Lately, there are many articles around talking about how affiliate marketing is slowly destroying MLM. However, there are not enough similarities regarding the segment of the people doing each things, yes they both are a way to earn money. But not because police officers, and fire fighters are public servers looking after the community and that have received some type of training means they are the same and one does not threaten the other.

But… What Is MLM?

MLM stands for Multi-level marketing, and if you ask us, is a totally different strategy from affiliate marketing. See, MLM associates are payed for the sales they generate and for the sales people in their network generate. MLM is a type of direct sale, where sales occur with WoM and recommendations. The people involved in this relationship, sales the product and/or service, but also they recommend people to join their networks as a distributor of the company. On the other hand, affiliate marketing directly depends on your work performance, and your income is the reflects the publishers work.

Other Major Differences

Working with affiliate marketing requires you to learn and study marketing techniques such as SEO, Social Media Marketing, SEM, sponsored content, content generation, ads, email marketing, CRM, and other bunch of things that affiliates do to work as premium publishers. Yes, all of that can be left aside in MLM since sales are directly made. Furthermore, being an affiliate does not require you to be on top of other people’s work. Thus, people prefer to work with MLM when it comes to have “easy money” since being on top of others can earn you more easy money.

For people with a selected a skill set, affiliate marketing is much more lucrative than the multi-level marketing, because you do not have to look after the newbies on the team, or teach, train or motivate others. You can concentrate on what you are good at and earn a lot of money without any other trouble.

Affiliate marketing really focus not only shot term results but also on long term that will help your brand be part of the prefer/evoke set of the industry. Working with experienced publishers allows a brand to widen its reach to very high levels, something WoM is more limited. Moreover, is not like users reached by affiliate marketing strategies will not share their findings with family and friends.

MLM Is Not Being Destroyed By Affiliate Marketing

Either you work at MLM or at affiliate marketing programs, they both carry responsibilities and are great at producing results for advertisers and money for the partner. We at Wide Markets believe in building a long term experience with our advertiser clients and their buyers. We empower the future without boundaries and find growth by leveraging our innovative solutions, because our goals go beyond a sale, but to build a brand.