The start of a new year is the perfect opportunity to begin thinking about ways to revamp your affiliate marketing efforts. Though it takes some hard work, affiliate marketing can be extremely rewarding once you’ve built up a customer base and gained some traction.

One of the best ways to improve your affiliate marketing in 2024 is to stay up-to-date on the latest trends in the affiliate marketing industry. Like most industries, affiliate marketing is not static; it’s a constantly fluctuating push and pull of various factors that influence consumer behaviors and the best ways to reach them.

To help you navigate the ever-changing affiliate marketing environment, we’ve assembled a list of the top five affiliate marketing trends to keep an eye on in 2024. Let’s get started.

Trend 1: AI in Affiliate Marketing

Artificial intelligence is reshaping nearly every industry, affiliate marketing included. While the dust has begun to settle from the initial generative AI craze set off by tools like DALL-E, Midjourney, and ChatGPT, this doesn’t mean AI is going away anytime soon — it just means it’s becoming more apparent which AI trends are fads and which are here to stay.

Affiliate marketing is one area that is likely to continue to be heavily affected by AI in 2024. Digital marketing, in general, is one of the industries that generative AI is impacting most heavily. Thus, it’s in your best interests as an affiliate marketer to learn how to use AI tools like ChatGPT to improve your content creation and marketing strategy. However, exactly what the long term effect of AI will be on affiliate marketing is not yet entirely clear. 

While AI is not quite ready to compete head-to-head with human-written content in terms of quality, it’s still enormously useful for speeding up your affiliate content creation process, as well as for optimizing and managing your marketing campaigns. For example, you can use ChatGPT to help you brainstorm content ideas or generate first drafts of marketing copy, or to quickly build lists of keyword variations.

There are also AI tools that make it easier to provide personalized content or product recommendations that increase conversion rates. Most importantly, the AI landscape is still shifting quickly and dramatically, so it will be very important for affiliate marketers to keep a close eye on developing trends in artificial intelligence throughout 2024 and beyond.

Trend 2: The Growing Importance of Video Marketing

Video marketing is another trend that’s going to play a major role in affiliate marketing in 2024. While video content has long been one of the most effective ways to market affiliate products online, it’s only continuing to grow in popularity. Written content like blogs and email campaigns still get good results in many cases, but they’re being increasingly overshadowed by the power of video marketing.

One reason that video content works so well for affiliate marketing is because it reflects the popularity of platforms like Youtube and TikTok that revolve around video content. Affiliate marketers should consider shifting their strategies to incorporate more video content to adapt successfully to this trend.

There are all kinds of ways to prioritize video content in your affiliate marketing, Here are just a few types of marketing videos that could be perfect for advertising affiliate products:

• Product reviews
• Product tutorials or how-tos
• Unboxing videos
• Product demonstrations
• Videos showing off creative product uses
• Interactive contests or promotions

Trend 3: The End of Third-Party Cookies

Third-party cookies — which track the sites consumers visit and the products or content they view — have been a staple of affiliate marketing for years. They’re what make it possible to show consumers personalized advertisements based on past online activity on other websites. However, consumers have recently raised some valid concerns about the consequences that third-party cookies have on digital privacy.

Driven by these widespread concerns, Google is planning to completely phase out the use of third-party cookies by 2024, which means affiliate marketers who use them will need to find other ways to learn about their audiences and deliver relevant recommendations. 

One of the easiest solutions is to rely only on first-party cookies, instead. NutriProfits uses a number of first-party cookies to make our site work better and to help our affiliate marketers track the sales they make. There are other solutions as well, such as social media targeting, contextual advertising, privacy-compliant extensions, or personalized tracking domains.

Trend 4: Voice Search

By the end of 2024, there are projected to be approximately $8.4 billion voice assistants in use throughout the world — more than 2024’s projected total world population. Unsurprisingly, the value of voice search-driven ecommerce is skyrocketing as well. If you want to improve your affiliate marketing in 2024, voice search is a trend you definitely need to come to grips with.

Voice search will change affiliate marketing in a few ways. Primarily, more and more people are searching for information about products (or even ordering products) by speaking out loud to their phones instead of typing queries into search engines. 

This means affiliate marketers are going to need to rethink the way they use long-tail keywords in their affiliate marketing content. People type and talk very differently, so consider that you may need to incorporate longer keywords that match natural speaking cadences instead of typing cadences in 2024.

The increasing popularity of voice search also means affiliate marketers will need to place greater emphasis on optimizing featured snippets. When someone is scrolling through a list of search engine results, they may ignore the featured snippet and choose to click on one of the other top results.

However, when a person uses their voice assistant to search the internet, the assistant will typically read only the featured snippet out loud — making it much more likely that this information or suggestion is the one the user chooses to go with.

Trend 5: Mobile Optimization 

Like several of the other trends on this list, mobile technology is nothing new, but it’s more important than ever to recognize the extent to which mobile devices are dominating consumers’ online shopping habits. Today, more people than ever are browsing and ordering products from their phones. Consider that 72% of purchases made through NutriProfits’s affiliate program come from mobile devices — that’s nearly 3 out of every 4 products sold.

The trend toward mobile optimization is closely linked to other affiliate marketing trends, like the increasing importance of video content and voice search, because trends like these make it easier than ever to find products on your phone. To keep up with the popularity of mobile devices, affiliate marketers need to make sure they’re carefully optimizing their affiliate websites and affiliate content to perform well with smaller screens and touch controls.

Key Takeaways

Affiliate marketing is changing fast — just like most industries today. While there are practically countless market and technological factors influencing affiliate marketing’s evolution, there are five trends in particular that are set to have the most significant impact in 2024:

• AI in affiliate marketing
• The growing importance of video marketing
• The end of third-party cookies
• Voice search
• Mobile optimization

As we enter a new year, it’s crucial for affiliate marketers to take these trends into account and adapt their strategies to match. Keeping up in these five key areas could be the difference between a struggling affiliate marketing business and a thriving one in 2024.