Knowing Affiliate Mistakes To Save Time And Money
Affiliate marketing may be a good way to create money, but it’s not necessarily as easy as some make it sounds especially when you are making some killer mistakes.
Too many affiliate marketers are literally making HUGE mistakes that cost them time, money, and ight even hurt their reputations permanently.
Fortunately, once you’ve identified these killer mistakes, it’s easy to correct them so you’ll stop making them in your own affiliate marketing campaigns.
If you’ve been wondering why your affiliate marketing campaigns aren’t as effective as you’d hoped, you would possibly be making one or more of these big mistakes that might be seriously hampering your efforts.
In this guide, you’ll learn about the most common mistakes made by affiliate marketers (even some highly experienced marketers make these mistakes!).
You’ll also learn how to keep from making these mistakes yourself, and the way to stay from repeating equivalent mistakes over many times, because they do not know a better way or I should say the correct way.
If you are going to realize any level of success in affiliate marketing as an affiliate marketer, you must know the 9 Deadly Mistakes Every Affiliate Marketer Should Know And Avoid.
Mistake #1:- Focusing On Selling
I understand that the most precious goal of all affiliate marketers, even a minimum of one percent success in making sales. That much is obvious. But you should never focus on “selling”.
Instead, your main focus should be centered on helping people. It does not matter what your selected market is, your main focus should be on helping your team/customer in some way, because this is how you add value to your affiliate offers and how you get the audience in the market to trust you and need to shop more from you.
It doesn’t matter what your market is, your main goal is about helping people. Period.
If your niche is weight loss, you’re helping people get in shape and obtain better look, and feel healthy.
If it’s internet marketing, you’re helping people make money and achieve financial freedom.
If it is socks, you’re helping people keep their feet warm and dry and appearance fashionable at an equal time.
Always focus on helping your target customers. This will enable you to build a rapport with the people you’d wish to sell to, making your job easier and supplying you with a reason to feel good about yourself at the same time!
Mistake #2:- Not Testing
Testing is one of those things that everyone seems to know they’re supposed to do, but almost no one actually does.
Why exactly is testing so important, anyway?
Well, let’s say you’re achieving a 2.5% conversion rate. Not too bad, you might think.
After all, you’ve got considerable competition, and you aren’t really standing out well in your market.
But what if one simple tweak, something perhaps as simple as adding ONE WORD to your squeeze page or changing ONE IMAGE on your blog’s main page could increase that to a 5% conversion?
2.5% higher doesn’t sound like all that much of a difference until you realize that’s DOUBLE the conversion rate, DOUBLE the purchasers , and DOUBLE the income.
From making one change! Isn’t that worth it?
The thing is, you’ll never know what might make a difference if you don’t test.
Mistake #3:- Sticking With MMO Products
MMO, or Make Money Online, is one among the foremost financially lucrative markets online , but it’s an error to concentrate solely one market. Did you recognize that even the most important internet marketing (I.M.) gurus have built their influence into other markets?
That’s because any niche, regardless of how lucrative, features a maximum income cap that you simply can reach. Eventually, you’ll reach virtually the whole market, and your income will suffer because you’ve got nothing new to sell them and no ability to add new value.
Sure, this is an extreme example. The truth is, no niche market has a complete cap, because new customers are coming in and starting up continually. But think about it. Once you’ve hit a plateau, your income stagnates.
But if you diversify into other markets, you’ll always have fresh products to market. You’ll always have new value to add. You’ll always be ready to make money because you’re not grid-locked into one specific market.
I know it’s going to be tempting to start out with the MMO niche because it is often extremely lucrative and you’re learning tons about it yourself, but unless you’re help someone in the niche because you’re an expert yourself.
You’re more confident and happy trying a distinct segment where you’ve got more to feature.
Mistake #4:- Spreading Yourself Too Thin
The temptation is great, especially for brand spanking new affiliate marketers, to spread themselves too thin by branching out into too many markets. Maybe they buy 50 domains all in one go , or they start out blogging in 13 different niches in one week.
