Hi Luke, thank you so much for joining this interview today.
For those who may not know you yet, Luke Kling is the founder of affLIFT, one of the leading affiliate marketing communities in the industry. Launched in 2018, affLIFT has grown into a massive hub with over tens of thousands of members, offering thousands of follow-along campaigns, guides, and landing page templates. It’s well-known for being a highly active, zero-ego community where real, data-driven affiliates—from beginners to 7-figure media buyers—help each other optimize campaigns and share live case studies every day.
It’s truly an honor to have you here today to share your journey and where performance marketing is heading. Let’s dive straight in!
1. You started in this industry at a very young age and later led marketing at PeerFly. Looking back over two decades, what is the single biggest mindset shift that has kept you successful in this industry for so long?
The biggest shift for me has been learning to stay flexible.
Affiliate marketing changes constantly. Offers die, traffic sources change rules, platforms get harder, tracking changes, AI comes in, and what worked 6 months ago might not work today. If you get too attached to one method, you are going to struggle.
The people who last in this industry are the ones who keep testing, keep learning, and do not take losses personally. A failed campaign is usually just data. You paid for information, now you have to use it.
That mindset has helped me a lot: test, learn, adjust, and keep moving. You are going to have losers. I’ve been doing this a LONG time and I still have losers. I still make dumb mistakes. Keep moving forward.
2.You created affLIFT as an affordable, high-quality “middle ground” to fight back against spammy free forums and overpriced premium groups. Looking at the community today, how close is it to your original vision?
affLIFT has far exceeded my early expectations but every day we are still working towards the vision.
When I started affLIFT, I wanted there to be a real middle ground. At the time, you basically had free forums full of spam or very expensive groups that beginners could not pay for. I had a good job and was making good money and many of the popular forums I still didn’t feel comfortable paying for! I wanted affLIFT to be affordable, friendly, and actually helpful.
The thing I am most proud of is the culture. People are posting real follow alongs, real stats, real mistakes, and other members are jumping in to help. Not every campaign turns green, but that is the point. You learn so much faster when you are building in public instead of testing in silence. We are all trying to help each other. No big egos. Just everyone trying to succeed at something very difficult to do!
So yes, I think affLIFT is very close to the original vision. The community is what made it work.
3. You are a strong advocate for affiliate-friendly networks like PropellerAds, especially when it comes to Pop and Push traffic, rather than fighting the strict compliance on Facebook. Why do Pops and Push remain your personal staples, and what other traffic sources (like Native or Search Arbitrage) are you seeing gain massive traction on affLIFT right now?
I still like Pops and Push because they are accessible.
You do not need a complicated funnel or a $10,000 test budget to start learning. You can launch, collect data, optimize zones or creatives, and actually understand what is happening pretty quickly.
With Facebook or other strict platforms, a beginner can spend more time fighting compliance than learning media buying. Pops and Push are not easy (because affiliate marketing is NOT easy), but they let you focus on the basics: offer fit, tracking, angles, landing pages, optimization, and budget control.
PropellerAds has been a big part of that for our community. They have won Top Traffic Source on affLIFT every year because members keep using them and sharing results.
Right now, I am also seeing a lot of interest in Native, Search Arbitrage, survey arbitrage, and AI assisted campaign workflows. Native is interesting because there is more room for angles and presell. Search and survey arbitrage are interesting because when the numbers work, they can scale very well.
4. On the offer side, low-friction verticals like Sweepstakes, Lead Gen, and mVAS (Mobile Value Added Services) have always been forum favorites. In the current landscape, which offer types are showing the best conversion rates when paired with these budget-friendly traffic sources?
The usual low friction verticals are still popular for a reason.
Sweepstakes, lead gen, dating, mVAS, antivirus/utility, and smartlink style monetization can all work well with Pops and Push because the user does not need to make a huge buying decision. You are usually asking for a click, a signup, a phone submit, an install, or some other relatively simple action.
mVAS has been getting a lot of attention again, especially with PropellerAds and Golden Goose style campaigns. Dating still performs well with Push when the angle and GEO fit. Sweepstakes and lead gen are still good because they are easy for newer affiliates to understand and test. All of the Zeydoo offers are also popular. They’re in-house surveys and engagement pages are easy converts that members are utilizing quite a bit.
The big thing is not just the vertical though. It is the offer. A good prelander with a bad offer will still struggle. Sometimes the traffic is fine, the lander is fine, and the offer is the problem.
5. You’ve been utilizing AI workflows and custom assistants (like your AI agent “Jeff”) to launch campaigns via API in under 60 seconds. How is this practical automation changing media buying right now, and what parts should humans still control?
AI is making the boring and repetitive parts much faster. It is also helping me reduce my silly mistakes.
