2025 is here, and the affiliate marketing world is evolving faster than ever. From the rise of AI to compliance and Google algorithm updates, this year is shaping up to be a big one. In this episode, I’ll break down the hottest trends, key predictions, and strategies to help you stay ahead of the curve. Plus, I’ll share what we learned from 2024 and how you can use it to make 2025 your best year yet.
Click Here for The Written Transcript of This Episode
Links Mentioned in this Episode
How to Get Started with Affiliate Marketing
Text “REFERRAL” to 260-217-4619
Don’t Miss An Episode – Subscribe Below
 |
 |
|---|---|
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
5 Affiliate Recruiting Mistakes That Are Costing You BIG Time
Behind-the-Scenes on Our Affiliate Promotion for Product Launch Formula
How to Promote Virtual Summits as an Affiliate (If You Aren’t a Speaker)
Fix Your Funnel: How to Increase Sales and Make Your Affiliates More Money with John Ainsworth
2025 Affiliate Marketing Predictions
From the rise of AI to compliance and all the Google algorithm updates, this year is shaping up to be a big one. In this episode, I’m going to break down the hottest trends, some key predictions and strategies to help you stay ahead of the curve. Plus, I will share what we learned from 2024 and how you can use it to make 2025 your best year yet. Let’s get started. So I am back after almost a month of battling some sort of an illness and like our whole family was battling it and things got really bad. Honestly, it was the worst I’ve ever felt in my life. And then getting Covid, and that was mild in comparison to what I went through for the first three weeks of this. The COVID battle was kind of short. I’m on the recovery.
I’m finally back to the point where I can actually feel pretty confident that I can record this entire episode. It will be edited, so if I have a coughing fit or any other issues, you’re not going to know about it. But hopefully I’m able to make it through this without a whole lot of struggle on my part. Who knows, it may take me a couple days to record it. I have no idea. Until I get into it. This will be the longest I’ve talked in an entire month. So I’m excited about this though, because I wanted to do this a couple of weeks ago.
It’s an episode I do every year and I make these predictions for what’s going to happen in the affiliate marketing world. And frankly, I’m usually right. I’m usually correct about what’s going to happen. And part of that is just because I’ve been around for a long time and I can kind of see the landscape of the industry and I’m surrounded by a lot of smart people. And so last year, you know, I made some predictions and actually they all turned out to be right. So I’m not going to focus on that. Usually I’m wrong about like, I make like 10 predictions and I’m wrong about one. But this past year I think I made like seven or eight and I was right about all of them and I’m not going to focus on that.
But I do want to take a look back at 2024. It was there Were some surprises, there were some shifts, as I predicted, and this was an easy prediction. But, you know, affiliate marketing absolutely smashed records in 2024. Literally over $10 billion were spent through affiliate marketing in 2024. And that’s, that was not a surprise. The industry had been growing by 10% year over year. And so being that it was almost at 10 billion the year before, that was an easy prediction. But experts are predicting that number to continue to rise in 2025 and beyond as brands and creators continue to come up with new, innovative ways to connect with their audience. And let’s be real, like 2024 wasn’t just a year of growth. It was a year of big changes.
In many ways, affiliate marketing today looks nothing like it did just a few years ago. For affiliate marketing dramatically changed from 2005, when I got in the industry, until 2021, notwithstanding the COVID stuff. Certainly it accelerated affiliate marketing in 2020, but that was like, we all knew that was, it was going to continue to grow, but it was going to go back to its normal pace of 8 to 12% a year, which is amazing by the way. It’s a fast growing industry.
Eight to 12% a year is unbelievable. But 2020 was kind of this anomaly. And we all, at least smart people knew that was like, okay, it grew about 35% that year. That was not going to be sustainable for years past. But outside of that, it didn’t really change dramatically in those 16 or 17 years. It has changed dramatically since 2022. And trust me, things are only going to evolve more dramatically and faster every single year. So before we jump into 2025, let’s take a look back at some of the key things that I felt like I learned in 2024.
Things that work, things that didn’t. And really what you need to keep in mind going forward. The first thing is the algorithm updates. The key word here is diversification. Google did it again. The pesky algorithm updates that keep content creators on their toes all year long. And some affiliates took big hits, especially those who relied heavily on, on one source of traffic, so particularly search engines. And the lesson there is putting all your eggs in one basket just doesn’t work anymore.