But this is really shortsightedness, ignorance and folly.
You should specialize in one or two key niches at a time, and extending yourself once you’ve made some real headway into those niches. Unless you are going hire someone to manage multiple blogs, multiple products, multiple email lists, multiple social media pages and accounts… you’re doing yourself an enormous disservice if you diversify too widely in the beginning.
Choose two or three markets initially, and only diversity further once you’ve really made some real headway into those first niches. Once you’ve got some decent traffic, a tiny list that’s growing, some social media presence that’s making a difference… then you’ll be in a better position trying out new niches.
Don’t make the mistake of spreading out too far too fast. You’ll find that you simply can never make a true difference in any single niche, because you aren’t putting enough effort into one to form any headway.
Mistake #5:- Joining Too Many Affiliate Programs
Another major temptation for affiliate marketers is to get into too many affiliate programs because they aren’t sure which one’s going to be the foremost profitable for them. Well, let me bring you in on a open secret.
They can ALL be profitable for you!
Trust me, as long as you’re sticking to the legitimate affiliate programs with well-known companies, you’re nearly always getting to see some nice results. There’s a reason why their affiliate programs are so popular!
Start by choosing your two or three initial niches, then find two or three affiliate programs to promote to your lists.
Make sure to find a minimum of one really hot product at each affiliate program that appeals to the emotion that will convert well in your niche, then stick with promoting that product for a while before you try something new.
If you join too many affiliate programs at the same time, you’ll find that you simply take a long while to succeed in the minimum payouts required for every affiliate program, because you’ll be making $2 here, $8 there, $22 somewhere else… it’s madness!
It’s far better to sell three different products via one single affiliate program than it’s to sell fifty products from thirty-five different affiliate programs.
Not only that, but if you’re a member of too many programs, you’ll be more apt to forget the principles of every affiliate network and find yourself getting banned, because there’s just too many to keep track of.
Some of the simplest or hottest affiliate programs include:
>> http://www.clickbank.net
>> http://affiliate-program.amazon.com
>> http://www.jvzoo.com
>> http://www.neverblue.com
>> http://www.cj.com
>> http://www.linkshare.com
>> http://www.shareasale.com
Check these programs to ascertain which of them have products that fit together with your market and your passion, then persist with those programs for a short time until you see good returns. You may find you never got to move past these few programs.
Mistake #6:- Not Tracking Results
If you begin seeing an honest number of sales, you’ll soon start to wonder which of your marketing efforts is producing the most efficient result.
You’ll obviously want to concentrate more of your efforts on those methods that are making you the most income. But what if you have no idea which areas to concentrate on, because you don’t know which methods are working?
Enter TRACKING…
Tracking, quite simply, allows you to know where your traffic is coming from and where it’s going. Simple tracking is as simple as employing a tracking code through your affiliate program.
For example, you’ll create one tracking ID for every website you own on the Amazon affiliate network. Or if you promote products through ClickBank, you’ll add a custom code word to your affiliate links to enable you to find out out where every sale you refer came from.
You could also enter far more detail by using your own affiliate tracking script which will allow you far more detailed information about your clicks and sales. This is advanced stuff, so you would possibly not need it directly . But you actually need SOME kind of tracking in place so you’ll find out which of your methods is functioning best!
Mistake #7:- Giving Up Too Quickly
If I had a dollar for every person I’ve seen give up trying to make money online, I’d be VERY wealthy right now. The internet is suffering from blogs that have just one or two posts, and affiliate accounts that never send the primary referral.
What are some common reasons for giving up?
1 Not making money too quickly
2 Not getting traffic quickly
3 Not getting accepted to many affiliate networks
4 Feeling like it’s too much work
5 Thinking affiliate marketing is a “scam”
The one thing most of these things have in common is expecting things to happen overnight. Affiliate marketing isn’t a “scam” just because you didn’t make $10,000 or even $1,000 your first month. You can’t expect to require a fresh domain with no backlinks to 100,000 pageviews in your first month directly.
