Is Affiliate Marketing Saturated?

With the millions of affiliates out there, it’s no wonder people are asking “is affiliate marketing saturated?”

Is there any chance for new affiliate marketers who enter such a competitive industry? After all, what chance have they got when there’s millions already out there? Is it worth a shot? Should you “give it a try?”

Affiliate marketing is a broad term. An “affiliate” can be anyone who joins an affiliate program in order to promote someone else’s product or service online. Not all affiliates become successful; but there’s many millions of people who fall into the affiliate category. Many give up before they even create any content or even get started. Why is this?

The affiliate marketing industry has for years perpetuated the myth that making money online with affiliate marketing is easy. Anyone can earn an “easy income” with little work, so they have said! Not true!

Is Affiliate Marketing Saturated – Regulations

Affiliate companies nowadays are not allowed to make earnings claims. Tighter regulations in this industry have clamped down on this kind of behaviour. This is most definitely a good thing for affiliate marketing. It has levelled out the playing field and made it a more professional industry. GDPR (general data protection regulation) was made by the European Parliament in May 2018 and affected many affiliates. Affiliates operating within the EU have to declare their use of data they collect from website visitors.

Google too has had a say in the affiliate marketing industry. Back in the early 2000’s you could throw up a website and get it ranked on Google. Small three-page websites could gain massive traffic. Affiliate marketers were making very good money with little work, if they knew what to do. Along came Panda and Penguin. They were Google algorithm changes which disrupted low quality, spammy affiliate websites. People who had been earning massive incomes were suddenly out of the game altogether – going back to their day jobs.

Is Affiliate Marketing Saturated? Barriers To Entry

One of the main problems with affiliate marketing, and one reason why people think it is oversaturated is the low barrier to entry. A traditional bricks and mortar business wouldn’t expect to be in profit immediately on opening. In most cases, businesses will run for 1-3 years at a loss and only recoup their initial investments after this time, gaining profit slowly.

But with affiliate marketing for some reason people assumed they will be profitable straight away. This, in part was due to the marketing surrounding affiliate training products.

Many training courses claimed that you could make easy money without much effort. This, and the low cost to start an affiliate business (e.g. a $100 course), means that almost anyone worldwide can participate. But joining a course doesn’t make someone an affiliate marketer – they just paid for a course! They are a consumer, not an affiliate marketer!

The real competition for new affiliates depends on which route they decide to choose in their affiliate marketing journey.

Is Affiliate Marketing Saturated – Over saturation Or Competition?

An oversaturated market doesn’t allow for new competition coming in. It’s true that ranking a website on Google is much tougher today than it was even 10 years ago. But that doesn’t mean affiliate marketing is saturated. If you’re a newbie and want to rank a website and promote Forex marketing affiliate products on Google, you’re going to be out of luck! You’ll have more chance finding an one armed, unicycling fire juggler!

The “making money online” niche too, is incredibly competitive. To get your content ranking on Google, or even YouTube will be very difficult. But affiliate marketing isn’t limited to these topics and affiliate businesses aren’t limited to ranking content for free either!

There’s many ways in which affiliates get their products in front of potential customers:

Paid marketing – Google Adwords, Bing, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin the list goes on. Can all of these platforms be oversubscribed?!
Organic marketing – content creation is a free method for generating sales online as an affiliate marketer. Blogging, Social media marketing, Video, content creation etc.

Plus there’s millions of topics within affiliate marketing too. In order to get your content ranked on Google for free you need to choose topics which are less competitive. In order to use paid marketing, you need to carefully choose your products accordingly, so you’ll be able to make a profit.

How To Be A Successful Affiliate

In order to have a chance at earning a realistic income from affiliate marketing, you have to do things in a certain way. There’s many ways to fail, as in life. But getting the right knowledge will set you up for success.

One of the problems with affiliate marketing is that people are impatient. They think that they can throw up a website and suddenly earn an income from it. It’s true that an affiliate business can earn an income quite quickly. But so many affiliates, me included, run into it as if it’s going to happen tomorrow. This is why many fail.

With a bricks and mortar business, you wouldn’t grab the nearest building and throw up a restaurant with no clue how or what kind of food you’re going to serve. It’s a recipe (no pun intended) for disaster! But with affiliate marketing so many people do exactly this. They rush in expecting great things to happen immediately and then give up when nothing does! I did it too!

Likewise when building a block of flats you wouldn’t start placing bricks until the foundations were laid. Laying the foundations of affiliate marketing is key. It’s what your affiliate business will be built on.

Different Affiliate Business Models

There’s multiple strategies to generate sales within an affiliate business. Many affiliate marketers join Amazon’s partner program and attempt to find visitors through building a website.

There’s a big problem with this strategy, especially for new affiliates. There really is huge competition on Google for certain keywords and topics. Added to this, you’ve also got Google recommending products right at the top of the search engines. Here’s the view I got when searching for “buy spotlight”, for example.

As you can see Google dominates the results at the top of the page for this search. As an affiliate for Amazon, unless you have a fairly obscure product, you’ll likely be facing this kind of competition moving forwards.

Then there’s all the paid advertiser listings appearing in front of yours. And of course let’s not forget Amazon’s website itself; which will likely rank at or near the top of the organic listings.

So if you’re attempting this strategy you need to position yourself so that you’ll get traffic. Otherwise you’re out of luck. It’s not therefore other affiliates who are positioning you out of business; it’s Google and paid marketers who are doing it – with this strategy at least!

Review Sites

Review websites used to be a good method for affiliate marketers to use too. My first affiliate sale came from a review article I wrote on a website building software back in the early 2000’s. But many large companies now have reviews on their own websites – including Amazon.

There’s still room for review websites but you’ll need to pick your topic carefully. If you choose the less competitive topics you’ll have more luck getting your content noticed. See my Six Figure Mentor’s review.

Paid Marketing

Affiliates can also use paid marketing strategies although this requires you to have a good business model. It’s very difficult promoting low value products from the likes of Amazon and using paid marketing. Amazon’s commissions are pretty low (3%-11% commissions). Ideally choose digital products which offer recurring commissions instead. With digital products you can earn 40%+ commissions.

Using A Digital Product Range

A digital product range can give you the best chance of success as an affiliate marketer. With low value products and trying to get content found in a competitive niche is tough. Instead, invest in a digital product range which gives you multiple earning strategies. By doing so this means you have more opportunities for marketing.

With low value items, you’re stuck using only free or cheap marketing methods which are competitive and difficult. It can still be done of course but you’ll have your work cut out.

Building content and keeping going is very difficult, especially when you don’t see anything for your efforts for a long time. Most will quit given this situation.

Ideally use all these strategies to give yourself the best chance as an affiliate:

Subscription products – offer recurring commissions on items you sell
A range of products – lets you earn commissions from existing customers when they purchase another product in a range
Multi-tier sales – allow you to earn commissions based on sales made by your referrals
Use digital products not physical products – digital products cost less to deliver and manufacture. Savings are passed to affiliates who can earn 40%+ commissions
Use high value digital products – high ticket items give you more income potential and help you to offset marketing costs.

See SFM digital business system for more on this.

Why Affiliate Marketing Isn’t Oversaturated

Hopefully you can see that there’s many ways to skin a cat within the affiliate marketing business. Not all affiliates are successful and most quit before they even reach 1000 subscribers on their email list. This means that even though there are millions who “give it a go”, most don’t actually follow through and become full time affiliates. Affiliate success today is built on effort and attitude, not price. Arguably this is a higher entry barrier than cost alone, keeping affiliate numbers down.

Google is constantly improving improving their algorithm’s to give the end user the best possible experience with their search queries. This means that unless the affiliate has the same end in mind, they’ll fall by the wayside. And many do!

Quality is therefore very important for affiliates if they are going to succeed online in today’s marketplace. Those who “dip their toe in” because they think it’s easy will be disappointed. They will quit.

For the serious person who wants to make a full or even part time living from affiliate marketing there’s plenty of room! So long as you don’t think it will be easy and are prepared to roll up your sleeves and work at it, there are great rewards.

Access an online webinar to learn more about earning a full or part time income online. Click on the image below to access a webinar with one of my personal mentors Stuart.