It just doesn’t work anymore. It worked in 2005, it worked in 2010, and even 15 and 20. But the ones that really thrived in 2024 were the ones who diversified their traffic sources, Social media, email marketing, direct partnerships, affiliates. Obviously, if 2024 taught us anything, it’s the ability to adapt, the ability to diversify it is not optional. It is absolutely essential. The second thing that happened in 2024 was this was the year that AI became a transformational tool. It’s when AI really hit its stride in affiliate marketing. Yeah, I was around in 2022 and, you know, 2023, it was a thing, but I feel like it didn’t really hit its stride until late 2023.
Need help activating your affiliates? Use my proven email templates for getting inactive affiliates in the game and making sales! Get them here!
So really, 2024 was the first full year. I mean, everything, you know, creating killer content, just streamlining partner communication. I mean, I know one of the things that we were able to do that was huge in 2024 was when we brought on new clients. One of the things that we wanted to do was their affiliates that are also customers. We wanted to communicate on brand with those customer affiliates. We wanted our communication to feel like we had been a member of the team for years. So we created models of their communication. We took hundreds of our clients emails and loaded them in, and then we would write our email and then say, hey, write it in the style of the client. And it tweaked it just a little bit. It made it 20% more like the clients. And it did some things, things that I don’t normally do. And like, we have one client in particular. She uses a lot of emojis, and she uses certain words that I don’t use, but it took that content and made it more like her content, and it worked. And that was something that we didn’t do prior to last year. And the thing is that AI is a tool. It’s the rocket fuel.
But you still have to have somebody steering the ship, and that’s you. So continue to use AI. It became a great tool for analyzing data, for personalizing outreach. This is something, again, we’ve talked about this before, creating customized swipe copy for our bigger partners, where we take, you know, 50 of their emails and load them into a chat. And now when I have this affiliate promote one of our clients, I’m able to create swipe copy specifically for them. Well, yeah, I did that work, but it took the human intuition. It took my creativity to make that happen. Like, AI didn’t automatically do that. I had to tell it how to do it, and I had to collect the 50 emails and I had to do the grunt work. Those are things that a human had to do. The third thing, partner expectations, they evolved and they grew.
I mean, their expectations are much bigger now. Like, it’s not enough to just hand them a generic affiliate link and be like, all right, go get them. The top performing affiliates want More. They want those tailored landing pages that convert better, they want co branded materials that feel more personal, they want detailed analytics, they want custom swipe copy. And here’s the thing, the affiliate programs that deliver on these expectations, they’re seeing higher engagement and they’re seeing better roi. So if you want to attract and keep high quality affiliates, you’ve got to meet them where they are and give them what they need to succeed. And that is evolving. And it’s, I’ll be honest, it’s becoming harder for affiliate managers.
Now The good news is we have those tools like AI because yeah, affiliates want custom swipe copy. Part of the reason why affiliates want custom swipe copies, I’ve been teaching about this and so it’s becoming, they’re seeing it and going, well, Matt’s programs and some of these other programs are doing this. Why don’t these. Now here’s the thing, it is more work to provide custom swipe copy. But thankfully, I mean back in the day, and I say back in the day, you know, three years ago, we used to provide custom swipe copy for our top affiliates. But here’s what I had to do. I had to get 20 of their emails, I had to give them to a copywriter. The copywriter had to study their style, pick out some keywords. There were some tools to be like, hey, are there any keywords I should look for? And they would pick those up.
They noticed that they used emojis. And then that copywriter would create the swipe copy and it would cost me $400 to create personalized swipe for an affiliate. It was totally worth the $400. They would go on to do $80,000 in sales. But it was still a huge expense and a huge time suck. And it wasn’t perfectly in their style. Now, now it is, it’s perfectly in their style. And it takes me a matter of once I get the chat loaded. And the cool thing is like because we have multiple clients, if I have an affiliate promote three different clients, I only have to load their emails one time and I save that chat as like their name. So again the expectations are rising, but so are the tools to meet those expectations.
Creating co branded graphics and stuff. I mean it used to be good to go to your graphic designer and you just go to Canva. Now like I can create a graphic for an affiliate. I can create a Facebook graphic, an Instagram graphic, a Twitter X graphic and a Pinterest graphic. And I can create four of those five minutes. Used to be it would take me three days because I’d have to put it in a project. Ask the graph. No, all that.
So that’s like the bad news, good news. The bad news is they need more, and that takes more time. The good news is it doesn’t take nearly as much time as it would have three years ago. And the good news is you’re taking more time, but they’re making more sales, so it’s worth it. And the last thing we saw in 2024 was just the effects of the election year, you know, and cost.
