• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, February 21, 2024

This is a very unexpected question to be asking.  Affiliate marketing has been the overlooked cousin of digital media for the last 20+ years.  It was always there, and it “did its thing,” but it seems to be stepping out of the shadows now. 

My 14-year-old son recently informed me he was trying to do some drop-shipping with affiliates to make extra money.  My son is more tech-savvy than most, but it still caught me offguard.  I pressed to learn some more and discovered that “all the kids are doing it.”  Has my son become one of the folks who are sucked into influencers and thinks he can drive sales of obscure products that are only available through offshore websites?  I guess so.

What I find most interesting is he and his friends are establishing a small echo chamber of cross-selling in the hopes that one or two of them might catch fire and reach a broader audience.  All these kids are simply selling the same stuff to one another in their grades at school, but in doing so they are learning a valuable lesson about audience, marketing and ecommerce.  To be honest, I applaud them taking the initiative to find ways to generate revenue and learn a bit about what it takes to make it in a digital-centric world.

Does this mean that all these kids will grow up to become marketers?  Probably not, but marketing is a core skill that can help you in so many ways, across so many categories of business.  The skill is one that every young person should know.

But I digress.

Somewhere along the way, affiliate marketing went mainstream.  We have to give credit to those aforementioned influencers and the creator economy.  They are teaching a generation that there’s a way to make money online.  I see the parents of these kids taking the reins as well, also launching their own affiliate-driven online businesses.  The advent of platforms like Shopify and commerce giants like Amazon has enabled anyone with an audience and an idea to monetize their reach and deliver sales.

Getting started is easy, and these kids all know it.  They trial and test. They build Instagram profiles to harness and aggregate content, then try to monetize it.  They understand the concept that you need to try a few business ideas before you find the right one with audience-market fit.

Note I didn’t say product-market fit, because in this business it’s all about the audience, and less about the product.   Those products have already been created, so it’s simply about distribution.  If you can get in front of the right people, you can sell almost anything.  The question I have is whether they will get to the next stage of optimization -- or is it simply a volume game.  Get more stuff out there, catch fire, and move on?

Either way, I love seeing this generation take the tools we created and use them to their own needs.  It’s fascinating to watch -- and could revolutionize the ecommerce game over the next few years.

 

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