“History teaches everything including the future.”
–Alphonse de Lamartine
Societies that had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, developed nasty germs and potent weapons of war-- and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, the Pulitzer Prize winning book by Jared Diamond explores why it was the Eurasian cultures that dominated the indigenous peoples of the Americas and South Pacific -- and not the other way around.
Take the affiliate marketing space as a microcosm of the development of civilizations in human history. Most people would agree that although currently a billion dollar industry, affiliate marketing is still very much in its infancy stage. Many companies are still very much in the hunter-gatherer stage, where tasks necessary for survival such as reporting, data analysis, and even creating linking urls are all manual processes day in and day out. This doesn’t leave much resource for progress and innovation.
In human development, plant and animal domestication meant food surpluses-- a prerequisite for the development of settled, politically centralized, socially stratified, economically complex, technologically innovative societies. Drawing parallels from human history: compare food production to the automation of your company’s processes. Automation can come in many forms, whether simply streamlining mundane tasks manually or even investing in new technology to efficiently support those needs.
An affiliate network could make campaign stats more conveniently available to publishers; an advertiser could streamline the process for pixel implementation; a client services team could reevaluate their method of communication with their sales force; a publisher could invest in more sophisticated data analysis tools. Be careful however that you do not try to change too much at one time. The last thing you want to become is a company with great processes and technology, but no money in the bank to run the business.
Do your analysis and determine which areas of your business will give you the most return for your effort if you automated some processes. The great part about the affiliate marketing space right now is that there is so much money being made by companies-- regardless of developmental stage-- simply because of all the inefficiencies that exist. To follow in the footsteps of past “food producing” civilizations, first determine which areas of your business most need improvement, then set goals and milestones for completion, and clearly define measures of success. Some metrics could include: revenue per employee, turnaround time for operational ticket items, or even the ability to support a certain number of remote or offshore employees (because of efficiencies).
It’s never too late to start automating your company. The affiliate marketing space is not a zero sum game. Even in society today, there is not one superpower that dominates the entire world. Each company will eventually discover and focus on their core competency and progress more and more toward cooperation amongst those who can contribute their piece of the matrix most effectively. Think of your company as its own little civilization in the affiliate marketing world, are you still in the hunter-gather stage or have you begun to build automation processes into your business to facilitate surpluses in resources? Are you ready for world domination?
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