I mean, the U. S. presidential election. And this wasn’t just in the U. S. like, it doesn’t just affect the U. S. because most of our international listeners, you’re marketing in the U. S. so even if you’re not in the U. S. the presidential election dominated the news cycle. I mean, you had in the early part of the year, you know, it was, was Trump going to win the nomination and Biden? And then it was Trump versus Biden, and then it was the debate. Then it was, was Biden going to stay in?
Then it was Biden dropped out and it was, who’s going to replace Biden? Then it was Kamala Harris is in. And then it was the DNC and the rnc. And then the last two months, I mean, it was just, it was nuts. And then that ate into the holidays. And so, I mean, ad costs were just through the roof. Just absolutely through the roof. That had a big effect on, on affiliates in 2024. There were a lot of affiliates who just couldn’t do pay per click on social media for about six months there because of the election. I mean, both campaigns, I mean, the combined cost that they raised was astronomical. I mean, set every kind of record. I mean, I heard Kamala Harris was over a billion dollars.
Like, that’s insane. And think about it. Yeah, they were spending some money on tv, yeah, they were spending some money on print, but where were they spending a large chunk of their money? It was on social media. Why? Because of targeting. So that pushed other advertisers to the side who couldn’t afford to compete. Now, the bottom line from 2024, affiliate marketing, it’s evolving fast.
Diversification, AI, meeting partner expectations, being strategic. These are not just nice to have, they are essential. If you haven’t jumped on the AI train, you need to jump on now. If you haven’t jumped on like giving your partners more and more and more, you gotta jump on now. So if you’re ready to take those lessons from 2024 and use them in 2025, let’s start talking about the predictions that I’ve got for 2025. Prediction number one easy one. Affiliate marketing is gonna keep getting hotter. I’ve said this every year for essence.
I’ve been doing these episodes. Affiliate marketing is no longer the scrappy underdog. It’s the heavyweight champ. It’s a big boy. You know, we put our big boy pants on in this industry. You know, when I got into it 20 years ago, 20 years ago, you know, it was a little bit of that scrappy underdog. And it was like half a billion dollars. And it was like, hey, we’re, we’re real, but not really.
In 2024, 16% of all online orders, 16% went through an affiliate program. That means almost 1/5 Google Trends. I mean, between 2020 and 2022, we started seeing a big rise in interest in affiliate marketing. But the thing is, it kept going in 2023 and 2024.
It did not level off like people thought it might because, oh, we’re now. No, we’re not in the pandemic anymore and people are back in their office. No, it kept going. So just in affiliate marketing software, 2020 through 2022, three years, $216 million. $216 million. Keep that number in your head. In 2023 and 2024 alone, 1. 5 billion. Two years compared to three years. What’s the math on that? Seven times more money was invested in affiliate marketing software.
I started an affiliate network, and that came about because I was able to raise the money. I had not been able to raise the money after thinking about it for almost 15 years, but for 12 of those 15 years, it was kind of like that scrappy startup, right? The scrappy underdog. Now it’s become such a behemoth that people wanted to invest.
So my prediction for 2025 is it’s going to keep growing like it’s been growing. You know, an easy prediction here because the best predictor of the future is the past. And it’s been growing by 10% a year on average for almost two decades. It’s going to keep growing at that rate this year.
The second prediction I’ve got is just is the evolution of social platforms. Up until a couple of years ago, we said we were going to Google something. And what that meant was we were going to use Google. Now, not only has the terminology changed and just like Kleenex became. What kind of Kleenex? Do you have puffs? I’ve got a. As I’ve been sick, I’ve been using a lot of puffs plus lotion.
That way my nose isn’t raw. And what Kind of Kleenex. Do I use puffs? I don’t call them facial tissues, I call them Kleenex. But they’re puffs. You know, down south, everything’s Coke. What kind of Coke do you want? Dr. Pepper. You know, my favorite kind of Coke is Pepsi. Things like that. You hear statements like that.
Now when we think of Googling, it might not mean using Google. And in fact the terminology is changing because less people are using the word Google as a verb and they’re saying search. It started to shift over the last year or so. And so think about like, when’s the last time you searched for a product on social media?
I mean, it’s actually genius. Social platforms like TikTok and Instagram X, they’re evolving into search engines for younger audiences. And even like the new ones like Blue sky, it’s changing the social media landscape. It’s becoming more dynamic than ever. And so again, going back to what we Talked about with 2024, you can’t rely on a one size fits all approach. You’ve got to have a specific strategy for TikTok and a specific strategy for Instagram and a specific strategy for X. They’re very different. The communities are different, the communication style is different. And so diversification, it’s a hard word for me to say right now when I’m on cold medicine.
