a day.
In Q4, I have to make 32nd decisions. So my default is to decline if I’m not sure. Well, now we can use AI to cover that. And so think globally, expand globally, because in 2024 it’s going to be a much more global market. And I mean, I venture to say that, yeah, we’re going to tip over that 10% mark where 10% of all transactions online worldwide are going to be involve affiliates. And I’m in a venture to say that as high as 20%, I’m going to predict 15.
Last I checked we’re in the low, barely above 10%, but I’m going to predict 15%, possibly as high as 20% of all affiliate sales for us based companies will be from internationally based affiliates. So big prediction there and we’re going to continue to see that grow over the next few years. And the last prediction, again, this is one of those things that we’re already seeing in 2023, in fact, we’ve been seeing it for the last few years, is that affiliates will demand more from their affiliate programs.
They’re going to demand more from their affiliate managers, they’re going to demand more from the companies that they are representing. Affiliates will want even more done for them. And I touched on this earlier. I said I got a cool thing to share and I’ll share that here in a second. And one of the things is AI makes this possible. Affiliates want more help.
They want more done for you and done with you stuff. They want more things that allow this to make it easy for them. The old saying affiliates are lazy. Many people have said that over the years, affiliates are lazy. I said, no, they’re not lazy. They’re busy. Affiliates have their own business to worry about. They have their family to worry about, their kids, their spouse, their community. Your affiliate promo is kind of down the list now.
They want to do it and they want the money, but they also want it to be easy. They provide the audience. Think about how hard they work to get the audience to build their email list, to build their social media following, to build their podcast listeners or YouTube viewers.
They provide the audience, you provide the marketing. They want more handholding and personal attention. This is one of the reasons why you should hire an affiliate manager.
It doesn’t have to even be us, but this is why you need somebody. Because as a business owner, as an entrepreneur, it’s going to get harder and harder and harder for you to service your affiliates, which means it’s going to be harder and harder for you to work with affiliates and get them on board because they’re going to need so much handholding you’re going to be frustrated by it.
And so what happens is the rich get richer because the companies that hire an affiliate manager can afford to. They’re out there kicking your b*** and it’s going to be harder to do what I did back in 2005. I tell that story all the time how I went from zero to over a million dollars a month in 18 months building my affiliate program.
By the way, I’ll put a link to a training where I show you how I did that. I’ll tell you right now that if I did exactly what I did back then, I would not be able to accomplish that today. That’s why when I do the training I talk about here, you have to do what I did, plus these other things because it’s 18 years later and it’s different.
If you do what I did back then, you won’t be at a million dollars. In fact, I don’t know if I’d be at $100,000 a month back then because I wasn’t helping my affiliates as much as I would need to now. So back then I would have had to have made a couple of decisions. I would have done it. I was single, not married, no kids. I was working 100 hours a week.
I would have just worked 110 hours a week and I would have made it happen because we were fighting for our survival and I’m glad that I did those things and we made it. So I would have done it, but I would have also hired somebody else, which kind of weird because then I probably wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today. I would have hired somebody else to run the affiliate program or I would have hired somebody else to do some of the other stuff.
That’s why hiring an affiliate manager is so important because they can take on all this work and we’re replacing the work of approving affiliates and monitoring fraud and we can use AI for that. So now we’re on this other side, which is more about the relationships and handholding for affiliates. One of the ways that we use AI is to create custom swipe copy personalized swipe Copy personalized graphics for our affiliates.
So what’s personalized swipe copy? It’s swipe copy. We’re not just saying here’s the generic swipe copy. I’m going to tell you right now, nobody’s doing this, by the way. As far as I know, I’m sharing it with the world now. Everybody’s going to be doing it.
We’re opening up a pandora’s box, a can of worms, whatever you want to call it. People are going to be doing this left and right in 2024 because I have not had anybody else do it for me. No other affiliate program and I’m a member of dozens of affiliate programs actively involved in dozens of affiliate programs.
No one’s doing this. The ones that I’m inactively involved in where I’m just on their email list and I monitor what they do because I want to see it. Nobody is doing this. I’m a part of more than 300 affiliate programs. Not a single one of them is doing this except for us, for our clients. Pretty cool.
Now I’m sharing it. Now people are going to have to start doing it. And those of you who are affiliates, you’re like, well, man, his team do this, why don’t you do this?
Now? That’s the reason why with our agency we have so many affiliates who are like their promotional calendar just looks like our clients calendars. They want to work with us because we do things like this.
So here’s what we do. I’m going to share how we do it. We go into, in our case it’s Chad GPT. Make sure you’re using Chad GPT. Four 3. 5
might be able to handle it, but four can definitely handle it and we’re actually going to create our own bot that does this. But Trippy told you, don’t need to buy it, I’m going to create it and I’ll offer it for sale and it will be worth it to some of you. But for most of you, just use Chad GPT four because it’ll be cheaper and it’ll only require a little bit more work.
So that’s it. You go into Chadgy BT four and we’re going to create a chat and we’re going to name it whoever the affiliate is. I’m going to name one of our affiliates.