With my own AI agent, Jeff, I can have it help with research, campaign setup, API work, landing page ideas, newsletter drafts, scripts, and optimization workflows. The big win is speed. Something that used to take 30 minutes or an hour can sometimes be done in under a minute once the workflow is set up.
A good example of this not directly related to running an affiliate campaign is that I have Jeff handle one work on one of the community’s favorite things…promo code giveaways. I used to manually review every person that requested a promo code, figure out if they qualified for one, assigned them a promo code on the Google Sheet setup with the ad network giving the code away, and then private message them the code. There was a lot of room for me to make mistakes in that workflow. Now, Jeff handles everything except sending the promo code to the member. I still do that .
But I do not think humans should be removed from the process when dealing with AI and affiliate marketing.
Humans still need to control the strategy. You need to decide what offer makes sense, what angle is worth testing, what data actually matters, and when the AI is making a bad assumption. AI is great for execution, organization, and speeding up testing. But the affiliate still needs to understand the business. I have decades of experience with running affiliate campaigns and a lot of time I’ll have a fairly accurate “feeling” about a campaign that the AI simply can’t mimic (yet).
Also, as someone who has done it, if you automate bad strategies, you just lose money faster.
That being said, every single person reading this needs to start experimenting with AI and AI agents. This is the future and you do not want to be left behind.
6. With so much noise around massive tech shifts in 2026, what is one major opportunity or traffic strategy that most media buyers are still completely underestimating?
I think a lot of people are still underestimating practical AI workflows.
Not “AI will make everyone rich” hype. I mean actually using AI to remove friction from your day-to-day process.
Build small tools. Use APIs. Automate reports. Generate angle ideas. Monitor campaigns. Create landers faster. Have an agent help you organize your data and spot things you might miss.
Most affiliates are still using AI like a chatbot. The bigger opportunity is using it like an assistant that can actually do work.
The affiliates who combine real media buying experience with AI workflows are going to have a big advantage. This is something I am beginning to talk about A LOT on the forum.
7. If you had to start over today with zero audience, no data, and a very limited budget, what exact combination of traffic source and offer type would you pick to get your first profitable campaign?
If I had to start over with a small budget, I would probably keep it very simple:
PropellerAds + Pops or Push + a proven low friction offer like mVAS, survey, or dating.
I would not try to test five traffic sources at once. I would pick one traffic source, one ad format, one GEO or a small group of GEOs, and one offer type.
The goal of the first campaign would not be to get rich. The goal would be to learn the process: tracking, campaign setup, reading data, cutting bad zones, testing angles, and understanding why something is or is not converting.
If you can get through that first real test and know what happened, you are already ahead of most beginners. This is the same strategy we’ve been preaching on the forum for 8 years for beginners!
Oh, and try to use AI to help .
8. For someone completely new to affiliate marketing today, what is your step-by-step blueprint for getting started? How should they leverage affLIFT’s guides, choose their first angle, and launch a simple live campaign without getting overwhelmed by information overload?
My advice would be:
Pick one path. Do not try to learn Facebook, Native, Push, Pops, SEO, email, and cloaking all at once. Pick one simple paid traffic method.
Go through the beginner material on affLIFT. Not just passively reading but actually follow the steps. Set up tracking, understand postbacks, learn the terms, and see how other members structure campaigns.
Choose a simple offer. Start with something low friction like we talked about above. Survey, mVAS, dating, lead gen, or a smartlink can all be good starting points depending on the traffic source.
Launch a small real campaign. You will learn more from spending $25-50 carefully than from reading 100 threads and never launching anything.
Start a follow along. This is probably the biggest shortcut on affLIFT. Share what you are testing, your setup, your data, and your questions. You will get feedback and stay accountable.
Do not change everything at once. Beginners often panic and start changing the offer, GEO, lander, bid, traffic source, and creatives all at the same time. Then they have no idea what mattered.
Use the data. Cut what is clearly bad, keep testing what has potential, and do not take losses personally.
The goal is to build the habit of launching, tracking, learning, and improving.
9. Finally, what is your golden rule for an affiliate to build a sustainable, long term business instead of just chasing short lived campaign exploits?
My golden rule is: focus on building a repeatable process, not chasing one lucky campaign.
A hot campaign is great, but campaigns die. Offers get paused. Traffic sources change. Competitors copy angles. If your entire business depends on one trick, it is not really a business.
Long term affiliates build systems. They know how to test. They track properly. They build relationships with networks and traffic sources. They understand their numbers. They keep learning.
If you can consistently launch, measure, optimize, and adapt, you give yourself a real chance to stay in the game for years. That is much more valuable than one short-lived exploit.