It’s key. You’ve got to diversify your strategies across multiple platforms. So experiment with some newer platforms. Experiment with short form video on TikTok, Instagram Reels search friendly content for Google. Different things for different audiences. Right? The brands that win and the affiliate programs that win in 2025 and the affiliate marketers that win in 2025 will be the ones that show up where their audience hangs out with content that feels relevant and native to the platform.
All right, so diversification is key. The third prediction for 2025 is that affiliate managers are going to become more like community managers. You know, back when I got started and even really up until the early 2000s, right around Covid hitting affiliate managers were really just the middlemen between brands and affiliates. Starting a couple of years ago and really accelerating in 2025, affiliate managers became more like architects of the brand’s community. You know, if you think about it, creators are the cornerstone of most marketing strategies today. They’re relatable, they’re authentic, they’re deeply trusted by their audience.
In other words, they are the perfect builders for a brand’s community. So building a community, though it’s not as simple as just Handing creators a coupon code, handing them an affiliate link, and calling out a day like, you can’t do that. The most successful partnerships happen when brands treat creators as true partners, not just another marketing channel. And so my prediction for this year is that affiliate relationships, authentic affiliate relationships, are gonna grow at scale.
As more brands get into affiliate marketing, managing relationships with affiliates is going to become more challenging. But I talked about this earlier. Challenges present new opportunities. So we invest in tools that make these partnerships feel personal, even at scale. Things that streamline collaboration, platforms, providing real time data and. Right. Creating authentic connections with your affiliates is going to be critical. The brands that succeed, they’re going to be ones that build communities, not just marketing campaigns. So again, affiliate managers are not just managing programs, they’re leading movements. They’re movement leaders. And in 2025, that’s going to separate the good affiliate programs from the great. So see yourself as a movement leader.
You are leading a movement. This is big. This is probably my biggest thing that I’m seeing in 2025 and beyond is being that movement leader, not just an affiliate manager. I just did that podcast episode. I rereleased that episode where I talked about how I hate the term affiliate manager. We’re not managers, we’re not managing people. We’re not moving people around, pieces on the board. No, we’re leading movements. And movements are something that people can get behind. The next thing I’m seeing, number four in 2025 is just more opportunities. With niche bloggers and these emerging channels, you don’t need to have a celebrity influencer to drive serious results for your affiliate program. We have talked about this so many times.
In fact, smaller niche bloggers are quickly becoming some of the most powerful players in the affiliate game. Like, well, blogs are dead. No, they’re not. Has blog traffic gone down? Yes, but many blogs have grown exponentially, especially in the niches. Those 2024 updates I talked about from Google earlier, they leveled the playing field. They’re no longer favoring the mega sites as much, so the little bloggers, they can compete. So, yeah, they mainly have like 5,000, 10,000 regular readers.
But first of all, that’s 5,000 to 10,000 regular readers. And second of all, they’re ranking higher. It’s a great opportunity for affiliate programs to connect with highly targeted, engaged audiences and be think about it like niche bloggers. They don’t have millions of followers, but they have something even better, and that’s trust their readers, know, like and respect them, which makes them more likely to take action on their recommendations. And that’s all affiliate marketing is. So we’re working with a company that’s new on XP Affiliate. Right. One of our new merchants is called Daybreak Skincare. So I would say to Daybreak, would you rather work with.
A huge beauty influencer promoting hundreds of products, or a niche blogger who specializes in solutions specifically for the skin type that Daybreak Skincare is for. The latter one might only have a 50th of the readers, but their audience is laser focused, loyal and ready to act. So my prediction for this year is that niche is the new big.
Niche is the new big. This year, make it a point to prioritize partnerships with niche bloggers in these emerging channels, because these collaborations are not about reaching the most people, they’re about reaching the right people. It allows you access into these smaller, more authentic communities where you can build trust, create deep customer relationships, and obviously generate better roi. So if you’re not already working with these niche creators, now’s the time. The big players are great, we still want the whales. But in 2025, the quote unquote little guys might just be your secret weapon. All right, prediction number five is that AI is going to continue to rise. It’s. AI is not a buzzword anymore. It’s not, you know, we’re not playing buzzword bingo here.
It is a full blown tool. And if you’re an affiliate manager not using AI, you are seriously missing out. I mean, the AI tools now are just huge. Like. But this is the thing, just to be clear, AI will not replace a good affiliate manager. It’s only here to make you better. We sort of talked about this earlier. So the affiliate managers who learn how to use AI effectively are going to have a huge advantage because AI is great at doing the repetitive, time consuming stuff, whether it’s making your emails perfect, analyzing data. I mean, like, it’s unbelievable what you can do with it to analyze data. Like you can just load the data into. And I do this all the time. Like, yeah, you know, you could look at the data and it could take you an hour. And that’s great. Like I used to do that. Or I can say, here’s the November stats and the December stats.
