Experts on the Affiliate Marketing Trends of 2018

The affiliate marketing trends of 2017 were super hot for a while.

Now, other new hot verticals, strategies and technologies are coming in and you need to get to know them ASAP!

Introduction

Trends.

They’re the lifeblood of the affiliate marketing business.

Trends speak of the innovation in our industry.

A need to constantly change the game, invest in new areas, and explore new goldmines.

Wanna understand which are the trends that affiliate marketing experts wanna go for?

Keep reading!

Affiliate Marketing Trends for 2018

Ready to get to know everything about the biggest affiliate marketing trends for 2018?

These trends have been collected from the industry’s hottest experts.

These guys gave us tremendously important insights and we’ve now compiled their phenomenally informative answers to make sure you’ve got the trends you need to succeed!

Want some expert opinions to be able to understand more about this year’s dopest trends?

Then it’s time to check these trends in affiliate marketing!

Zac Johnson

Super Affiliate and Founder of Blogging.org

For Zac, the business will continue to be focused around relevant review terms and rankings on Google.

While this seems simple enough, it’s still one of the most effective and lucrative ways to make money through referral based marketing.

When someone goes to Google and searches for “product name reviews”, they are already in buying mode.

Brands and affiliate marketers who put in the time and effort to build out legitimate sites that offer real value and rank high in Google, will continue to make great money in 2018 and beyond!

Andrew Payne

Affiliate Marketer & Founder of AffiliateSuccess.com

According to Andrew, there are more affiliates exploring Pop Traffic, which means it’s obviously getting more competitive.

Another trend:

Experienced affiliates are starting to understand how to really get traffic of a higher quality.

This means these pros are finding the best offers faster.

Neil Patel

Co-founder of Crazy Egg 

According to Neil, you’ll see the same trends but in more diverse parts of the globe.

The business will expand.

In his opinion, Asia is at a great moment of expansion.

The next level?

Affiliate marketing will expand to developing countries in 2018.

iAmAttila

Founder of iAmAttila.com

In iAmAttila’s opinion, Ecommerce and Lead Generation are the two big trends.

He believes these areas will continue to grow.

Why?

Because people from all over the globe are starting to get more comfortable online which means they’re less averse to using their credit card online.

iAmAtilla believes Ecommerce is gonna be big and also Lead Generation, especially for B2B.

He reckons it will generate leads for several businesses since companies need to acquire customers every single day.

This will eventually mean internet marketers can get a piece of the pie.

How?

By charging for CPA.

They can charge 20 dollars and get the lead for 10.

This means they can easily make 10 bucks.

Evan Weber

Affiliate Marketing Guru & Founder of Experience Advertising

Evan thinks Affiliate Marketing will continue to expand and grow in 2018.

Every year, more merchants/advertisers are launching affiliate programs on the major networks like CJ, Linkshare, and Shareasale.

More web publishers are joining affiliate networks and affiliate programs to help monetize their websites and blogs.

In Evan’s opinion, advertisers need to do a better job of diversifying their affiliate traffic sources away from coupon affiliates and browser extension affiliates, into relevant/niche web publishers and mobile affiliates, in order to broaden their affiliate revenue sources.

This is a challenging task that can only be accomplished by utilizing the recruiting tools provided by the major affiliate networks (and then following up), as well as using proactive affiliate recruiting strategies to prospect potential targeted publishers by category or niche.

According to Evan, if merchants put resources into growing their affiliate channel, they will experience affiliate channel growth, otherwise they will have 5-10 affiliates accounting for the majority of their revenue (which capitalize on the merchants website’s overall traffic), which is definitely not ideal.

Ideally, you want a very diverse publisher base producing traffic and revenue, which ensures the affiliate channel grows over time on an annual basis.

For Evan, another very important aspect is the affiliate messaging strategy.

Too few companies send well-made affiliate newsletters that push out promotions on a regular basis.

They speak at their affiliates instead of to their affiliates.

If more merchants start encouraging phone calls with their affiliates they would have much more affiliate participation and uptake.

However, this is not the norm and results in lackluster participation rates.

Promotions drive affiliate marketing, so if you want more affiliates to market your company to their audiences, then pushing out weekly promotions/discounts on your products is the best way to increase affiliate participation.

