The 7 Most Common Mistakes Made In Affiliate Marketing
Must Have Knowledge For All Affiliate Marketers
Affiliate Marketing — The Best Place to Start
Everyone must begin somewhere and for inexperienced Internet marketers, affiliate products may be the best place to start. Rather than going through the time consuming and costly process of creating your own product (of questionable quality) and then attempting to market it to the masses, why not start by finding a product that is well-made and comes from someone who already has a high level of credibility?
You could save a lot of time, money, frustration, and willpower while also making money. In fact, it’s a lot of money. Even if they make a fortune from their own products, many top Internet marketers still sell affiliate products. Why? Because it is still fantastic money and requires little effort.
With that said, it’s also important to note that affiliate marketing isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s certainly easier than pulling off a Jeff Walker-style massive product launch, but there are plenty of pitfalls waiting to devour you and your money. Do yourself a favor and pay attention to what I say to avoid those pitfalls. In this section, I will discuss the top seven:
Pitfall #1: Selecting a Subpar Product to Promote
All products are not created equal. In fact, that is most likely the driving motivation behind your decision to sell affiliate products: you have accepted that there are already a plethora of high quality products on the market; and, if you create your own, it may not compare favorably.
If you decide to choose your product from a list on ClickBank, do so with caution. Rather than choosing the product with the highest commission haphazardly, look for those with the highest popularity and gravity ratings. If a large number of people buy them frequently, they must be superior to other products for sale in that niche.
You will want to look for good niches as well as good products within niches. Here’s a stupid tip, but it illustrates my point: don’t sell garden hoses in the winter. Nobody is going to buy. Concentrate on products that a lot of people want, and if their popularity has recently increased, now is the best time to enter the market.
Mistake #2: Choosing a Low Converter
Your goal as an affiliate marketer is to profit from the hard work of others, as well as the money they have spent on copywriters, product developers, and software. If you choose a product that does not fully utilize these benefits, you will likely benefit less.
Take conversion rates, for example. Not every product creator hires a top-tier copywriter. In fact, many of them simply compose their own copy. Many people also do not hire someone to create graphs for their sales pages. Instead, they attempt to do it on their own. What was the end result? The page is unappealing, the copy is riddled with errors, and the product converts poorly.
Before you begin promoting a specific product, carefully read the sales page and compare it to others. Do you feel compelled to purchase? Were you confused by the graphics? Did the copy fail to entice you to bite? All of these can lead to fatal mistakes for both the seller and you. At this point, you can’t help the seller, but you can avoid his product and find a better one. Do yourself a favor and choose your products with care.
Pitfall #3: Selling Bad Products For A Bad Salesperson
This Pitfall is especially important to avoid if you have a to-do list. All it takes is one incorrect product promotion to cause a mass exodus from your list. Don’t make this mistake again.
Even if you’re tempted to promote the next “biggest launch,” make sure you don’t fall for anything. Several marketers have expressed regret over their decision to promote Rich Jerk’s latest offering after list members complained that his sales page was riddled with profanity and sexist remarks. Don’t be one of these people. Before promoting something to your list, make sure you thoroughly inspect it. Unless you’re the Rich Jerk, you probably don’t want people to think of you as just that: a rich jerk.
Additionally, for major promotions, avoid jumping on the affiliate product bandwagon. Instead, wait until the buzz has died down slightly before releasing a comprehensive review of the product (which most affiliate marketers do not provide). This has a much better chance of resulting in sales, and it will also assist you in maintaining credibility.
Finally, avoid promoting products that make ludicrous or false claims. “Extraordinary claims necessitate extraordinary evidence,” Carl Sagan once said. Most of the time, these snake oil salesmen cannot provide you with any extraordinary evidence, but they do make the claims. Avoid endorsing or becoming associated with them.
Pitfall #4: Choosing Products with Low Commissions
If you’re marketing to a list of people, keep in mind that they’ll only consider so many product offers in a given period of time, so choose wisely. If you promote something that only generates a 25% commission for you, you’re wasting a lot of time. In reality, you could probably find a comparable product with a 50% or 75% commission.
Don’t be too concerned about the actual dollar value of the commission. While many well-known Internet marketers now claim to focus on promoting high-ticket items (because only a few sales will generate a lot of money), you can still make a killing selling low-cost reports. The growing popularity of the $7 report attests to this.
So, avoid the low cost sellers, but don’t be too concerned about the price.
Pitfall #5: Failure to Gather Leads
Always, always, always, always, always, always, always, always, always, always, always, always Rather than driving traffic to your affiliate link via pay per click, search engine optimization, and other methods, you should make an effort to convert them first. Why? There are 2 reasons for this: basic mathematical reasoning and the collective experience of many marketers.
