How AM Has Changed In The Last Few Years, And What You Should Be Doing About It

As an addon to my yearly post about what verticals and traffic sources are working for AM right now, I thought I’d do an additional post tracking other changes in the industry.

Affiliate marketing is growing up fast as an industry, and it’s easy to miss or underestimate the ways in which the market, the technology, and the opportunities out there are changing.

So here’s a summary of the trends to watch, to take advantage of – or to sit back and go “I’m glad we don’t have to do it the old way any more!”.

Disclosure: some of the tech I mention here – Funneflux and Adplexity – is funded by STM Ventures, who are part of the same company that runs STM. I’m not involved with those projects, though.

Technology

Having a tracking server is no longer mandatory. It used to be that you couldn’t get started in AM without installing a tracker on a remote server. Now, multiple services including Voluum, Adsbridge and Thrive offer hosted trackers so you can get started quicker and have less maintainance overhead.

Trackers have really grown up. Just a few years ago, the options for tracking were pretty badly outdated, hard to use, and required customisation to do even comparatively simple things – anyone recall the hacks to get split-testing working for landing pages? But that’s totally changed. FunnelFlux is my personal favourite tracker for highly advanced features, but all the mainstream new wave of trackers are just amazing compared to what came before.

CDNs are easy to use and comparatively affordable. Three or four years ago, serving ads to a far-away geo meant tracking down a hosting company there, or accepting slow load times. I remember the hours I spent looking into South American VPS providers! Nowadays, any number of CDNs will deliver your pages fast and incredibly cheaply. If you’re not already using a CDN you definitely should be.

S3 and similar services mean you don’t need a lander server. If you can avoid having a server, you should – they take time and money to maintain and have downtime, security, and other problems. Being able to just throw all your landers up on Amazon S3 or a similar service is a huge change for the industry.

Spy Tools are far better. Some people love them, some people hate them, but spy t ...