Affiliate cencus 5.1.6 & 5.5.1
The biggest eight sectors for affiliates, in order, are:
1) Travel / Flights (30%)
2) Entertainment and Music (27%)
Joint 3) Electrical goods (24%)
Joint 3) Computers / laptops / peripherals (24%)
Joint 5) Gifts / Gadgets (22%)
Joint 5) Books (22%)
7) Fashion / clothes / lingerie / accessories (21%)
Joint 
Financial services (19%)Joint
Mobile phones (19%)24% promote B2B and B2C. A further 3% promote B2B exclusively
Again I have to ask myself, what’s missing? Seems to me there are still some large untapped sectors like the B2B sector, lower conversions but higher basket. I don’t believe that the B2B sector has organsied themselves in the same way that the B2C sector is doing. Most B2B websites are splash pages with little or no way to be able to set up an affiliate program. On hindsight, I would have liked to have an additional question asking about drop shipping. I was surprised that travel / Flights came out on top, I like a few others had thought the financial sector would have been top.
Just under half of all affiliates are educated to degree level (48%)
35% are educated up to Bachelor degree level, 11% up to Masters level and 2% (34 in total) have PhDs.
Only 26% of affiliates have done any marketing courses compared to 73% who have not [Figure 13].
The proportion of affiliates who have done marketing courses increases very slightly for those doing affiliate marketing full-time [Figure 14].
30% of full-time affiliate marketers (i.e. those who do affiliate marketing as their day job) have done marketing course compared to 70% who have not.
50% of affiliate marketers say that their education has ‘not at all’ helped their present knowledge and understanding of affiliate marketing. [Figure 15]
39% say their education has helped ‘a little’ but only 11% say it has helped ‘a lot’.
It is clear is that there is a large community of self-taught individuals. Many affiliates are great entrepreneurs and need to be taken seriously because they are making a great contribution to the rapid growth of the internet economy.
I kind of knew what the results would be on this one. Firstly, University’s can only dabble in online marketing if at all. The problem being specific advertising channels keep shifting, by the time a university writes a module, the rules have changed. Especially in the areas of organic search and paid search. Affiliate Marketing is still seen as ambiguous and if you saw my previous post you will understand why.
I don’t believe you need any formal qualifications at all, if you are sound in English and Maths, the latter being quite key to be able to interpret and understand website stats and how much commission you are owed, then so long as you have a computer and basic tools, any one can enter into the arena.
As Wil Reynolds said at the affiliate summit in Vegas “Debunking SEO Myths” “Let’s not over complicate things.” If you can write good content your half way there. (I think Ill be quoting this man for the rest of my life,lol)
I probably fit into that 50% said their education had not helped at all. Nothing before I entered into affiliate marketing has helped me. What started out as a hobby became my work. I was lucky I had my partner that was a computer geek where I learnt a lot from him, he will tell you himself, he had no formal education in computers, he, like me was self taught. That’s the great thing about the net a4uforum.co.uk and abestweb and webmasterworld, you can ask questions if you get stuck.
(Was in draft for the last six weeks Old News but thought I would publish anyway…)
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment