4 Pitfalls to Avoid When Starting Affiliate Marketing
Today is a guest post especially written by Matthew Lord.
Affiliate marketing is a fun and exciting way to create extra income for yourself online. However, just like many other internet-based businesses, affiliate marketing can be difficult, and has a steep learning curve for a new marketer. Pair that with the fact that many people are preying on new marketers with “get rich quick” schemes, and it can be difficult to decided who and what you should listen to in order to succeed in the fun, yet challenging world of affiliate marketing.
1. Build it and they will come. I have heard this advice given a few times to newbie affiliate marketers. Just because you setup a blog or website does not mean that you are instantly going to get hundreds or thousands of visitors per day! You have to do some work in order to get that kind of traffic to your blog or website. For short term traffic you can use PPC, video marketing, social media, and even some article marketing. For a long term strategy you are going to want to focus on getting your affiliate sites ranked on the first page of Google, and building a list of email subscribers in your niche.
2. Diversifying too much. Most super affiliates focus their efforts on 1-5 niches, not dozens of them. If you really want to succeed with affiliate marketing then you have to concentrate on a few markets where you know that you can make some sales. In order to find these markets it is going to take a little bit of trial and error, but once you find them you can just rinse and repeat your traffic strategies in order to increase your affiliate commissions.
3. Choosing a product without performing adequate market research. Do you think that it would be wise for a new affiliate to enter the “make money online” niche, or the “weight loss” niche? The answer is probably not, because there are a lot of big players in those niches. You have to crawl before you can walk, which is why I advocate focusing on niche markets with adequate amounts of traffic. This way you can generate some easy sales and build your marketing skills.
4. Focusing on low commission products. I have had personal email conversations back and forth with several affiliate marketing newbies, and many of them seem to promote low commission products. They think they will make more money this way. In theory this makes sense, but why make five sales and get an $8 commission when you can make just one sale and get a $40 commission? Of course there is a balance, because if you sell products with too high of a price tag your conversion rates may suffer (if you are not building a list, which is a whole different matter). I like to focus on products that sell for between $40-$80, as these seem to convert best and offer good payouts.
I hope these four tips will help you with your affiliate marketing. Just remember to work hard, work smart, and you will see success in the near future!
To your online success
Samantha & Matthew
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Hello
my name is Samantha Milner and I am a full time internet marketer working in a
variety of niches and providing a variety of
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Hi Matthew, i got to agree with point four, but somehow, popular affiliate product will normally highly competitive to rank, otherwise u have to think creatively to rank for similar keyword.
Simon