Affiliate Marketing

The structural weakness nobody mentions

Affiliate marketing is usually sold on what you avoid: no product, no support, no inventory, no refunds. All true. What is rarely said is that you have also given away every point of control.

You do not set the price. You do not set the commission rate. You do not own the customer — they become the merchant's, and every future purchase they make earns you nothing. You cannot fix the product if it disappoints. And the commission rate that made your business viable can be cut by an email you had no part in writing.

This has happened at scale more than once. Large affiliate programmes have reduced rates by half or more overnight, and entire businesses built on those rates became unprofitable the same day. There was no negotiation and no notice.

The implication is not that affiliate marketing is a bad idea. It is that affiliate income should be one revenue stream among several rather than the foundation. The people who were hurt worst by rate cuts were the ones for whom a single programme was everything.

Where the money actually concentrates

Commission structure determines almost everything, and it varies enormously.

Physical goods typically pay 3–8%. A $60 sale earns you around $3. To make $5,000 a month you need roughly 1,700 sales, which needs very substantial traffic.

Digital products and courses pay 30–50%. One $500 course sale earns $200. The same $5,000 needs 25 sales.

Software with recurring commissions is the one worth understanding. A tool paying 25% recurring on a $90-a-month subscription earns $22.50 every month for as long as that customer stays. Refer forty customers who stay two years and you have built something closer to a subscription business than a referral scheme.

The difference between the first and third is not effort. It is niche selection, made before you write anything.

Comparison intent is the whole game

There is a large difference between someone searching "how to build an email list" and someone searching "ConvertKit vs Beehiiv".

The first is learning. They will read your article, find it useful, and leave. The second has already decided to buy and is choosing between two options. They convert at rates several times higher, and there are far fewer of them, which is exactly why they are worth pursuing.

This is why the pages that earn are alternatives pages, comparisons, "best X for Y" lists and genuine reviews of things you have used. Broad informational content brings traffic that does not buy — and is precisely the traffic that AI answers in search results have absorbed most completely.

What still works

The version of this that has survived every algorithm update and every rate cut has three properties.

Genuine first-hand use. Reviews by someone who actually ran the software for six months read differently from summaries of other reviews, and increasingly that difference is what ranks.

An owned audience. An email list means the merchant cannot take your customers and the search engine cannot take your traffic. This is the single highest-value thing to build alongside affiliate content.

Diversification. Multiple programmes, multiple traffic sources, and ideally a product of your own eventually. The affiliate income funds the transition to something you control, rather than being the destination.