Zero-Click Searches Are Killing Affiliate Marketing (Unless You Do This)

For years affiliate marketing has been the promised land of passive income: a simple exchange of clicks and commissions.

So why is it not working that way for affiliates? Is affiliate marketing just a buzzword?

According to Jamie I.F., the founder of Endorsely, the problem is that the industry is still stuck in 2015 while influencer culture, creator economies, and AI-fueled discovery have transformed how people find and buy products.

Affiliate tools haven’t kept up, and brands using them are leaving money on the table.

And affiliates (the good ones) are walking away.

In this interview by Website Planet, Jamie will show us exactly how Endorsely is helping brands grow for REAL in a different way, using AI to find ideal affiliates, track non-click conversions, and outmaneuver competitors.

In 2-3 sentences, why does your company exist? What’s the fundamental pain point or flaw in your industry it was designed to solve?

Most affiliate software is designed for the old internet of 2015 where banners on websites controlled commerce. And they’re not designed to actually help you grow revenue, just to track clicks.

Our software helps SaaS brands not just set up their affiliate program, but actively finds them affiliates to grow their revenue.

Now, it’s the age of creators, influencers, and turning your best customers into advocates and ambassadors – yet the software platforms have not adapted for this.

None of the affiliate software I’ve ever used has actually tried to help me be successful and make me get rich. It’s just “Hey, here’s a dashboard, thanks for the subscription money, good luck with actually getting ROI!”.

That’s why with Endorsely, we built the first affiliate software that actively helps you GROW your affiliate program with our AI Affiliate Finder that digests your brand, understands who you are and who your customers are, and finds the best-fit influencers and affiliates for your brand.

We even find you the affiliates promoting your competition so you can approach them to get them to promote you instead!

Why is this issue especially relevant today? Can you share any recent statistics, research, or examples that prove its urgency?

For a few reasons…

1. Google search traditionally fueled affiliate programs, but Google search traffic is declining, and the affiliate business is too reliant on Google search traffic.

60%+ of Google searches now do NOT result in a click. This is fine if you’re a company with a product, since you can still benefit from zero-click searches if it’s surfacing your brand…

BUT, if you’re an affiliate who sells information (your product recommendations and “taste”), without someone clicking your link or using your promo code, you don’t make any money.

Yet, people still want to find products, but they search elsewhere:

• TikTok
• Reddit
• Twitch
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Podcasts
• Instagram
• And more…

So, if you’re creating an affiliate growth strategy, you have to consider the 10+ channels your potential customers are going to be spending their time beyond Google. This could be Discord or Slack groups, Facebook Groups, niche YouTubers, TikTok influencers, or anything else depending on your product.

2. Partnership marketing is extremely valuable, but it’s changing, and most software still fails at modern partnership marketing.

That’s why a new type of affiliate, referral and influencer marketing software is needed, that combines elements of each into one partnership marketing software to help these brands grow.

Partnership marketing is one of the best yet most underutilized marketing strategies around. It’s INSANE how many SaaS brands aren’t thinking about partnerships.

You can build massive companies JUST by being great at finding angles for partnerships with other brands with complementary audiences to you.

But those partnerships don’t always result in a clickable affiliate link.

So we’ve built software with more ways to track conversions from partners, such as:

• Promo codes for influencers
• Creating custom campaigns where you can pay per post
• Pay based on the number of views

Bonus: you can measure the ROI from every campaign from one central dashboard.

3. The buying journey is about to be destroyed by AI.

So how do you get your brand recommended by AI?

By incentivising thousands of brand mentions from your advocates!

We’re transitioning to an AI-first world, and within two years, I predict that more searches will be done by AI agents surfing the web for information to feed back to their humans, than will be done by humans themselves. Those AI agents will use LLMs that have knowledgebases, and also research on Google, Bing, etc, to find this information to make buying recommendations to their human.

Algorithms will likely default to the most popular and talked about brands. They can’t vouch for a newcomer since they haven’t tried his product. Too risky.

So how do they identify the most popular brands? Brand mentions across the information in their knowledgebase, or encountering a lot of mentions of the brand during their research phase online.

With an affiliate program, you incentivise people to talk about you, increasing the influence you have over AI recommendations in the future.

This is why I tell everyone: the ROI is not quantifiable just in conversions from affiliates. It’s so much more than this.

The ROI lies in being surfaced by every single recommendation someone has for a product in your niche when you dominate the training data used to train the next-gen AI models!!!

What kind of people or organizations are most affected by this issue, and why are they still stuck with it? What’s wrong in how they are trying to solve it?

Most brands are not doing referrals, or affiliate marketing, correctly. Many say they “TRIED it”, but it didn’t work.

