Performance PR, Is It Better Than Affiliate Marketing | Comparing Skillset, Scalability, & Income Stability

Performance PR is better than affiliate marketing for brands that are seeking to improve online visibility and perception specifically. Affiliate marketing is better for brands that just want to maximize revenue generation.

Performance PR works by combining aspects of public relations (PR) and performance marketing. Public relations is managing a company’s reputation to increase brand awareness and enhance public perception. PR agencies primarily accomplish this by securing placements with authoritative media and news outlets. Many PR agencies also leverage social media channels to stimulate more brand mentions online. Performance marketing is a digital marketing strategy where businesses only pay for concrete results, such as clicks, leads, sales, media placements, and backlinks.

I’ve been a performance marketer for over a decade. In the following article, I discuss how different performance PR agencies like Acceleration Partners, Canvas PR, and Whiteoaks PR function. I compare performance PR and affiliate marketing so you can decide which of these digital marketing business models is better for your skillset and income goals.

Performance PR Is Better for Marketers With Networking Skills

Marketers that offer performance PR services need to build strong relationships with journalists, influencers, media networks, clients, and industry peers. These relationships are crucial for securing the media placements, collaborations, and referrals to be successful. As such, PR is typically better for someone with an extroverted personality type.

As one PR professional on Reddit puts it, you need to have exceptional social skills to be successful in the PR industry.

➔ Affiliate marketing is better for marketing professionals who prefer to work independently. Affiliate marketers can make money online with minimal interactions with other people. Affiliate marketers just need to apply to the affiliate programs of the offers they want to promote and then promote those offers through their chosen digital marketing channels to generate income online. Therefore, affiliate marketing is more suitable for those with introverted personalities because most of the work is performed alone.

Performance PR Is Better for Scaling With People

Operating a performance PR agency requires manpower for scaling. That’s because PR is service-based work, so growth depends on how much client work the agency can accommodate. You need real people to fulfill client facing meetings. These tasks cannot be automated with AI or freelancers external to the company. As such, performance PR agency owners need to invest into hiring more team members to optimize revenue potential.

➔ Affiliate marketing is better for scaling with money. That’s because affiliate marketing earnings are based primarily on traffic rather than relationships. Traffic can be scaled by investing more money into PPC ads, SEO, and content. As such, an affiliate marketer can make more money just by spending more money.

An affiliate marketer on Reddit mentions they were able to have their first $1,000 day doing affiliate marketing with Facebook Ads by first optimizing their ad campaign to generate $20 revenue on just $10 ad spend. Once they had proved the concept, they just invested more money into ad spend to generate more income from the campaign.

Performance PR Is Better for Stable Income

Performance PR can get paid through a few revenue models. For example, Canvas PR operates on a pay-per-placement model, where the client pays a flat fee for guaranteed placement. Acceleration Partners uses a pay-for-performance model, where the agency gets paid based on performance metrics like clicks, traffic figures, leads, and sales. Gen3 Marketing uses a hybrid model. The performance PR agency charges a flat fee that covers operational costs but also earns bonuses for exceeding performance benchmarks.

Performance PR isn’t always 100% performance-based, while affiliate marketing always is. Even when performance PR uses a pay-for-performance model, you can often accurately estimate performance if you use the same PR channels. As such, performance PR income is often relatively stable.

➔ Affiliate marketing is better for passive income. The majority 69% of affiliate marketers use SEO to generate traffic for affiliate offers, according to AffiliateWP. SEO is the best marketing channel for long-term traffic acquisition. An affiliate marketer can write and publish a website article that generates affiliate marketing clicks for years without the website owner performing additional work to keep the page ranking.

An affiliate marketer on Reddit mentions making around $5/month passively with a web page that gets thousands of views a day.

Performance PR Is Better for Earnings Control

A performance PR professional working for themself controls their income potential through the meetings they set. They actively pitch new clients, coordinate with media platforms, and negotiate deals. Income is controlled by the amount of work the performance PR professional completes. Most importantly, the amount of sales meetings they set and convert.

A PR professional on Reddit highlights a day in their life. They mention client meetings and managing media relationships as two of the most important aspects of their day.

➔ Affiliate marketing is better for uncapped earnings. Performance PR earnings is often inhibited by the amount of sales meetings the agency can take. Affiliate marketing earnings are only limited by the amount of quality traffic an affiliate can generate for an offer. This traffic is often based on how algorithms like the Google algorithm or the TikTok algorithm provide visibility to a piece of content. It’s not based on the availability of a human worker. As such, some affiliates can realize substantial earnings just by having a piece of content go viral.

Adam Enfroy is an example of a high earning affiliate. Adam reported making over $125K per month from affiliate marketing from his blog and YouTube channel in 2023. He was able to achieve this by joining over 300 affiliate programs and ranking for high traffic keywords on search engines like Google and YouTube.

What Is Performance PR?

Performance PR is a digital marketing strategy that blends public relations strategies with measurable outcomes. Unlike traditional PR, where a brand pays for the service regardless of the outcome, performance PR agencies offer clients more predictable outcomes through more guaranteed results.

Performance PR examples include Gen3 Marketing, Whiteoaks PR, and ABCD Agency.

Gen3 Marketing defines performance PR as a merging of PR and affiliate marketing. They create PR content and secure placements with major media, then use affiliate links to measure the actual traffic and revenue the campaign generates.

Whiteoaks PR defines performance PR as offering a fixed price for fixed outcomes. They work with their clients to set measurable KPI targets that both parties agree on. If the PR initiatives of Whiteoaks don’t meet the target KPIs, they refund their client.

ABCD Agency defines performance PR as the client only paying for PR initiatives that satisfy their predetermined criteria instead of paying a monthly retainer for ongoing PR work. Their clients are only charged for actionable outcomes, like the number of tier one media clippings or the number of high-quality backlinks from sites with sufficient domain ratings (DR).

What Are the Different Types of Marketing Agencies to Start Beyond Performance PR?

The different types of marketing agencies to start beyond performance PR include:

• SEO agency
• Social media marketing agency
• Content marketing agency
• Advertising agency
• Influencer marketing agency

How Can Performance PR Support SEO Efforts?

Performance PR can support SEO efforts by:

• Building high-quality backlinks - Common PR media sites like Forbes and Business Insider have high authority on Google.
• Increasing brand authority - Brand mentions in trusted publications can legitimize the brand for potential customers.
• Driving organic traffic - Whether it’s by clicking a backlink or searching the brand by name after discovering it through a PR publication, performance PR can drive more website visitors.

Conclusion: Is a Performance PR Agency a Good Business to Start?

A performance PR agency is a good business to start. It combines aspects of both traditional PR and performance marketing, allowing the business to earn a predictable income for delivering real results for clients. This is a recipe for client satisfaction, which often breeds long-term engagements. However, success with a performance PR agency requires long hours of active work. This type of agency is also highly competitive because agency owners compete on a global scale.

An alternative online business model that is more passive and less competitive is local lead generation. Local lead generation entails creating websites that attract customers for local businesses and selling the leads to real local businesses for $500 - $2,500+/month. Like affiliate marketing often does, these websites attract leads by using SEO. As such, once they are ranking on Google for the target keyword, they can continue generating income for periods without performing regular work.

However, these sites are much less competitive than affiliate marketing because they target local keywords instead of global keywords. When trying to rank a local lead gen site, you typically only compete against a handful of small local service business owners in one specific city or region. Learn how we set up and rent these simple local lead generation websites to generate passive income online.