Get my #1 affiliate recruiting email (the one I’ve personally used to recruit thousands of affiliates in dozens of niches). Grab your copy here!
What do you see? Really? It’s become like a full time virtual assistant that’s like really, really efficient. The thing is, what’s going to make a great affiliate manager in 2025 and beyond is not the ability to analyze the data, because AI can do that. And not just the ability to manage relationships like used to be that you had to have both of those.
The magic is going to happen this year and beyond when you combine AI with the things that are uniquely you, human creativity and human strategy. And so AI will help you and it’ll help you to adapt. But that Human creativity and the connection. We talked about this just a moment ago. We talked about niche bloggers, we talked about community architects, right? That’s what’s going to separate the good affiliate managers and the mediocre affiliate managers from the great ones. So obviously, you know, as far as like ways that we’ve used AI and this is not an exhaustive list, but data analysis, what’s working?
Anytime I want to know what’s working, what affiliates are up, what affiliates are down, what creatives are working, what creatives are not, what campaigns worked better than the others. I have AI do all the analysis on that. Now I still have to interpret it, I still have to react to it, I still have to strategize around that. But the analysis is all done by AI. And so really what it did was it took what used to be a half a day task, two hours of analysis, two hours of strategizing around that, and it cut it into a 2 hour and But now it’s better. Things aren’t missed.
That’s number one. So I’m 10 to 20% better. AI is a little bit more accurate. Like the reality is it’s not significantly more accurate than me taking two hours to do it, but it is more accurate. It doesn’t miss as much. And then I get to spend my time focused on really just the creative side. Things like content creation. I talked about that earlier. It’s a huge deal. Things like swipe copy, creating, affiliate swipe copy. I talked about customizing it earlier. What about just creating it in general, creating it for different audiences.
You know, I can take an outline, notes that I’ve written about an offer and I can say, okay, I need an email now. And I’ve trained it in a certain style. Just to be clear. What I did was I took some of my favorite marketers across numerous platforms and I took numerous marketers across numerous niches and I trained this chat and I told the chat what niche they’re in and I took multiple marketers in that niche. So I took literally name a niche, like a broad niche, health and fitness, weight loss. I took parenting, I took financial Internet marketing, how to make money online.
I mean, just name it. And I took these things, I loaded these emails and I said, here are some emails in this niche and this niche, in this niche, Literally possibly over a thousand emails. And these are all things where they Promoted affiliate offers. And I said, great, now we have a model for how these emails should be written. And I would say, okay, now here’s an offer, you know, it’s for this product, it’s got this audience, blah, blah, blah, blah. Write me an email. Great, write it. Then I would give it more. I would say, okay, here’s a, there’s a one week campaign.
Write it. You know, write an email now. Write an email with 3 days left. Write an email with the day that expires, et cetera, et cetera. It’s unbelievable how fast it does it. And then, okay, here’s a few subject lines I like in 30 seconds, give me 10 more. It’s unbelievable. I mean I’m able to create hundreds of social media posts that they can schedule so I can put them into a sheet and it schedules them for them.
Like they’re able to load them and schedule them. I mean that’s huge. So in 2025, the best affiliate managers aren’t going to be the ones who work the hardest necessarily. They’re going to be the ones who work the smartest. They’re going to be the ones who know how to prompt AI effectively and integrate it into their workflow not only to save time but to discover some new ways to grow their programs. AI is here, guys. Like if you’re not onboarded, this is not the future, it is the present.
If you are not using it yet, 2025 is the year to start. It’s going to be the competitive edge in every industry and definitely in the affiliate management world. I the sixth prediction is we’re going to see a dramatic increase in dramatic emphasis in first party data and privacy. The term data privacy is everywhere, right? Privacy regulations, I mean they’re rolling out worldwide now. The end of third party cookies we’ve seen basically and we’re seeing 2024 made one thing clear and that is first party data is king. So for affiliates this means developing those direct relationships with your audience. No more third party cookies, right?
