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Mistakes Affiliate Marketers Should Avoid
Having an online home business that makes you money on auto-pilot is very exciting. Although it can be easy to make money with affiliate marketing, only a very small percentage of affiliates actually do make a lot of money.If you follow the advice in this article you will not only avoid the common mistakes most affiliate marketers make, but you will also learn how to select affiliate programs that earn you residual income for many months up to lifetime. With affiliate marketing a vendor pays people (affiliates) a certain percentage of the sale price for merchandise sold. It's a win-win situation because the affiliate simply refers people to a website and does not have to worry about order fulfillment, and the vendor gets people to advertise for them and only has to pay them after they make a sale. Below are some common mistakes most affiliate marketers make, and why you should avoid them: 1. Sending people directly to a free affiliate website. You spend so much time, energy and money to market. When you send people directly to a vendor's website you only have one chance to get the sale. If they don't buy they are gone. The best thing to do is to send visitors to an opt-in page, where you give them something of value for free, in exchange for their email address. That way you can follow up with them at a later date and have the opportunity to sell them other products. 2. Creating a website with numerous affiliate links, tons of flashy banners, and all the colors of the rainbow. You don't want to overwhelm visitors to your website. When you do that they only get frustrated and if that happens, they are gone. Instead, offer an honest review of a product, pre-selling readers on its benefits, and on how it will help them. 3. Falling victim of affiliate commission theft. Yes, commission theft is a very big problem. While, you cannot eliminate it completely, there are some steps you can take to minimize it dramatically. Two methods you can use are cloaking and redirecting, instead of having the affiliate url in a form like this, for example: http://www.vendorswebsite.com/?id=thisismyaffiliateid It takes the same effort to refer a sale for a one-time purchase product than it takes to refer one for a residual payment product. Therefore, it makes good business sense to try and market affiliate programs with recurring commissions. In choosing residual payment affiliate programs, you should consider the stickiness of the services you are promoting. For example, you refer a sale for a membership website which only offers resale rights to products, and nothing else to keep the customer from canceling. People can join, download all the products and then cancel within the same month. On the other hand, consider referring a sale for web hosting or for an autoresponder service. These services will be essential for the customer's business, and he or she is probably not likely to cancel for a very long time unless they give up their online business completely. To sum it up, you should try and avoid the common mistakes that affiliate marketers make by sending your customers to an opt-in list first, then pre-selling them to the product's benefits, and finally avoid affiliate commission theft. In addition, you should be promoting affiliate programs with residual income commissions, but be sure to always evaluate the stickiness of the product you are recommending. The best way to do that is to use the product yourself first. |
ABOUT THE AUTHOR |
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Trent Brownrigg is a successful internet marketer and home business mentor. Find your home based business at http://www.work-at-home-jobs-iowa.com and he will personally help you succeed.
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