I recently wrote a similar article on this topic here.
The two articles kinda go hand in hand, as they basically come from the same topic of whether affiliate marketing is still a viable option when it comes to make money online.
And although I get this question year in and year out the truth of the matter is that Affiliate Marketing is still a good way to earn an income online.
The only thing that has changes is the point of saturation.
Let me explain.
Most people who are thinking whether Affiliate Marketing is dead are also the same people who think that Affiliate Marketing is saturated.
And let’s face it.
Most popular marketplaces do get saturated. This is not a new concept and it really has been around since the beginning of time, yep even before there was a thing called the Internet.
So this isn’t a new problem.
So what you need to ask yourself is this. If the competition has been around since the beginning of time, then how do businesses continue to survive in an overly saturated marketplace?
Answer?
They go deeper into the marketplace and offer related product and services that fill a need.
Now unless you’re the trend maker, you really can only look for a hungry marketplace that is less competitive. Once you’re there, become the market leader.
To be the market leader you do have to keep providing better than average products or services. That’s the only way you will have a competitive edge.
Having said that if you choose your market wisely you can sustain your competitive edge for the longest time.
Now Affiliate Marketing isn’t for everyone and if you’re a beginner then, you had better get some training, because marketing techniques have changed in a big way.
There was a time where all you had to do was put up an ad in Google Adwords and you could make a lot of money fast. But those days have gone.
Similarly, it used to be easy to rank in the search engines a few years back, and if you could get good rankings then you could also make a lot of money.
Webmaster quickly found ways to manipulate the search engines so that their website would continuously rank for competitive keywords. Some of the content produced by webmasters didn’t offer a very good experience to the user and as a result the information return was less than optimal.
Google and other search engines had to do something about it or else people would lose confidence in what information was being returned and as a result find another way of researching information.
So Google launched the famous algorithmic penguin and panda ranking changes and that sort of put an end to webmasters trying to game the system.
Anyway, coming back to is Affiliate Marketing dead? The answer is nope, it’s not dead, BUT it has just changed. You will still have very competitive marketplaces and you will also have less competitive marketplaces, which hasn’t really changed.