MOST COMMON MISTAKES MADE IN AFFILIATE MARKETING
Affiliate Marketing – The Best Place to Start
Everyone has to start somewhere. And, for newbie Internet marketers, the best place to start
may be with affiliate products. Rather than going through the laborious and expensive process
of creating your own product and then trying to market it to the masses, why not start by finding
a product that is well put-together and comes from someone who already has a high degree of
credibility? You could save a lot of time, money, frustration, and you could make money in the
process, really, really good money. Many top Internet marketers today still sell affiliate products,
even though they make a killing off of their own. Why? Because it is still fantastic money
Now, with that said, it’s important to mention that affiliate marketing is no walk in the park, either.
It’s certainly easier than pulling off a gurus massive product launch, but, like anything else, there
are plenty of pitfalls just waiting to consume you and your money. So do yourself a favor: listen to
what I say and avoid these mistakes.
I will go over some of the top ones:
Choosing a Bad Product to Promote
Say you decide to pick your product off of a list on Clickbank for instance, select carefully. Rather
than just selecting the product with the highest commission, look for ones that have the highest
popularity and gravity ratings. If a lot of people are buying them often, they must be better than other
products for sale within that niche. In addition to picking good products within niches, you will also
want to look for good niches.
Picking a Low Converting Product
As an affiliate marketer, your goal is to make money from the hard work others have done; and from
the money they have spent on copywriters, product developers, and software. If you select a product
that underutilizes these advantages, you will benefit far less.
Take, for instance, conversion rates. Not all product creators hire a top-notch copywriter. In fact,
many of them just write their own copy. Many also don’t hire someone to do graphs for the sales page.
Instead, they try to do their own. The end result? The page looks stupid, the copy contains major errors,
and the product always converts poorly.
Before you start promoting any particular product, read the sales page carefully and compare it with
others. Do you feel compelled to buy? Did the graphics throw you off? Did the copy fail to reel you in
for the sale? These can all amount to fatal errors for both the seller and you.
You cannot help the seller at this point, but you can avoid this product and find a better one.
Do yourself a favor and choose your products carefully.
Selling Snake Oil for a Snake Oil Salesman
This mistake is especially important to avoid if you have a list. All it takes is one wrong product promotion and you could end up with a mass exodus from your list. Again, don’t make this error.
Even though you may be tempted to promote the next “biggest launch,” make sure you don’t buy into just any product. Additionally, avoid jumping on the affiliate product bandwagon for major promotions.
Instead, wait until the buzz dies down slightly; and then release a comprehensive review (something most affiliate marketers do not provide) of the product. This has a much better chance of getting sales for you; and it will also help you to maintain credibility.
Last, avoid promoting products that make outrageous and fallacious claims. As Carl Sagan once said
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
In most cases, these snake oil peddlers cannot provide you with any extraordinary evidence, but they do
make the claims. Avoid promoting them and becoming associated with them.
Picking Products that Only Offer Meager Commissions
If you’re marketing to a list of people, they’re only going to consider so many product offers in a given
period of time, so select the ones you promote wisely. If you promote something that only generates a
25%-40% commissions for you, then you’re leaving a lot of money on the table. In reality, you should find a similar product that offers a 50%-75% or in some cases 100% commissions.
In terms of the actual dollar value of the commission – don’t sweat that too much.
Think about your customer and what it can do for them and good feedback for you.
While many top name Internet marketers now say that they concentrate on promoting high-ticket items
(since only a few sales will generate a lot of money), you can still make a killing selling relatively cheap reports.
The rising popularity of the $7 report is testament to this fact.
So avoid the cheapo sellers, but don’t worry as much about the price.
Failing to Collect Leads
Always, always, always capture leads from non-subscribers of your list. If you
are generating traffic through pay per click, search engine optimization, and other methods and then sending that traffic to your affiliate link, you should make an effort to convert them into list members first. Why?
Two reasons: simple mathematical reasoning and the collective experiences of many marketers.
The simple mathematical reasoning goes something like this: virtually everyone who would have purchased the product will opt in to your mailing list. And many who definitely would not have purchased the product will opt in to your mailing list. Instead of converting at a rate of around 1-3% (in affiliate sales), you will convert between 15 and 40% of visitors (to your mailing list). From there, you will get the chance to contact the willing buyers and the more reluctant.
Additionally, once they’re on a list, this is no longer a one-off effort. You get the chance to market to them again and again for months or even years.
As a marketer, one of the best tools you have available is your list.
Always, always, always use your list over the one-off sale.
Ignoring the Importance of Timeliness
In business in general, the quick often out-compete those with greater resources. As you know, Google is not a small company with meager revenues, as in the past. It emerged from nowhere to out-compete other well-endowed rivals; and it did so with cunning.
How does this apply to you? Successful affiliate product promotion requires you to do more than simply slap an affiliate link in an email and send it out to a couple thousand people. If you expect them to actually buy, your email should be newsworthy – not promotional.
If you can genuinely write your email as if it were a news announcement, you are far more likely to draw interest than if you send a link to an Internet marketing eBook that was written in 1998 and wasn’t particularly popular even then. You need to find product launches that qualify as an “event.” It is critical that you engineer your own build-up and release, centered on the build-up and release of the product. To make it short and sweet: pay attention to the clock and the calendar. If there’s a big launch coming up, you need to capitalize on it quickly. There may not be a second window for opportunity. So take it when you have it.
You will want to make sure that your list members purchase from you, rather than from another list owner.
So how does all of this come together?
As you read, there are common mistakes in affiliate marketing, I have only mentioned a few but important ones. If you fall into making them, you affiliate marketing will put you in debt, rather than making you wealthy.
So how can you avoid these traps, make better decisions, and ultimately become wealthy via affiliate marketing?
First, start by selecting products that are actually good. As I mentioned previously, a low demand product will make few sales, no matter how hard you try to promote it. If the demand isn’t there, you can’t create it. Don’t try.
In addition to choosing a product that is likely to convert well, you will also want to make sure that the claims are reasonable and that the seller is credible. One bad product could seriously knock you down a few pegs with your list members. Making a single sale and losing an otherwise repeat-buyer is rarely worth it.
With all of that said, you’re now ready to take a crack at affiliate marketing. There are mistakes to be made, but you already know this; avoid these, and you’ll sail through into profit, following the trail of many super affiliates.