The AI Shift: Why Affiliates Must Evolve Now

Welcome to revenue optimization with Stats Drone. And I want to talk about something that I've just become recently passionate about and maybe a little late to the game, but it's the world of AI tools. So, I've been messing around with AI tools for quite some time, but not really serious like every day or multiple hours per day. Um, but I've taken it to a new level and I just want to share some of my personal experiences and hopefully it might motivate some people to say, "Okay,

how do I get started and where do I start?" Um, let me just start from a story perspective. Um, the last two years we've had Chachi Batig uh happening and I've watched everyone use it in their own different ways. Like I've seen and interviewed people on this podcast where they're basically doing AI content at scale and just printing a lot of money which was like great for them.

Um, they might have known that this was kind of like a limited window where they could take advantage of it, but they did. So I kept asking people like in the question like AI came up almost every time whether it was intentional or not. And so I got a chance to learn how are people using AI um like in their creative thought process how they solve problems the different ways they can use a toolbt.

Um so I started kind of putting this in the back of my mind going okay I'm loading it up but I wasn't really taking it seriously on my side and for a couple reasons. Um, the main reason is I didn't think that we quite needed it quite yet. Uh, but now that's changed very quickly. And so I'm I'm using everything. I'm using tools like Lovable. I'm using tools like uh Claude uh Chatbt, but I actually think Claude is a lot better, especially when it comes to

doing any types of projects or coding. Um, and how do I think this is going to fit into the world of affiliate marketing? Uh, every way. Like I I can't imagine a a a space in time where you can't think about how AI can affect something you're working on. It in my opinion affects everything. So just a quick short story. I mean like a couple days ago I saw someone post on LinkedIn that you know they're looking for a new job and they're a designer and

I just said this is not good at all. Um so just to give you another background story. So I'm a self-taught designer. I've used tools like um Photoshop to build websites and then I switched to Sketch and then [snorts] I switched to Figma. So I know how to design stuff and I like doing it. I I actually enjoy the work. Now the the AI tools that exist for design today are just insane.

Like even for product both design and ideation it's just it's unparalleled. So now I can basically start building these tools in either claude um chatbt or tools like lovable and I can say I want to build this dashboard that does X Y and zed and I want this kind of theme and you can do everything from like feed it your own designs you can feed it any design saying you know I like this color scheme I like these choices of fonts um it does everything like

I think I'm a good designer but when I take my own designs and put it into these AI tools it makes it even better it uses the right font, the right colors, the right tone, the right everything. And whenever I think it's off, my ability to orchestrate it is just so much easier. It's almost feels like it's faster than me doing the work myself if I were to do this in Figma.

And I know in terms of the design space itself for product design, user experience design, uh these tools are changing just as fast. I mean, I forget all the different tools that are available, but there's like a UX pilot and there's just all these AI tools that you can make the design process even easier. So now it it's made me think it's like, okay, what do I need to do to get websites up and running quicker?

Um, it's changed my workflow. So, I've needed to build I think probably five or six different websites. And these projects I just kind of put in the side and said, "Okay, you know what? when we have a bit of time and money, we'll get someone to design them and then we'll pay for the uh cutting of the code and then we'll give it to our dev team so they can actually load these things.

Well, now I've been able to do almost all of this myself. It actually got to the point where not only did I have to design a single website, but I had an option. I could use a WordPress template out of the box where I'd have to load the template, not so difficult, and then populate the content, which is in theory not so difficult. But then I said, "Okay, let me try the same with a tool like Lovable." And then I did that and it was just

even easier. It's like I could basically just type the content out in the bar and say, "No, I need you to move things over." So rather than deal with the structured template that I can't break out of unless I start hacking the template, now I can actually go and basically design exactly what I want, how I want it. Um, it can be based in JavaScript or I can actually have it cut into CSS, HTML, um, PHP, it doesn't really matter.

Um, it's just unreal. And then just to give you another point about like, okay, how far can you take this? Well, I am a big fan of database. So, I've been using tools like Tableau for quite some time. Um, I'm getting comfortable learning, uh, like data tools like MySQL, um, which I think are are kind of easy, but they still take a bit of effort. um there's just so many libraries and services that do data viz for you and I'm like what is the future of

data visualization itself well I've actually built my own mini library of database which is all done in JavaScript so it's like I have this here ready to go as my own library which I basically talked to to create it versus there's other libraries that were built like 10 they're free and open source but you still have to kind of hack them and you can't hack them the way you want to unless of course You take that code and you put it into Claude and you say,

"Hey Claude, I want you to update this because I want to build something else." So the tools are just infinite. Um, how I think they're going to apply to the world of affiliate marketing, I think it's going to be a very aggressive transformation in probably one year time. So give you an example. How many affiliate sites out there are using WordPress? There's a lot. Let's just say it's 80% of affiliate sites are on WordPress.

How many have an outdated template? How many have outdated data? How many have an outdated design and how fast could you replicate and replace all this stuff? I think the answer is it could be done better, faster, and easier. You can literally take your tired looking WordPress site, um, download the screenshot of it, both desktop and mobile, put it into any of these AI tools and say, "I need a refreshed version for 2025," or, you know, if you're listening to this next year, 2026, it's basically,

what are the new design trends? What do you need to stay on top of? So, the people that don't do these things are going to be the ones that are left behind where either one of two things will happen. Their site will fade out of existence and they're going to start losing traffic or there's going to be these sharp sharper M&A people that will understand these things and say, "Hey, you have great content.

Your site has history. Your site has an old uh domain, which is good. It's part of the history checkbox. And it has authority and it has links. It has everything we need except for the prettiness um which we we know we're experts at. So if you don't do this yourself, someone else will and they'll come and offer you um a price tag of I don't know $5,000$10,000 $50,000 which is maybe amazing money for you.

But the last thing you'd want to see is that you accept that money and then a short period of time their payback is two months. Like imagine selling a site for $50,000 because it makes 5K a month and then they get the payback in a couple months. You'd be you'd feel kind of like cheated almost. You'd be like, "Oh, I wish I knew this and I wish I I knew how to do this." So the AI tools are here.

I think we're we're at a very critical uh turning point where if you don't do these things, I think that that weird invisible separation of when the industry all industries start separating. I think we're actually approaching a turning point. You know, there's a lot of these gurus out there that say things like your time to learn AI or some type of coding, you have a couple months to do it, otherwise it's too late.

I think that's a little crazy, but I think there's some truth in it because it it's all about not just time, but how much time you put in now and how good you are at able at your ability to kind of leverage that time. So, for example, if I'm able to use these AI tools and increase my output by a factor of 5x, that's amazing. But you have to pay attention to people that are doing a 10x.

Like, how are they doing this? So there's going to be learning what the tools are, knowing how to adapt to the tools, and knowing the best way of using the tools, which you could reverse engineer and say, you know what, it starts with the right prompts. If you know how to do that, you've basically got a good skill that you can start using that to stack. So, um, scary and exciting times ahead.

Um, I think we're going to see way more disruption than what we've seen in the world of the internet. And I'm saying this by me just reading what I'm hearing from a lot of other people. That's my job is to do interviews and ask people these these crazy questions. And every time I ask, especially when it comes to AI, and these people are AI experts, I just say, "Okay, I'm trying to put my own uh map together of what I think this looks like." And I

hope with with what I think I know, I hope this is helpful to you. And I'm looking forward to sharing more stuff about AI in the future. It's going to change everything. And who knows, maybe it's going to get to a point where it might be called AI, but we just take it for granted. So, it won't be AI anymore. it'll just be design, programming, and whatever.

It just happens to be done in an automated fashion that is more prompt based. Uh whether it's you creating the prompt or you creating a prompt and getting your answers back where you're not talking to databases, it's like the databases are are talking to you. So, good luck out there and uh um get started with some AI tools. Make it make it serious.