AI: The Ultimate Threat to Affiliate Marketing’s Future?

In this episode, I want to talk to you about AI.

Will AI be the death of affiliate marketing and you as a marketer?

The short answer is no. But there are a few conditions, and you need to be aware of the fact that things change, things move forward, and you have to adapt.

You have to be flexible, you have to be willing to move with the times.

And so, will this AI craze be the end of you and your business in terms of blogging and content creation and copywriting and so on?

Well, that is really up to you and how you move forward with the times.

So first of all, when it comes to AI, I’m sure you’ve heard of ChatGPT and Jasper and all these different tools that are springing to life.

Jasper and a few others have been around for quite some time, but ChatGPT came around in November-ish of 2022 and took the world by storm because of the simplicity of the dashboard and the user interface and so on.

Previous AI tools have been quite sort of cumbersome, required a bit more effort and time to learn, whereas ChatGPT was very fast, essentially boom, boom, boom and it creates really “good” content.

Good being in quotation marks, obviously, because know good is subjective, right?

So will this be the end of you?

Well, not really, but it really is up to you.

So first of all, obviously ChatGPT is very, very good for content creation, rewriting your content, rephrasing things, giving you angles, developing your content ideas, whether it’s for blogging or YouTube, coming up with copywriting, headlines, descriptive meta descriptions for SEO and so on and so forth. It’s really, really good basically for any kind of content development.

It has a whole range of other uses for other niches and other avenues, but obviously we are affiliate marketers, so I’ll stick to our thing as it were.

So for blogging, for example, for creating blog post outlines or developing content or rewriting paragraphs or rephrasing things and basically just pulling sources from the internet, you can ask it, “Give me a statistic about cancer,” and it would bring back stats about it just like that.

So it’s very, very good in that sense.

But will it be the end of you? Well that depends.

ChatGPT and so on can make you incredibly lazy because unfortunately most people are lazy.

And it will also make you completely dependent on the tool if you’re not careful.

So people can very quickly become lazy and dependent on the tool.

And also people will inevitably stop developing their skillset because if you become completely lazy and dependent on that tool, then you’re not developing your skillset because you’re not doing the work, the tool is.

And that also leads to you not being able to think on your own.

Because imagine if I ask you come up with a headline for this squeeze page and you panic,

“But I haven’t got my AI tool. How can I do that? How do I create a good headline?”

That’s one you lose, right?

Because you need to be able to think on your own and understand what makes a good headline, what makes a good paragraph, what makes a good blog post, what makes a good structure to a blog post?

What makes a good call to action to a video? You need to know those things.

And also the one danger is that if you become lazy, dependent and not developing the skillset, it means that your content, whether it’s a video or a blog post, becomes stale.

Also, it can become quite biased. And it will also lack consistency because of the fact that the tools depend on the input you ask it for.

So you can ask tool use, very, very, very similar commands and it will give you very different results, sometimes very similar results.

So the consistency will be there because it depends on what you ask it.

And so what happens is your content becomes either very consistent or inconsistent, but it will be consistently stale and biased.

Because don’t forget guys, the AI tool, even though it is just a computer and it has no feelings and so on, it can become biased because it depends on what you put into it.

And also depends on what the coders in the background are doing with the AI tool, because they can and will limit certain functions and behavior patterns of the AI depending on their bias.

So anyway, it is very important to understand that.

And also, if you become lazy, dependent, you’re not developing a skill set and you’re not able to think on your own, it means that your content will have no personality because you’re not adding anything to it.

So it’s very, very important that you use that guideline of basically make the content good for the user, the person reading or watching the video or whatever it is, make it good for them so they leave with a nice pleasant feeling and you solve their query and the user experience is good and you showcase your authority.

That is the most important thing. If you use it purely because you can copy and paste and do it fast. I’m sorry, but you are an idiot.

And yes, the AI tool will be the death of you because you are not a marketer, you are a wanna-entrepreneur, you are lazy, you have proven to yourself just by thinking lazy, that you are lazy and that you need to change your mindset.

Now, for the rest of us who just enjoy using the tool because it helps us, will it be the end of us in terms of content creation and so on?

Personally, no, I don’t think so at all. Because here’s the thing, technology will always develop and you have to change with it.

So what you have to do do is if you want AI tools to help you not destroy you, then you have to learn to use them.

You have to learn to grow with them, you have to keep on top of developments in terms of what they’re doing and how they’re growing. So you can use them to grow your business. Otherwise it will destroy you.

Because here’s the thing, if you don’t develop with the times and be flexible and be malleable, then you will simply become a dinosaur and dinosaurs die off eventually.

Think of it in this way, my Auntie runs a travel agency and back in the early seventies, eighties, nineties and so on, early nineties when she was selling holidays, she had a local travel agent shop, meaning people came into the shop in person to book holidays with her.

And obviously when the internet arrived, that started to change things quickly because people started booking holidays online.

Now, luckily for her, she was on top of it. So she went online quite early and that meant she raced ahead of the competition.

Other companies that didn’t bother doing that, because they didn’t think the internet was a worthwhile thing doing, they would suffer and struggle.

And I’m sure there are many, many companies that went bust because of the internet. Not because of the internet, but because they didn’t bother keeping up with the times.

So don’t make that same mistake with AI tools.

They’ve been around for a couple of years now, AI tools, in a more sort of rudimentary form.

And I remember seeing them when they first arrived and they’ve gone from being very, very, very basic crap, but showing some substance, to now becoming a fully fledged, wow, okay, this is pretty good.

Now this is becoming real. This like is proper sci-fi stuff from space age, but you can move with times.

So long story short, use them to your advantage to help you, to aid you, to make you a better marketer.

Don’t become so dependent on them that you become lazy and basically you stop thinking because then guess what?

You are going to suffer. And make sure whatever content you create, whether it’s a blog post, a Quora answer, a YouTube video, whatever it is, a Facebook post, make sure that you add your voice and personality and your message.

Don’t become stale because the content it will create is stale, is predictable, and you can tell AI content sometimes.

So basically, long story short, don’t be lazy and use it, develop it, grow with it, and leverage it in whatever way you can to help you grow your business. So AI tools, will it be the death of affiliate marketing?

No, not really, but only if you let it, only if become lazy and you basically are an idiot.

Okay, so I’ll see you guys inside the community, and let’s keep pushing forward with our business.