The TopRanked.io Weekly Digest: What’s Hot in Affiliate Marketing [Week 38]

Or, if you’re still sitting on the fence, why not check out our full Conmama affiliate program review?

Weekly News Takeaways

The Final Countdown

As promised in last week’s affiliate marketing digest, here’s your reminder that Google Search On ‘22 is just five days away. There’s not much more to say at this point other than to tune in if you’re keen to get a jump on the next big changes in SEO.

Affiliate Marketing Search Trends

On that note, we thought we’d pull up a little something from the Influencer Marketing Hub 2022 Benchmark report. We’ll dig more into this report in the weeks to come, but for now, let’s focus on the search-related bit — interest in affiliate marketing.

First, here are the highlights straight from the report:

• Search engine requests for affiliate marketing grew by nearly 30% over 2021
• Searches for affiliate marketing rose more than 300% between 2017 and 2021

What’s Google Got to Say About It?

Now, Influencer Marketing Hub pulled Ahrefs data for this number and only focussed on US searches. But, just for fun, let’s look at Google trends worldwide data for the same periods.

The nice little thing about seeing the data on a chart like this is it’s pretty quick to visualize when spikes happened. So, for example, it’s pretty easy to see the first spike pretty much lines up with a bunch of other things that took off around Covid time.

What’s curious, though, is that the interest is showing a bit more durability than other Covid-driven trends. To illustrate, let’s slide the graph forward to include this year.

Boom. Right as the bubble was bursting for other Covid-inspired trends like Bitcoin, interest in affiliate marketing took off again.

Now, of course, there is that little note about Google changing its collection system at the start of this year. But even if that explains the blip back up to nearly 100% interest, the trend is still clearly heading up.

What to Make of It?

There isn’t really much to make of all this that isn’t already semi-obvious — interest in affiliate marketing has never been higher than it is right now.

What we can add, however, is that growth in interest is much stronger in some regions than others. For example, growth in the US is pretty mild compared to somewhere like Kenya, which is currently sitting at about 3-4x what it was in 2020.

So, Is Affiliate Marketing More Competitive than Ever?

Well, yes and no. There’s a couple of points to consider.

• Non-US geos are growing fastest: If there’s one thing we can take away from the last note above — that growth in interest is strongest in some non-US regions — we can also assume that new affiliates are not all targeting the crowded US market. Heck, many are probably not even targeting English speakers. In other words, the amount of new competition will largely be market-dependent.
• Affiliate marketing revenues are on the up: If we take a look at reported annual affiliate marketing revenues in the US, many niches are keeping pace with, or beating, growth in interest. So while more affiliates might be fighting for a slice of the pie, the pie is also growing.

Takeaway

The takeaway here is simple.

While data like this is fun to know, drawing conclusions from it can quickly become an exercise in futility.

Interest is up. Revenues are up. Anything else is just splitting hairs unless you can actually see it having an impact on you directly.

Closing Thought

Yesterday, James Clear wrote a great reflection on the passing of time and the importance of now. Here’s an extract:

“Whatever age you are today, your future self would love to be it… Looking back in a few years, today will seem like the time when you were young and full of potential. Make the most of it.”

Or, for those who prefer to consume their inspiration in Latin:

Carpe Diem.

So go ahead. Seize the day, boys (and gals). Seize the day.

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(Featured image by SevenStorm JUHASZIMRUS via Pexels)

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