The Rise of the AI Affiliate

Affiliate marketing is a juggernaut in the digital economy, quietly driving tens of billions of dollars every year. It's a simple yet powerful concept: earn a commission for each purchase made through your referral.

Now, we're entering an era where the intersection of AI and affiliate marketing is set to redefine this space.

I'm sharing this with you because when paradigm shifts like this occur, generational wealth is created. I wish someone I had known that earlier in my career. Now, I take these moments seriously.

Thousands of AI affiliates are about to be born in 2024. A new job for a new era.

But first, a little history for background.

History of Affiliate Marketing

95-2002: Early Affiliate Marketing​
The dawn of affiliate marketing saw the rise of websites peppered with affiliate links. When the dotcom boom was happening, people figured out referrals would be a big part of it. Much of this traffic was driven by portal websites and search.

This was just the beginning.

2002: Ad Arbitrage​
The emergence of large ad networks like Overture, Yahoo and Google Ads marked a pivotal shift. Suddenly, owning a website wasn't a prerequisite for earning affiliate revenue. People began buying keywords and redirecting traffic to landing pages, essentially arbitraging the ad system.

You didn't need to own the attention, you could just rent it. So, if it costed you $10 to buy a customer, but you got paid $15, you'd do that all day long.

Example: buying Google ads keywords for "dating nyc" and linking to an eHarmony landing page where they'd pay you $5 CPL (cost-per-lead).

2009-2022: Social Arbitrage​
The entry of Facebook ads and influencers opened new avenues. Highly targeted ads based on interests and likes heralded ad arbitrage 2.0, offering unprecedented precision. Influencers, morphing into media companies, turned into walking affiliate billboards, blending native advertising with their content.

2024-???: AI Arbitrage​
We're now entering the AI era, and it's transforming the affiliate marketing landscape in several ways:

• Faceless Social: Social media content creation is being revolutionized by AI. Now, both personal and brand accounts can use AI to regularly produce diverse content, from written posts to animated or video content. This shift is making its mark across various platforms such as YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok. AI tools are not just writing scripts; they're also animating and compiling videos. This enables marketers to effortlessly create high-quality, engaging content at a large scale, perfectly tailored for affiliate marketing.

• Personalized AI Chatbots: Chatbots are the new search. OpenAI's GPTs (little bots using OpenAI technology) will be embedded throughout the internet. If billions of people are finding their content through bots like GPTs, these bots will be the new wild west in affiliate marketing. They'll be personalized sales assistants providing personalized product recommendations based on user interactions.

• AI Responses: Crafting insightful or entertaining AI-driven responses can significantly boost internet presence. This not only attracts followers but also directs attention to affiliated products.

• AI Niche Websites: The proliferation of AI-written SEO articles can dominate search engine rankings. It's a game-changer for organic search marketing.

​BoringMarketing.com is the king of this whole AI-assisted SEO movement. How they use AI to bring in millions of unique visitors in organic search.

• using AI research agents to create content briefs

• using LLM automations to generate 1st drafts

• AI-assisted human editing

Basically, using a team of robots to make the whole SEO process more streamlined.

I saw them take a SaaS app from 8k to 80k organic visitors this month.