The simple mathematical reasoning is as follows: almost everyone who would have purchased the product will opt in to your mailing list. Many people who would not have bought the product will join your mailing list. Instead of converting at a rate of 1–3% (as in affiliate sales), you will convert between 15 and 40% of visitors (to your mailing list). You will then have the opportunity to contact both willing and hesitant buyers. Furthermore, once they’re on a list, this is no longer a one-time event. You have the opportunity to market to them over and over again for months or even years.
Your list is one of the most valuable tools you have as a marketer. Always, always, always prioritize your list over a one-time sale.
Pitfall #6: Failure to Recognize the Importance of Timeliness
In business, the quick frequently out compete those endowed with greater resources. Google is no longer a small company with meager profits. However, in the past, it has emerged from nowhere to out compete massively well-endowed rivals, and it has done so with deception.
What does this mean for you? Successful affiliate product promotion necessitates more than simply pasting an affiliate link into an email and blasting it to a couple thousand people. If you want them to buy from you, your email should be informative rather than promotional.
If you can write your email as if it were a news announcement, you will be far more likely to pique people’s interest than if you send a link to an Internet marketing eBook that was written in 1998 and wasn’t particularly popular at the time.
You must identify product launches that qualify as a “event.” Find something so significant that people will follow it and comment on it. If you find such a product (for example, the iPhone of Internet marketing products), it is critical that you engineer your own build-up and release, which is centered on the product’s build-up and release. You’ll want to make certain that your list members buy from you rather than another list owner.
To cut a long story short, pay attention to the clock and the calendar. If there is a big launch coming up, you must capitalize on it as soon as possible. There might not be another window of opportunity. So seize it while you can.
Pitfall #7: Ignore Critical Numbers
Many affiliate marketers overlook many of the minor, yet critical calculations required to run a business and ensure profitability. Many affiliate marketers, for example, will completely disregard the percentage ClickBank takes from each sale. Instead, they will only consider the price and the commission.
Furthermore, many will disregard conversion rates, pay per click bids, and the amount of time they devote to projects. They will also be unable to provide accurate estimates of how much promotional efforts will cost and how risky they will be They’ll gloss over all of these minor details and spend the majority of their time fantasizing about the fortunes they will amass.
Unfortunately, affiliate marketing does not work in this manner. If you pay too much for traffic, if your conversion rates are too low, and if you invest too much time in projects with low yields, the outcome will be negative. Your figures will not add up. You may end up in debt rather than profit at the end of the day, month, or year. And because you’re a sole proprietor rather than the CEO of a corporation, you don’t get paid at all. Worse, you may lose some of your own money, which you worked hard to earn.
Conclusion
So, how does it all fit together? There are seven common pitfalls in affiliate marketing, as you will see as you read. If you fall into one of them, your affiliate marketing will put you in debt rather than make you rich.
So, how do you avoid these pitfalls, make better decisions, and eventually become wealthy through affiliate marketing? To begin, choose products that are actually good. As previously stated, a low demand product will generate few sales no matter how hard you try to promote it. You can’t make something if there isn’t a demand for it. Don’t even try.
Next, look for a product that is a winner within the niches that are in high demand. Look for something that converts extremely well. You can accomplish this by searching ClickBank for high-popularity, high-gravity products. You can also do this by scanning sales pages for those that have exceptionally compelling copy, good bonuses, and reasonable prices.
Aside from selecting a product that is likely to convert well, you should also ensure that the claims are reasonable and that the seller is credible. One a poor product can seriously knock you down a notch with your list members. Making a single sale and losing a repeat customer is rarely worth it.
When you begin driving traffic to your affiliate marketing campaigns, remember to direct it to an opt-in form rather than your affiliate link. If you send the person directly to an affiliate link, you are unlikely to hear from them again, whether or not the sale occurs. It is critical to collect leads. If you don’t, as many affiliate marketers do, you’re throwing away a lot of money in comparison to what you’re spending.
Last but not least, do yourself a favor and keep track of conversion rates, bid prices, commission rates, product broker fees, and all the other small numbers that affiliate marketers prefer to ignore. Knowing, comprehending, and adjusting these figures could mean the difference between profit and debt. You can ignore them if you want, but it won’t help your business.
With that out of the way, you’re now ready to try your hand at affiliate marketing. There are many risks, but you already know the big seven; avoid these, and you’ll sail through to profit, following in the footsteps of previous super affiliates.
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