The last point Evan wants to make relates to advertiser’s conversion rates.

If you want productive, relevant affiliates and publishers, working on boosting the website’s conversion rate is advisable PRIOR to launching an affiliate program, otherwise it won’t meet expectations, not even close.

For Evan, you should work with a conversion optimization expert to implement the right strategies and A/B testing that will increase the website’s conversion rate, so relevant affiliate traffic can be converted at a decent rate, otherwise the relevant affiliates won’t stick around and the program won’t grow.

Evan’s final suggestion?

Bring in an agency that knows how to recruit relevant affiliates and publishers in a proactive fashion, knows how to leverage the major affiliate networks’ recruiting tools, sends out frequent, well-written affiliate messaging, and can provide 24/7 affiliate support via the phone and email.

In Evan’s opinion, if you want to grow your affiliate program beyond coupon affiliates and browser extension publishers, you will bring in reinforcements to implement these strategies, otherwise you are at the mercy of whatever happens in the account.

Emanuel Cinca

Head of Business Operations at STM Forum

In Emanuel’s perspective, it’s all about Ecommerce and CPA Facebook Ads.

Promoting on Facebook.

Shopify, mostly.

Jitendra Vaswani

Founder of Bloggersideas 

Jitendra noticed that people are trying new things on Facebook Ads.

He also tells us he’s going into Shopify, one of the year’s greatest trends.

In particular, Jitendra is focusing on remarketing and retargeting.

Mark Roth

Founder & CEO of OfferVault

Mark Roth tells us that trends are always coming and going and that all businesses in the industry must know how to deal with these consistent waves of change.

He believes that it’s all about how you react to these changes.

You have to come up with clear strategies to create revenue every single day, exploring different opportunities that’ll come about.

Bellatig Mehdi

Founder of Hacker de Croissance

For Bellatig, it’s all about Nutra on Facebook Ads and Native.

He also picks Ecommerce as a clear trend.

He also points out that affiliates have a love-hate relationship with Facebook Ads.

The love comes from the amazing targeting abilities.

The hatred comes from all the bans that affiliates must try to escape from.

Facebook Ads is super dynamic, which means it’s always a trend to pay attention too.

Sebastian Koenig

DACH Manager at ExoClick

In Sebastian’s opinion, Real-Time Bidding is the name of the game.

For him, it can only evolve and grow.

He also points out that Nutra will become bigger.

Trey Lewellen

Founder of Trey Lewellen Mastermind

For Trey, affiliates are showcasing a trend:

They all love the recurring pieces and they want more money.

Affiliates are also very intelligent people.

They know that it’s easier to actually build the funnel and to effectively sell the product than it is to run an offer.

Trey also states that affiliates want independence.

They want to build their own company.

Since they know how to run traffic, they can efficiently start creating their own offers.

Related Content: How to Choose High Paying CPA Offers on Mobidea

This is the big trend, for Trey.

Sergey Khitrov

Founder of CPA Life

In Sergey’s opinion, it’s all about cash and delivery.

He also sees Messenger traffic as a great source of income for all affiliates.

David Alexander

Digital Marketer at Mazepress

David believes that there’ll be a growth of voice search.

With voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Home being integrated by third-party hardware manufacturers, David thinks we all should expect voice assistants to become more ubiquitous as they appear in cars, televisions and other appliances in 2018.

This shift in search habits will impact affiliate marketers as those who adapt to rank for natural speech patterns and long tail keywords will see an uptick in traffic while marketers who stick to focusing their effort on high volume short-tail keywords that people would typically type will miss out on these opportunities.

David also sees blockchain technology as a major player in 2018.

Bitcoin has been all the rage over the past year and in 2018 we should expect this trend to continue.

Blockchain projects are disrupting industries far beyond confines of banking.

Affiliate marketing is no exception.

David asserts that we should expect more affiliate networks to adopt cryptocurrencies as a method of payment in 2018.

Even so, there’s more to what blockchain technology can bring to the affiliate marketing space this year.

Blockchains like Adbank are being launched to help manage affiliate payments between merchants and advertisers, cutting out middlemen that often eat into a large amount of the budget, allowing merchants to save money and advertisers to earn more for their work.

According to David, using immutable blockchain technology also has the added benefit of being able to tackle ad fraud caused by the vast number of bots on the internet.