You’ve got to collect emails, you have to, you’ve got to get people subscribed, you’ve got to build trust, you’ve got to be compliant, you know, you’ve got to learn about your audience. And so privacy first strategies are going to be key in 2025. Privacy first, that means first party data collection, it’s going to help you develop stronger relationships with your audience, can help your data to be more reliable and actually actionable and then you’re going to stay compliant because these, the regulations are Evolving. But the one thing is clear is first party data is always going to be compliant. At least it’s going to be compliant for the foreseeable future. So start focusing on direct connections with your audience, whether it’s email signups, exclusive content, community building, first party data, that’s the ticket here. Okay, number seven, the continued rise of video marketing. It’s again, 50% of users look for product videos before visiting a store. Right.
Video content is officially now essential. So if you’re not using it as an affiliate marketer, if you’re not helping your affiliates to use video marketing, you are missing out big time. So whether it’s explainer videos, product reviews, tutorials, influencer collaborations, these are no longer just nice to haves. These were kind of like, hey, that would get us an extra 1 2% here or there. This is how you get massive visibility, how you get massive engagement for your affiliate marketing. So the best part is creating videos. Going back to what we just talked about, never been easier. You know, thanks to AI.
I remember back when we had to do captions, we had to caption our own videos. AI auto generates them now in transcripts. I mean, it takes seconds script generation, you know, you can again, you can take notes if you’ve ever created scripts in the past, it’s a lot easier if you have in the past. I took all of the scripts that I ever created for every video I’ve ever done and I loaded them into a chat. Now I had them all in a Google Drive. It was really easy. I think it took a va two hours to do this.
And we trained it in how I write scripts now. I can give it notes and it writes scripts now if you don’t have that, what I would recommend doing is, is seeing if you can load some videos that you like that are on YouTube and load them into a thing that’ll generate transcripts and then use that as your script and then load that into AI. It’s a little bit more work.
But if you’ve already got scripts, I mean, now I can create scripts in just not like five minutes. But it used to be that it would take me about an hour per five to ten minutes of script. So if I was creating a 20 minute video, it would take me roughly two to three hours probably to create that script. I’ve cut it down to a half an hour. So I’ve cut my time by 80 to 90% roughly. Same thing for, you know, social media. Copy from the videos. Like, again, you can use AI to create that.
You can use AI to help generate visuals. If you’re doing pictures or videos with Sora now, I mean, if you haven’t used Sora, Holy crap, that is amazing. Is it the best thing in the world? Like, is it perfect? No, but like I used to use all kinds of services. I’m gonna pull up the list here. I’ve used all kinds of different. Storyblocks is the big one.
I was trying to figure out what the name of it was. Video blocks, Storyblocks. I’ve used Videasy, you know, and some other ones for finding video clips. And it’s like, you know, trying to find the perfect clip can sometimes take five to ten minutes. For a six second clip in the video, that’s a long time. Instead I can create it on Sora in 45 seconds. So again, it’s taking that time and reducing it by 90%. Even if I have to edit it twice and it takes me two and a half minutes, it’s still a lot less than the seven and a half to ten minutes that took me on average probably to find the videos before generating music. And I mean it’s so easy with AI now. So again, it’s just reducing time. It’s not perfect, it’s not reducing it to nothing.
I can’t just say here’s a script, make a video. No, I still have to do some of the work. But it takes what used to be, say two and a half hours to generate the script. The one thing that’s still the same, that takes about the same amount of time is me recording my part that has not been cut at all, you know, and then it takes me again to record a 20 minute video will take me about hour and a half usually, you know, with different takes and things like that. And then, you know, finding the right videos would take for a 20 minute video. Gosh, I’m just going to guess eight hours. We cut that down to again, you know, an hour and a half, two hours. You know, instead of three days to create a 20 minute video, it’s now 2/3 of a day and get it done in less than a day. And that’s the thing. So video in 2025 is non negotiable. It’s going to continue to grow on YouTube, Instagram, Reels, TikTok.
Wherever your audience is hanging out, video is the best way to reach them. So stop overthinking it. This is the like the key thing here is just stop overthinking it. Start creating, create a 60 second product review, a five minute tutorial, whatever it is, this is the key to standing out. Now this next one is for both affiliate and affiliate managers and that is in 2025. I am predicting, based on what I saw in 2024, the continued and perhaps resurgence of authentic long form content. I know what everything says and it’s not untrue. YouTube shorts, Instagram Reels, TikTok dances, you know, like bite sized content.
Right. It’s dominating. It seems like the attention spans are shorter than ever and everyone wants their content served in 15 seconds or less. I get it.And that is not true. I’m not saying that is not true. But the twist is that long form content isn’t dead. In fact, it’s actually starting to thrive again in specific context. And if you think about it, when someone’s making a major purchase decision, they don’t want a 15 second video, they don’t want quick sound bites, they want in depth reviews, they want detailed comparison, they want deep insights. If someone’s buying a MacBook, you know they’ve never bought one before, they’re going to look for articles, they’re going to look for ten 20 minute videos that help them make an informed choice. And so the reason why this works, especially in selling, is you are able to take a deep dive, you’re able to build trust, you’re able to demonstrate authority, all the things that you want to do in affiliate marketing and it becomes a magnet for readers or viewers.