I’m going to call one of out. What if he’s listening? I don’t know if he listens to the podcast or not. So I’m going to take Brandon Cox. Hey Brandon. All right, so Brandon Cox, good affiliate of ours, promotes a lot of our clients.
I’m going to take Brandon. You should be on your affiliates email list, by the way. You should be following them on social media, by the way. And I’m going to create a Brandon Cox email chat. I’m going to take Brandon’s last 20 to 40 emails. Could be more, could be less.
If you only have eleven to start with, that’s fine. If you only got six, start with six and then work on it. And I’m going to take at least 20 over time. And I’m going to take those emails and I’m going to train the bot, the AI in Brandon’s voice.
Certain words, certain style, certain format to the emails, the tone, the length, the subject lines, those things, I’m going to train it. So I’m going to drop those 20, sometimes 40, if I can get them 50, even more. I’m going to take those posts and I’m going to put them in there.
Then I’m going to take the generic swipe copy that I write and I’m going to say, please rewrite this in the style of Brandon Cox. And it’s going to spit out the swipe copy. And I’m going to do that for each of the pieces of swipe copy.
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I’m going to copy and paste those into a document, and I’m going to send that to Brandon and say, here is your personalized swipe copy. Now, if there’s a part where it’s like, insert your own personal story, I can’t insert Brandon’s story there. He’s got to do that.
The rest of it is in Brandon’s style. Pretty freaking cool. And I do that with social media. I go take 2030, 40 of their tweets, and I create some Twitter posts for Brandon. If that’s a big network for them. I do the same with Facebook posts.
And then I take graphics. Now, the graphic stuff that we use, if you upload graphics, it’s like, I don’t know what that is. It doesn’t recognize, but I look at it and go, okay, here’s the style that they use. They’re using, like, 1940s cartoon style. So I look at that, I make a judgment and I say, boom. Put this on there.
Make a graphic that shows a woman celebrating her book hitting the bestseller list. She’s a 35-year-old brown-haired woman, and she’s dressed casually and she’s boom, boom. She’s celebrating and she’s in her home office.
Yada, yada. I’m going to do that. I’m going to write that, and I’m going to generate that, and I’m going to give that to them. That her audience is 30 to 45-year-old women who want to be authors. This other person, they’re men. I’m going to have them be that. So I’m going to take that style. Do they like a more modern style or whatever, different types of things? Oh, this person’s a huge Disney fan.
So kind of do this in the style of Mickey and whatnot, or they’re a huge whatever fan. I’m going to do it in that style. They’re huge into superheroes. I’m going to make it a superhero theme. I’m going to give them personalized graphics as well. It’s all done with AI.
It’s boom, boom, boom. It’s really quick. But the trend that we’re seeing that affiliates are going to demand more from their programs, they’re going to demand more from their affiliate managers, and AI can help you to be able to customize those things super quickly.
Am I going to do that for 1000 affiliates? No. Am I going to do it for our top 20 to 30? Absolutely, because it’s worth it. So give your affiliates more handholding. Use AI to power that, even if you just do it for five.
The first one we did it on, we did it on one email that we added at the last minute and we said, hey, I wrote some swipe copy for you, and we sent it to like five or ten affiliates. All of them used it except for one. So we got an extra email out of seven of the eight affiliates that we sent it to.
So, guys, those are my predictions for 2024. I’ll be back in a year and we’ll get to which ones I get right. Which ones I get wrong. If I had to guess, number one is a safe bet. Number two is a safe bet. Obviously about AIS. Number one was about the growth grow by 10% or more. AI stuff. That’s a safe bet.
Voice search is definitely a safe bet. I mean, again, the numbers back that up. Split commissions being the norm. I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s going to happen in 2024. I’m going to predict that it is, but it might not.
The third party cookies, that’s definitely going to happen. I mean, it has to happen by 2024. So we have a choice there as far as becoming more international. Yeah, we’re already on that trend. That’s going to happen. And the affiliates, yeah, they’re going to demand more from their programs. I mean, how much more? I don’t know. I really don’t know.
But they’re definitely going to be demanding more. So use some of the tips and strategies we talked about today to give your affiliates more to make it easier for them. If you can make it 10% easier, you will stand out.
Over 95% of the programs for the next year or so. You will stand out. So if you have any questions about this or anything else, text me 260-217-4619 all the links that I mentioned are in the show notes.
How to make money from product reviews, how to write a product review that racing converts. Got all that. I got the training that I talked about. I’ve got the ERC guaranteed program in there. Share sale.
All those are linked to in the show notes and then make sure you come back as we’ll be in a new year. As we’re going to be in a new year. Can you believe it? A new year. Unbelievable. Make sure you come back for that.
Make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. Next episode I’m going to be talking about New Year’s resolutions for affiliates and affiliate managers. What do you need to resolve to do in 2024? That’s what the next episode is going to be all about. So make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss it. I’ll see you then.
Questions?
Text me anytime at (260) 217-4619.
Or…check out some of my free reports to help you get on the right track:
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