These things take time and patience.
If you give up too quickly, you’ll never know what could have been. You never know, you could be subsequently the next internet millionaire, but you’ll never know if you hand over before it happens!
Mistake #8:- Competition Fear
A lot of individuals attempt to stick with the “low hanging fruit”, because they’ve been told that’s what they ought to do as newbies. Or they do it because they’re terrified that they’ll never be able to compete against the millions of other websites out there.
HOGWASH!
You can compete in ANY niche! I’ve known complete newbies who managed to crack super tough niches like MMO and weight loss right off the bat. Is this likely? Of course not. Is it possible? Definitely.
I don’t advise new affiliate marketers to tackle these extremely tough niches immediately, but you don’t need to choose tiny, obscure niches that aren’t likely to bring you much money either. If there’s not much competition, it’s because there’s not much money there. Trust me, there ARE no “undiscovered” or “untapped” niches anymore.
There may have been a few years ago, but that ship has sailed. If it can make money, it’s already making someone money. Probably a whole lot of people too.
Don’t fear competition, just be wary of it. You WANT competition, trust me. Too much competition may be a difficult thing to beat , but choose niches that have an honest amount of competition, because that’s where the cash is.
Mistake #9:- Ignoring Competition
While it’s important to not fear competition, it’s also important to be sensible.
Expecting to create a fortune overnight during a super-competitive niche like weight loss may be a sure recipe for disappointment.
What you would like to do within the beginning of your marketing is to target niches that:
1 Have a healthy amount of competition
2 Don’t have overwhelming competition that it’s difficult to command traffic
3 You have some interest or knowledge in
Notice #3 especially. If you’ve got absolutely no interest or knowledge in a niche, it’ll be harder to make content, harder to link together with your target market, harder to sell products you know little to nothing about, and become more difficult for you to get traffic.
Do you really need to be an expert to penetrate a tough market? Absolutely not! In fact, you’ll probably produce best results in a niche that you are simply ignoramus about, just learning as you go.
But if you have absolutely no interest in the subject, it’s going to make it much, much easier to give up. You’ll simply get bored, because your work day becomes such a grind that you’ll throw your hands up in frustration and flip on the TV or head on down the lake to try fishing!
So how does one choose the first few niches?
Make a short list of some interesting and eye-catching topics you have an interest in. I’d say between ten to twenty (10-20) topics would be enough to give you a head start.
Now check to make sure there are:
1 Affiliate products to promote
2 A decent amount of competition
3 Resources available for you to learn from
4 Traffic sources you can take advantage of
As far as competition goes, you would like to seek out niches that have a minimum of 50,000 existing websites. Even a few million isn’t a big deal. Fifty million could be pushing it unless you’ve got money to buy initial promotion.
You can determine what percentage sites there are that mention your topic by searching Google. I search multi-word phrases in quotes to make certain I bring up an accurate number.
I searched for “golf” and got “About 1,310,000,000 results.” WOW! Over a billion! A search for “free cholesterol” came up with “About 95,100,000 results.” That’s much better, but still pretty big. “Pastry making” came up with “About 432,000 results”. That’s definitely a figure you would want to work with because it’s much more reasonable.
Don’t fear competition, but be reasonable about it!
Conclusion
Affiliate marketing isn’t for the faint of heart, or for people that find that they have a tendency to sign out too easily or jump around from one shiny new thing to another without thinking.
It’s actually tons of diligence , and it takes time to create resources like blog traffic and email lists. There are not any shortcuts unless you’ve got the cash to spend for content creation, buying existing websites with traffic, or paying for email subscribers or social network followers.
Always bear in mind these potential mistakes that can retard and stagnate your success as you navigate your way through the precarious world of affiliate marketing. Be sure you’re not making these mistakes, and don’t become lax once you begin making money.
No one is immune to these mistakes!
As long as you’re employed hard, solid marketing strategies, keep at it, and avoid these mistakes, you’re bound to start making money.
But if you hand over your effort too soon, I can guarantee you’ll fail!
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