And that’s what drives sales. Yeah, if you want to drive interest into a $40 product, a 30 second video might do the trick.You know, if you want to drive interest into an opt in just to get them on your email list, yeah, 15 second video, that does the trick. But if you want to sell anything worth much money at all, keep in mind the average American, I believe the average American makes $62,000 a year, roughly. Doing the math on that, if they’re working 300 days, they’re making 30 bucks an hour. I don’t know what the exact math is. Melissa’s go 30 bucks an hour. Even if you go a little bit higher, 40, 50 bucks an hour, you know, you’re still talking about any purchase that takes up more than two hours of their income. Like they’re going to spend a little bit of time researching it. So well researched long form content, it’s not dead by any stretch.
In fact, it’s really making a comeback and I believe it’s going to go up in 2025. So it’s something to look at. Possibly consider Doing more of in 2025, again, both as an affiliate, but also as an affiliate manager, helping your affiliates to do that. Prediction number nine is that co selling becomes a big, big part of affiliate marketing. So let’s talk about co selling. I haven’t talked about this really much on the podcast. It’s become one of the biggest trends in affiliate marketing right now. Traditionally, affiliate marketing relied on clicks.
So a creator shared a link, their audience clicked on it, sales were tracked, easy peasy, right? But now affiliate programs, brands, creators are taking things to the next level with co branded storefronts, co branded landing pages. So here’s how it worked. And again, I’m going to use a. So let’s use the example of one of our clients, Cannabolics. They’re a CBD oil company, they’re really big in mma. So they’re going to team up with an MMA influencer. Instead of just sharing a link, we create a personalized co branded landing page featuring the influencer’s favorite products.
So it becomes like a digital pop up shop, right? And it’s curated by someone the audience already trusts. So that mma, he’s like, I like these three things. I use this rubber, I’m looking at one of them right now. I use the 3000 milligram rub and I use these drops in the morning and these drops at night. That’s my routine. When I have pain, I use this rub. I use these drops in the morning, these drops.
I don’t necessarily use their other stuff, but buy it if you want to. But I’m not saying like, here’s cannabis, go buy whatever they have. No, I’m saying here’s the Matt McWilliams package. And this works because creators love it. It gives them more control. They get to choose the products they know their audience will love, which creates a more authentic shopping experience. The audiences love it because they’re getting a personalized recommendation from someone they follow rather than just a generic sales pitch. So obviously trust and higher engagement are the result.
And then the brands love it because happy creators, happy audiences, oh, you got more conversions. Like, this is a win, win, win. So co selling is going to start to dominate affiliate marketing in 2025. CO branded landing pages are going to become the norm and programs that actually follow this strategy are going, are going to stand out in a crowded marketplace. I read a quote. Kenyon Brown, he’s the co founder and CEO of Creator Commerce, said co selling is the next big frontier in the world of influencer marketing. And he said that brands leveraging co selling are going to see conversion rates two to three times higher than traditional affiliate links.
He is absolutely spot on. So if you’re not already using co selling, 2025 again is the year to start. This is not just a trend, this is a big, big deal. All right, final two here. Number 10 is data is going to be the new backbone of affiliate success for affiliate programs like both as an affiliate and as an affiliate program. Like affiliate marketing without data is like driving blindfolded. All right, you might get lucky, but the odds are you’re going to crash. And in 2024, data became more essential.
So programs started leaning heavily on analytics to really dial in their affiliate strategies. And it paid off big time. Things like we talked about earlier, the access that we have to AI now makes it really easy for us to optimize and know what’s working and what’s not. Making data driven decisions and actually proving roi, this was huge for me with some of my clients, like proving here’s how we increased. Convincing the stakeholders to approve a bigger budget is a big thing. So data has become key. And here’s the thing for affiliate managers, not only do you need to collect data and analyze that, but you need to share it with your affiliates. Be open, be transparent.
Share conversion rates, share what’s working, share engagement metrics, share any insights you have into sales performance. Because transparent data, not only does it build trust, right? Not only does it help them to know exactly how their efforts are impacting sales, but they can optimize how they’re approaching sales. They can drive even more sales. It’s the backbone. Like I said, it’s the rocket fuel, you know, so make the investment in time, both time. And if you need to purchase some tools, get them. I don’t have any recommendations, I really don’t, because there’s a million out there. But make it a priority in 2025.
