BLOG

In the last decade and a half I have seen some common mistakes
made by affiliate marketers that cause people headaches and lose
of revenue. Please consider the following pitfalls and how they effect
your business.

Pitfall #1: Choosing a Bad Product to Promote
Not all products are created equal.  For the most part, you have
accepted that there are plenty of high-quality products already on the market.

Choosing the right affiliate offer can be hard if you do not have a system.
1. Choose a market (Health, Wealth or Relationships)
2. Pick some offers in your affiliate network.
3. Check out the landing page (Is it clean? Does it make sense? Would you buy the offer?)
4. Check out your offer on offervault.com
5. Check out what type of keywords are available for your offer.

In addition to picking good products within niches, you will also want to look for good niches. Here’s a stupid tip that will illustrate my point nonetheless: don’t sell garden hoses in the winter. No one will buy. Focus on products that a lot of people want; and if their popularity just surged, now is the best time to get in the market.

Pitfall #2: Picking a Low Converter
As an affiliate marketer, your goal is to profit 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 are likely to benefit 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 graphics for the sales page. Instead, they try to do their own. The end result? The page looks hideous, the copy contains major errors, and the product 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 throwyou off? Did the copy fail to reel you in for the catch? These can all amount tofatal errors for both the seller and you. You cannot help the seller at this point, but you can avoid his product and find a better one. Do yourself a favor: choose your products carefully.

Pitfall #3: Selling Snake Oil for a Snake Oil Salesman
This pitfall is especially important to avoid if you have a list. All it takes is one erroneous product promotion and you could end up with a mass exodus from your list. Again, don’t make this error.

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.

Pitfall #4: Picking Products that Offer Meager Commissions
Would you rather have a product that paid you $1000 a sale at 1% conversion or a product that paid $100 at a 50% conversion? Well for ever 100 people who come to your web site you could make $1000 or $5000 – pick one.

If does not matter what the payout is, if the offer does not convert you still get $0. Look at the results of other affiliate marketers. See which ads are working for them and then promote those offers just a little bit better than your competition.

Pitfall #5: Failing to Collect Leads
Always, always, always capture leads. Rather than 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 experience 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.

Pitfall #6: Ignoring the Importance of Timeliness
In business in general, the quick often outcompete those endowed with greater resources. Today, Google is no longer a small company with meager revenues, but in the past, it emerged from nowhere to outcompete massively 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 then.

You need to find currents events that tie into you product. Find something so  big that people follow the event and comment on it. If you can find such a product (say, the iPhone of Internet marketing products), it is critical that you engineer your own build-up and release, centered on the build-up and release of the  product. You will want to make sure that your list members purchase from you, rather than from another list owner.

Pitfall #7: Ignoring Important Numbers
Many affiliate marketers fail to make many of the small—yet important—
calculations needed in order to run a business and ensure you are in profit. For instance, many affiliate marketers will completely ignore calculating their EPC (Earnings Per Click).  Instead, they’ll simply focus sololy on the amount of their commission check.

Additionally, many will ignore conversion rates, pay per click bids, and the amount of time they put into projects. They’ll also fail to make realistic estimates of how much promotional efforts will cost; and how much of a risk they’ll be. They’ll glaze over all of these minor details and devote the majority of their time to daydreaming about the riches they will rake in.

Unfortunately, affiliate marketing doesn’t work like that. If you’re paying too much for traffic; if your conversion rates are too low; if you put too much time into projects that don’t have high yields – the outcome is bad. Your numbers won’t add up. At the end of the day, month, or year, you may end up in debt, rather than profit. And since you’re a sole proprietor, not a CEO of a corporation, It is all on your shoulders.

Please take sometime and think about these 7 pitfalls and how to avoid them. Set up systems and review points in your business to monitor your progress toward your goals.

Tags: affiliate marketing, Cpa Marketing

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 at 1:47 pm and is filed under Free Advertising Techniques, Marketing Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.