How AI Is Changing Affiliate Marketing, And What You Should Do About It

AI has changed the online business landscape considerably over the past few years, and affiliate marketing is no exception.

One of the biggest changes is the way people search for information. AI-powered search can now answer many straightforward questions without the searcher ever needing to visit a website. That creates a problem for the kind of generic, keyword-focused content that has traditionally been a big part of affiliate marketing.

But I don’t think this means that affiliate marketing is becoming irrelevant. In fact, I think it creates an interesting opportunity for those of us who are prepared to do something different.

I’ve put together a video looking at this subject, including some ideas from a recent Kinsta article about affiliate marketing in the AI search era, and some developments taking place at Wealthy Affiliate.

AI makes generic content easier

Let’s start with the obvious problem.

If you ask an AI tool to write a general article about affiliate marketing, it can produce one almost instantly. Ask it for an article about the five best autoresponders, or the ten best affiliate marketing tools, and it can give you something perfectly readable in seconds.

The problem is that everybody else can do exactly the same thing.

As AI becomes better at producing this kind of generic content, there is less reason for someone to visit one particular website simply to read information that could have been generated anywhere else.

This is one of the points raised in the Kinsta article I discuss in the video. AI can deal very effectively with basic questions and generic information, while there is still a need for content that provides depth, nuance, hands-on experience and useful detail that cannot simply be copied from one generic article to another.

And this is where I think things get interesting for affiliate marketers.

Your experience becomes more important

Every affiliate marketer has a particular combination of experience, interests, background, opinions and personality.

Nobody else has exactly the same combination.

That is something worth putting into your content.

If you have actually used a product, tell people what happened. If you have tested a service and found something that surprised you, talk about it. If you have been involved in a particular area of online business for years, draw on that experience rather than simply asking AI to explain the subject for you.

Even your quirks and eccentricities can help make your content recognisable.

I know that sounds slightly strange, but that is actually part of the point. If AI makes it easier for everyone to produce polished, generic material, then being a real person with your own particular perspective becomes more valuable.

So my approach is not to avoid AI. It is to use AI to complement and support your uniqueness, rather than replace it.

Use AI to help you, not to become you

There are plenty of things AI is extremely useful for.

I use it for research, brainstorming, organising ideas, improving writing and repurposing content. It can also take care of a lot of the tedious work involved in running an online business, which means you can spend more time on the parts that actually require your own input.

For example, you might start with your own experience and ideas, then use AI to help organise them into an article.

You can ask it to suggest a structure, identify areas that need more explanation or help improve the wording. You can then go back through the result and add your own examples, opinions and experiences.

That is a very different process from simply typing a subject into an AI tool and publishing whatever comes out.

The more of your own thinking you put into the process, the more useful AI becomes as an assistant.

Go deeper into specific subjects

Another interesting point from the Kinsta article is the increasing importance of more specific searches and real-world information.

People are not always searching for broad subjects such as “affiliate marketing”. They may have a much more specific question because they are already researching a particular problem or considering a particular purchase.

That creates opportunities for affiliate marketers who can provide useful information based on actual experience.

Instead of another generic article such as “The 10 Best Affiliate Marketing Tools”, you might create a detailed walkthrough of a tool you actually use.

You could show how you set it up, what happened when you used it, what you liked, what you didn’t like, and what you discovered that wasn’t immediately obvious.

You could test a product yourself, compare its features, investigate particular edge cases or demonstrate exactly how something works.

That kind of content gives the reader something more than a collection of generic facts.

Don’t underestimate YouTube

This is also one reason I think video is becoming increasingly useful for affiliate marketers.

YouTube gives you an opportunity to demonstrate products and services rather than simply describing them.

More importantly, people get to see and hear an actual person. That immediately adds something that a generic AI-generated article does not have.

I’m obviously doing exactly that in the video above. You can see me talking about the subject, explaining what I think and drawing on my own experience of affiliate marketing.

And you don’t need an expensive studio or a huge production budget to do this. You can start with very simple videos and improve as you go. For affiliate marketers who are willing to put themselves on camera, that can become another way of establishing a recognisable identity online.

Build an audience you can reach directly

The video also touches on something that has been important in affiliate marketing for a long time: building your own audience.

An email list gives you a way to communicate with people directly rather than relying entirely on search engines.

You can also use YouTube, Reddit, Facebook groups and other communities where appropriate to develop relationships around a particular subject.

The important thing is to contribute something useful rather than simply turning every interaction into a sales pitch.

Over time, this can help you establish yourself as someone people recognise and trust within a particular area.

AI and the new Wealthy Affiliate

The final part of my video looks at something happening at Wealthy Affiliate, where I host all of my WordPress blogs.

Wealthy Affiliate is developing a completely redesigned version of its platform called the new Wealthy Affiliate Experience, with an AI system called ACE embedded into it.

The interesting part, from the perspective of this article, is that ACE is intended to be deeply customised to the individual user rather than simply providing the same static training to everybody.

The idea is that you can interact with the AI and use it to help build your business according to your particular needs. According to the information discussed in the video, ACE is intended to help users learn, perform tasks, build things within the platform and initiate training.

I also asked Kyle, the founder of Wealthy Affiliate, whether ACE would be able to help with promotional material.

His response was that promotional material creation is within its intended scope, including things such as ad copy, creatives, landing page content and variations for different placements.

That is particularly interesting because it brings us back to the main point of this article.

AI can potentially do more and more of the work involved in running an online business, but the business still needs to have something distinctive about it.

Go vertical, not generic

I think the easiest way to look at all of this is to stop worrying about whether AI can produce an article faster than you can.

It obviously can.

Instead, ask yourself what you can bring to the subject that a generic AI-generated article cannot.

Go deeper into the subjects you actually know.

Use your own experience.

Show people how things work.

Test products and services.

Share your successes, failures and discoveries.

Create YouTube videos where you show your face as a real person who is unique (and possibly even a bit weird)

Build an email list and an audience that you can communicate with directly.

And let your personality come through.

The internet is going to contain an enormous amount of generic AI-generated material. I don’t think the answer for affiliate marketers is to compete by producing even more of it.

There is another option.

Go vertical. Go deeper and narrower into your particular area of expertise, and use AI to help you express what makes your approach different.

That is the approach I intend to take, and the three resources that will help me are: