Email List Dynamics: Affiliate Marketing in a Personal Brand?

I'm new to affiliate marketing but have been looking to get started. I have an idea, but then came to a question. I've been soaking up information on affiliate marketing and other business, and one source is teaching about an entrepreneurial strategy of building an email list so that (from an entrepreneurial perspective) you have an audience to pitch affiliate offers to (1. build an audience 2. offer affiliate products 3. profit). This may have been a popular strategy in the previous decade, but I don't know if this is viable for this decade or the coming one. Because it appears that digital entrepreneurship has shifted from "have something to say and make money online" to "build a business/personal brand," where the audience is founded on trust, building the brand, and getting people to say "I like this person," rather than on the influencer's authority, expertise, amount of content, and ability to get people to just say "I want to hear more about this." In other words, digital marketing has gone from a content economy where people find all the content sources that catch their eye, to a personal brand economy where people choose their favorites and stick with them. For me, it's easy to imagine having a blog with affiliate links in the post, but it's hard to imagine someone like Graham Stephan building an email list and being able to send affiliate offers (I'd imagine the only offers that work are if he comes out with a personal course or book or something).

My question is, what are the dynamics of having an email list under either? Basically, if I had the goal of building an email list to send affiliate offers to, should I make a personal brand (e.g. Graham Stephan) and then send affiliate offers, or would that tarnish the email list/reputation? I was thinking of sending 1-2 offers a month, while also sending regular brand emails (like new posts). I.e., it seems that it used to be that you could just build an email list and then send affiliate offers to make money, but will this destroy the brand now? Or would this strategy be more viable for building an impersonal blog focused on subject content, and keep it as far away from branding as possible? Is building an email list and sending affiliate offers as a source of income a viable strategy anymore, or does it now only work as a resource to keep for directing people towards products that you create? I'm basically asking if affiliate marketing to an email list is doable anymore, or if affiliate marketing can only be done if implemented within the content itself (ex. product reviews) or to something that's not personal?

Examples:

1. I build a personal brand of teaching people (for example) business, and offer related affiliate business courses to my email list
2. I build a random, highly-strategized blog about affiliate marketing (the type that I'd plan from the get-go to sell to someone else within a year or two), and offer affiliate courses to my email list

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