And that’s fair…

BUT… that’s because they don’t take affiliate or partnership marketing seriously.

It’s not a sub-topic of another marketing channel – it’s a unique channel that requires a full-time person to manage. To support your affiliates to be successful and send you customers and grow your business for you.

A lot of people also complain they can’t find affiliates or they never apply to their program – so we built the AI Affiliate Finder that finds the perfect affiliates for them automatically! Now they have no excuses!

What should they do instead, and how do you help with that? What are the things you do that competitors CAN’T or WON’T do? What makes them game changers?

Firstly, they should include more CTAs in their emails and in their App, to tell their customers they have a referral program! The easiest way to increase referrals is to find your happiest customers with influence, and bring them on board as referral partners.

We’ve built tech to help with funneling customers into becoming referral partners.

Most businesses should also more actively recruit big affiliates and influencers. But, it’s hard and time-consuming. Both to recruit them, and to manage them.

This is why we’ve focused on our AI Affiliate Finder, which finds the best affiliates creating super relevant content on their niche, so all they have to do is invite them into the program and build the relationship from there.

For example, I also run an SEO tool called Answer Socrates. Here’s what the AI Affiliate Finder finds for this tool – a great selection of 1,043 active YouTubers and websites who would make great promoters:

No other competitors have any kind of tool that finds affiliates for you. Yes, there are networks like Impact, Awin, etc, but these are marketplaces. They are not finding specific people in your niche, they’re just buffets for thousands of generic affiliates that aren’t necessarily a good fit with the right audiences.

Can you share a milestone or testimonials that show your solution works? Great if you can show what metrics you move and by how much.

Yes, I have many, including using Endorsely to grow some of my other SaaS businesses! An SEO tool called Answer Socrates that I own a percentage of, uses Endorsely for its affiliate program.

Using the Affiliate Finder tool within Endorsely, a specific YouTuber was recommended to us as someone who had reviewed a lot of similar SEO tools. So, we followed the AI Affiliate Finder’s recommendations, and this person made a YouTube video review of the tool that generated over $600 in sales within the first week, earning themselves over $160, and is still sending signups every week now beyond this.

Without the tool, we may never have found this YouTuber with a perfect audience!

Another example comes from a friend of mine Adam Collins from Ignite SEO, who rather than being a customer of ours with his own program, had a successful affiliate campaign as an affiliate.

He used our promo code feature to earn $500/mo passive monthly affiliate commissions from a single 1-hour webinar.

He was due to give a webinar talk on how to get more local business leads to a group of business owners, and was recommending a product that would help them. But, because he’s telling them about it out loud, there’s no clicks on his affiliate link and no way to track that he led to the sales, so he can’t get paid.

With Endorsely, he had a promo code that gave all the webinar attendees 10% off the software, which made the attendees feel special.

AND if they used this code, it was automatically attributed to him – so he earned a $500/mo in affiliate commissions from the 20-ish people that signed up for the software.

Another example is actually Endorsely itself! We use our own software to run our own affiliate program, and give partners $10 for every free signup, plus 30% recurring commissions for anyone who upgrades to a paid plan. We’ve used this to recruit some big names in the SaaS influencer space, and we currently get more than 20 signups per week from our partners.

For a new business, getting these high buyer intent clicks from people recommending you is a massive win. And every SaaS should start an affiliate program to get the same brand growth (and direct sales!)

What’s the BIG vision for the future of your company? What’s in your roadmap, and how will these updates improve your clients’ lives?

We’re going to be the only software you ever need for affiliate, referrals, influencers, and all other types of partnership marketing.

We want people to open our software, and it’s everything you need to get distribution within partnerships, all in one place. All the data, all the potential affiliate partners, all the tools needed to turn your happy customers into advocates, everything.

This will solve so many peoples’ headaches. All the research into potential affiliates, all the potential brands they could partner with to promote each other, all the details for influencer partnerships – solved for them. I think we can do it all within Endorsely.

To wrap up, if there was one key takeaway you wish people could bring home from this interview, what would it be?

Referral marketing is the cheapest, highest ROI, and one of the funniest ways you can grow your business.

You go out, make friends and partnerships, and then they send you lots of money :). What more could you want?!

So, for the takeaway: if you’ve tried with an affiliate or referral program, and it hasn’t worked, then give it another try and properly commit to it.

Affiliate is like SEO, it’s NOT an overnight thing. It takes 6 months to get serious traction for a lot of businesses, and a lot of time building those partnerships. But when it’s all in place, it’s a fantastic and predictable growth engine to send you new customers every month and skyrocket your MRR.