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Recently, I had a few people ask me what I thought about the future of affiliate marketing.

To succeed in anything long term, you need to look to the future to anticipate changes before they happen. This will ensure your survival in an industry that changes very fast. You have to be able to adapt and make sure your business isn’t too dependent on external forces.

PAST
I started affiliate marketing in 2008, at the time it seemed like the perfect way to make an income while traveling around a lot.

Back in 2008, Adwords was the game, everything could be run, simple landing pages could be used, very rarely did you hear of anyone being banned. Facebook was much the same. Clicks on both platforms were a lot cheaper than they are now, and it was a lot easier to make money. And because of this, many people jumped into the industry with the lure of easy riches.

PRESENT
In only 2 short years, leaves us in 2010… What’s changed?
All the major advertising platforms are turning anti-affiliate. Adwords will ban you for life at a moments notice, or just slap the shit out of your campaigns. It is clear they don’t want affiliates on their platform and we’ve seen that it makes no difference to their quarterly revenues. To be fair, the majority of CPA affiliates aren’t providing much value to consumers, and if I was in charge of a major advertising platform such as Adwords I’d probably make the same decisions.

Facebook now is following suit. Just recently they slashed the daily spend limits of many affiliates and released new guidelines which more or less rule out CPA offers.

FUTURE
In case you can’t look beyond next week: These trends are going to continue.

So this leaves a lot of affiliates scrambling for new traffic sources, PPV etc. Affiliate marketing is a hustle, and the best hustlers will always make a killing.  Unfortunately the majority of affiliates have no real skills, and can do nothing more than rip landing pages and copy what other people are doing. Eventually a lot of these unskilled affiliates will end up in day jobs again. Don’t be one of them…

So to the future and beyond, how does one survive?

By building a real business.

After the first round of Google bans, I spotted the trend and started making a return to e-commerce. I realized that in order to build a stable income, you can’t rely on anything as fickle as a few traffic sources.

You need to have control over your income. And to create a stable income on the internet, you need to either control the product or the customer. That means you need to have your own products or info to sell, or you need to control a large amount of traffic. Both of these result in a stable income, which are the type of businesses I like to work with. As an affiliate, you’re at the mercy of the merchant, affiliate network, traffic source and everything in between. It’s like a house of cards vs a castle and a moat. So another affiliate made $5k a day every day last week and is now making a big fat 0 this week. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather make a stable $200 a day/365 days as a base that I could continually increase.

In a way, I’m advocating becoming a merchant rather than being an affiliate. It suits a free lifestyle better by having the hustlers working for you, rather than being a hustler. On top of that, you can still advertise on platforms like Adwords and make a consistent ROI each month.

The main difference is that building a real business takes a lot more work in the beginning for little payout. But when that payout finally arrives, it will be consistent. Don’t be afraid of a higher barrier to entry, embrace it by being one of the people who actually follows through with a harebrained idea, thank me later.