Is Affiliate Marketing Dead In 2025?

Is Affiliate Marketing Dead? – An Overview

Affiliate marketing has been around since 1989 and over the years has changed dramatically.

It used to be much easier when the internet was newer because the competition was less and the early movers got the bulk of the profits.

No matter how affiliate marketing has changed over the years, there’s one thing that all the successful affiliate marketers and business owners have in common – the will to adapt to changes as they arise.

The truth is that in order to be successful online you to adapt and change strategies in order to stay ahead.  For instance, more and more people are moving towards consuming video content and using voice search.  The more you leverage up and coming trends, the better chance you have at staying ahead of your competition and being successful.

The good news is that affiliate marketing is still a thriving business model that is growing dramatically year after year.  In fact, over 80% of brands use affiliate marketing as one of their income streams.

For most brands, affiliate marketing brings in at least 20% of a publisher’s annual revenue for the business.

Perhaps what’s even crazier about affiliate marketing is how it relates to email marketing.  Chances are that you’ve heard it said just how powerful and lucrative email marketing is.  

Well, affiliate marketing now drives roughly the same amount of online orders as email marketing by capturing 16% of all online orders.

There’s no doubt that affiliate marketing is alive and well. 

However, you need to be aware of what tactics and strategies are working today instead of using strategies that have died out over time since affiliate marketing originated.  Let’s take a look now at both strategies you should avoid and strategies you should jump on.

Reasons For Affiliate Marketing Being Dead – How To Fail In Today’s World

Affiliate marketing only works if you’re up to date on what’s working and apply the proper income-producing strategies.

Here are some affiliate marketing strategies that are now dead:

• Facebook Page Organic – Driving organic traffic from a Facebook page used to be an incredibly powerful, quick, and easy way to drive large volumes of traffic to your blog or sales funnels.  From there, you could direct the visitor on to purchasing an affiliate product you were promoting.  The problem nowadays though is that Facebook has greatly reduced the percentage of people that can see one of the posts on your Facebook page.  You’d be lucky to get more than 1% of the followers on your page nowadays to even see the post you just put up.
• Facebook Paid Ads – There are people still crushing it with Facebook ads but they’re unfortunately getting more and more expensive like just about every other advertising platform.  The costs to run Facebook ads have gone up several multiples from even just a few years ago to run the same ad to the same audience.  It’s made this method of driving traffic one that is very difficult to master for converting cold traffic.  A few exceptions to this would be retargeting ads from those that visit your blog and creating lookalike audiences.
• Black Hat SEO – The Google algorithm and AI are getting smarter every day.  SEO techniques that rely on manipulating the algorithm may have worked previously but now fall short every time in the long-run and never amount to a sustainable and profitable passive income affiliate marketing business.

These are just a few of the ways to drive traffic that are now dead and no longer working for affiliate marketing.

Reasons For Affiliate Marketing Not Being Dead – How To Succeed In Today’s World

The good news is that affiliate marketing can still be done today to produce passive income and help you to build a successful business online.

Here are some of the ways that are working exceptionally well right now to drive traffic for affiliate marketing:

• Facebook Groups – If you ask me, Facebook groups are one of the best ways to warm up an audience and build trust.  You can build an intimate tribe of people around your brand.  Pretty soon they’ll be asking you for your affiliate links and wanting to know which products you recommend.  Creating a Facebook group is one of the fastest ways to start making a massive amount of affiliate sales.
• Blogging With E.A.T. & Epic Content – Blogging has been around nearly since the dawn of the internet.  However, in order to succeed with blogging and SEO (Search Engine Optimization), you need to focus on building a brand with expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E.A.T.).  You also need to create the best content for the main search query that you’re targeting to be able to deserve a chance at ranking number one.
• YouTube Organic – Building a YouTube channel and growing an audience on the platform is currently one of the best opportunities to take advantage of right now in digital marketing.  More and more people are turning to YouTube and videos to consume content.  By creating a YouTube channel, you can start to build trust with your audience that simply can’t be replicated on just about any other platform online.  The cool part is that there’s way less competition than in the Google search results if you’re willing to face your fears and get on camera.
• YouTube Paid Ads – Running paid ads is something that I normally recommend against if you’re just starting out.  However, if you’ve got a YouTube channel then this could be an incredible opportunity to see a high conversion rate with Youtube ads.

Final Thoughts: Is Affiliate Marketing Dead?

Affiliate marketing is definitely not dead and is an income stream that countless online businesses rely on every single day.

The key to succeeding is that you adapt to changes online as new platforms are introduced, user behavior changes and trends shift in the marketplace.

I recommend getting started with affiliate marketing by either building a Facebook group, a blog, or a YouTube channel.  

The course I recommend everyone take to fast-track their way to success with affiliate marketing is Project 24.  It’s an incredible course that walks you through step-by-step how to build an affiliate marketing business online utilizing the power of blogging and YouTube (highly recommend it). 

If you want more posts on affiliate marketing, then you can keep reading by checking out some of the suggested posts below.  You can also leave a comment and let me know what strategy you’re going to be using to drive traffic to affiliate offers.