If you are ready to take your business to the next level and start an affiliate program, start with my free report, Your First 100 Affiliates. This report takes nearly two decades of experience, trial and error, and lessons learned about finding top affiliates in nearly every conceivable niche and puts them all into one report. Grab your copy here!
All right, our final prediction for 2025. And this comes from a conversation I had with the big influencer the other day who is really focused on compliance. And after talking to him and just studying this more, I see a dramatic increase in the focus on compliance and credibility. I get it that compliance isn’t the sexiest topic in affiliate marketing. But 2024, it became crystal clear that ignoring compliance can cost you big time.
And I’m talking businesses being shut down, lawsuits. I mean, it’s big. The FTC started getting really strict this past year. They kind of got a little lax over the previous six to eight years. But the FTC started really tightening things down. Consumer protection laws became tighter than ever and the need for transparency became big. And so the reality is like, there’s a lot at stake.
You know, if you don’t comply with the FTC endorsement guidelines, you’re gonna face fines, you’re gonna face other legal challenges. Consumer trust is eroded. Your reputation, you could literally completely be put out of business. And so the thing is though, I found, this is what I found back in 2010 with the first round of FTC endorsement guidelines, that when you disclose as an affiliate, people were like, well, no, I’m gonna have to disclose and that’s gonna erode trust and it’s gonna make me sell less. We actually found the opposite. Consumer trust actually increased. Consumers are more likely to trust and buy from brands that are transparent and loyal. And the same is true for affiliates. And so one of the things that I think we’re going to see in 2025 is more state level consumer protection laws.
Like, I’m kind of looking at them like FTC light, like smaller FTC acts. You know, these are going to give consumers and competitors the power to file lawsuits if they believe that a brand is engaging in deceptive marketing practices. So here’s the thing. Stay ahead of the curve. Make sure you’re your program. If you’re an affiliate manager, make sure you are complying with all guidelines and communicate those expectations clearly to your affiliates. If you’re an affiliate, make sure you are complying. Credibility and compliance go hand in hand. So play by the rules. Like, learn the rules, play by the Rules. Go back and listen to podcast episodes. Go to mattmcwilliams.com search for FTC. There’s plenty of advice on there about how to stay compliant. You’ve gotta do that.
So 11 predictions for what’s gonna be a massive year for affiliate marketing. I mean, the opportunities are endless. They’re absolutely endless. There’s so much opportunity on the table, but only if you’re ready to adapt. Okay, this is not the year to sit on the sidelines. It’s time to step up. Like, take what I’ve taught today. Even if I’m wrong on one of them, even two of them. If you take these 11 things and apply them to your business, you will be successful even if something is not as big.
What if video doesn’t increase by as much as I think it does? It only increases by say 10% in 2025. What if I’m a little bit wrong about long form content? What if I’m a year early on some of these predictions? Well, then you’re ahead of the curve. Who cares? We learned this in 2024. Affiliate marketing is evolving at lightning speed.
Like what worked in 2021 did not work in 2024. Here’s the crazy thing. What worked in 2024 might not work as much in 2025. Like that’s how fast things are evolving. Then the good news is the core principles, the core principles that we’ve talked about for affiliate program success, for affiliate marketing success, transparency, trust, value. Right. These are here to stay. Building relationships, analyzing. That’s not like I haven’t been analyzing Data. Back in 2005, it just took all day to download and analyze one report. So I’m able to analyze more data now. And that’s the expectation as an affiliate manager. There’s more to do, so lean into those. So what’s your next move?
All right, feel free to text me. I’d love to hear from you. You can reach me anytime at 260-217-4619. I want to know what your next move is based on this episode. Are you going to start building better relationships? You’re going to start building relationships with those niche creators and those niche bloggers. Maybe you’re going to test out some co branded landing pages, do some co selling, maybe double down on first party data collection. Whatever it is, take action. I would love to hear from you what it is though. So text me at 260-217-4619. The reality is the companies and the affiliate marketers who succeed this year are not the ones who are reacting. They’re the ones who are proactive. They’re not the ones who are riding the wave that comes.
They’re the ones who are shaping the wave that could be you. So if you want to make 2025 your best year yet in affiliate marketing, let’s make it happen together. So one of the best ways to do that make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes. I’ve got tons of great content coming on how to optimize your affiliate program, so make sure you hit subscribe. Don’t miss the next episode. I’ll see you then.
See you soon.