Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing – The Best
Place to Start
Everyone
has to start somewhere. And, for neophyte 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 (of dubious quality) 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 will power;
and you could make money in the process, too—in fact, 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’s still fantastic
money and little effort is required.
Now, with that
said, it’s important to mention that affiliate marketing is no walk inthe park,
either.
It’s
certainly easier than pulling off a Jeff Walker-style massive product launch,
but, like anything else, there are plenty of pitfalls just waiting to consume
you and your money. Do yourself a favor: heed what I say and avoid those
pitfalls. In this section, I will go over the top 7:
Pitfall #1: Choosing a Bad Product to Promote
Not
all products are created equal. In fact, that is probably the driving
motivationbehind your decision to sell affiliate products: for the most part,
you have accepted that there are plenty of high-quality products already on the
market; and, if you create your own, it might not compare favorably. Turn Your Spare time into a profitable online Business
If
you decide to pick your product off of a list on Clickbank, select very
carefully. Rather than haphazardly 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. Here’s a stupid tip that will illustrate my point nonetheless:
don’t sell garden houses 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 worker others have
done; and from the money they have spent on copywriters, product developers,
and software. If you select a product that under utilizes 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
hiresomeone to do graphs 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 to
fatal 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. Turn Your Spare time into a profitable online Business
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.
Even
though you may be tempted to promote the next “biggest launch,” make sure you
don’t buy into just anything. Several marketers have lamented their choices to
promote the Rich Jerk’s latest offering after list members complained that his
sales page was loaded profanity and sexist comments. Don’t be one of these
guys. Make sure you carefully inspect anything before you promote it to your
list. Unless you happen to be the Rich Jerk, you probably don’t want peopleto
think you’re just that—a rich jerk. Turn Your Spare time into a profitable online Business
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
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. Ifyou promote something that only generates a 25% commission
for you, then you’re leaving a lot on the time. In reality, you could probably
find a similar product that offers a 50% or 75% commission.
In
terms of the actual dollar value of the commission – don’t sweat that as much.
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 ofthe $7 report is testament to this fact.
So avoid
the cheapo sellers, but don’t worry as much about the price. Pitfall #5: Failing to Collect Leads
Always,
always, always capture leads. Rather than generating traffic through payper
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 willget 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. Turn Your Spare time into a profitable online Business
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 out compete 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 out compete massively
well-end owe drivals; 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. Turn Your Spare time into a profitable online Business
You
need to find product launches that qualify as an “event.” 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.
To
make it short and sweet: pay attention to the clock and the calendar. If
there’sa 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.
Pitfall #7: Ignore 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. Forinstance,
many affiliate marketers will completely ignore the portion Clickbank extracts
from each sale. Instead, they’ll simply look at the price and the commission. Turn Your Spare time into a profitable online Business
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, that means you don’t get paid at all.
Even worse, you might lose some of your own money that you worked hard to get.
Conclusion
So
how does all of this come together? As you read, there are seven common pitfalls
in affiliate marketing. If you fall into them, you affiliate marketing will
put you in debt, rather than making you wealthy. Turn Your Spare time into a profitable online Business
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.
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