Affiliate marketing is a fairly young industry, but it already has a couple or three generations of people working in it since the origins on the adult side in the 90’s.
I had a chance to chat with a bunch of the potential future affiliate marketers yesterday at a career event at my local middle school.
The kids came through for a couple hours to learn about a wide variety of careers, including medicine, journalism, computer engineering, aviation, banking, law enforcement, photography, education, science, military, and oil and gas exploration.
And then there was me to chat them up about affiliate marketing.
I showed them an example of a Dallas Cowboys fan site that promotes the Fanatics affiliate program, and they were wide-eyed at the opportunity of doing something like that at their age.
That’s where I had a leg up on the other people there. I was selling these kids on getting into this now – not in 8 or 10 or more years.
I shared with them how I wished this was around when I was a kid, so I could have worked from home, instead of washing dishes for minimum wage. They liked that, a lot.
Many of them grabbed a copy of the January 2013 issue of FeedFront magazine to learn more about this mythical stuff.
And I printed out the “How Affiliate Marketing Works” graphic chart from Rae Hoffman to help them get a better grasp of things.
It was a really neat experience to see how excited these middle schoolers were about what I had to say.
So beware to all of you existing affiliate marketers. There are a bunch of new, hungry affiliates on the way.