Vipin Nayar

Head of Digital Marketing at Acodez

According to Vipin, here are some of the latest trends that every affiliate marketer must implement in the year 2018 are:

Better Reporting and Attribution

Proper reporting with in-depth analysis and reporting is quite necessary.

It’s crucial that affiliates implement better tools which provide real-time data to predict forecasts for a better performance.

In Vipin’s opinion, better reporting can also help bridge the gaps between affiliates and marketers.

It can help the users make decisions about whom to target, for instance.

Cross-Device Tracking

According to Vipin, since various devices are used to browse the internet, it is necessary to implement cross-device tracking.

It can help to provide better ads and help the users to make the purchase.

Choosing a dedicated niche

It is necessary that the affiliate marketer must be focused on a particular niche.

This makes sure that you stand out from the rest in a particular niche with precise targeting and targeted offers.

This can help in building a strong report and help increase the sales.

Implement the latest SEO techniques

Another trend that Vipin goes for is that everyone will understand that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a major role in affiliate marketing.

It is necessary that you implement the latest SEO methods.

This can help you to bring in more and more traffic, thereby helping you to increase your influence and help you to get the real worth of your labor.

Another trend that Vipin wants you to bear in mind:

You should focus on images and video-related content

Nowadays, both videos and images play a prominent role in influencing users.

Content like social media, tutorials, live content, and product demos can help provide better conversion rates for affiliate marketing.

The last trend Vipin wants you to take into consideration?

Mobile optimization

It is necessary that the website must be optimized for mobile devices.

Mobile apps can also be designed to get more and more users.

Cristian Rennella

VP of Marketing & CoFounder of oMelhorTrato.com

Cristian is straightforward:

After 9 years of work and of having grown from 0 to 21.5M users, he can assure you that the trend that comes to mind for 2018 is how AI will start helping when it comes to the campaign’s performance.

4 months ago, he started to use it through Deep Learning with the Google platform TensorFlow.

Results have improved by a whopping 27.1%.

It is worth noting that it was NOT easy and that Cristian and his team worked really hard with the IT team.

Thanks to AI, you can optimize from your publication schedules, their content, the geographical location, the designs/images, everything!

According to Cristian, predicting what will perform better at each moment of the day will be key to improving your long-term conversion through Artificial Intelligence.

Marissa Jaffe

Director of Affiliate Marketing at Promocodes.com

In Marissa’s opinion, mobile is an area where affiliate marketers took huge leaps forward in 2017.

At Promocodes.com, Marissa saw mobile traffic grow by 60 percent.

In 2018, Marissa is reacting to the mobile-first shopping future by developing additional optimization tactics aimed at mobile user acquisition.

Promocodes.com has rolled out mobile-only offers for first-time customers that tap into the increased traction in device-based shopping and speak to the merchant partners’ UA KPIs.

Megan Marrs

Founder & CEO of Marrsipan Media

According to Megan, since Amazon’s commission rate cut last year, affiliate marketers are becoming more hesitant about putting all their eggs in the Amazon basket.

The Amazon empire continues to grow with Bezos expanding into brick-and-mortar areas, and it’s not hard to imagine a future where Amazon will slash rates even further or even cut the program completely.

Megan ventures that – in 2018 – even tried-and-true affiliate marketers will begin to explore new methods of monetization and uptick efforts to work with affiliate networks or directly with industries in their niche, rather than relying so much on the teetering tower that is the Amazon affiliate program.

Feuza Reis

Director of Social Media & Brand Communications at Next Level Marketing

Here is what Feuza thinks:

Affiliate marketing is an excellent source to diversify income and can be amazing.

It won’t go away, but with recent algorithm changes both with Google and with social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, Feuza believes the shift to affiliate marketing is going more towards courses than towards AdSense or product affiliates.

Learn More: AdSense vs Affiliate Marketing: The Definitive Guide for 2018

The Online course industry is taking the world by storm and teachers are using collaborations and affiliates to diversify the revenue streams.

The new trend is also to have more evergreen courses and more affordable courses.

Whoa, guys!

What a tremendously informative list of the best affiliate marketing trends in 2018!

As for you, our reader, keep checking the Mobidea Academy for more amazing content, tips, and tricks!

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