Other Notable Common Affiliate Marketing Mistakes
It isn’t hard to set up a good website and start and affiliate marketing career. It isn’t hard at all to find affiliate marketing opportunities on the internet. However, it is a very simple thing to make deadly mistakes that will insure your failure to thrive at affiliate marketing.
One of the most notable affiliate marketing mistakes is to think that all you have to do is find the ones that pay the most, sign up, drive traffic to that site through your affiliate link and you’re all set right’ Not exactly.
It’s great to choose an affiliate program that pays a high percentage, but that’s not most important thing to consider. It’s much more important to find a quality affiliate program that meets certain criteria. Here are three mistakes you don’t have to make:
1. You want to make sure the product is a proven seller. You don’t want to waste your time and money driving traffic to a site that doesn’t convert. Find one with a good conversion rate.
2. Make sure the site you become an affiliate for protects its affiliates, and has your best interest at heart. Look for one that provides banners, e-mails, and other tools you can use to promote the site. Also, make sure that there is only one payment option. As an affiliate marketer, you need to be sure that you will get credit for your referral. If there is more than one payment method, you can get shortchanged.
3. Do not choose an affiliate program that promotes an e-mail course. Nothing is worse than becoming an affiliate to a site that’s first goal is to capture e-mail addresses, and then tries to make the sale second. As an affiliate marketer, you need to capture e-mail addresses, then to convert that prospect into a sale. Stick with affiliate programs that aren’t focused on capturing leads because it’s simply not in your best interest. Build your own list, not someone elses.
Making Back-End & Residual Commissions
Residual income puts money in an affiliate marketer’s pocket without any work or effort on their part. It doesn’t get any better than that. Sales of back-end products allow you to get paid for work that you do more than once. The idea here is to work smarter not harder.
So what are back-end products? They are products/services you offer to existing customers, i.e. to people who have already bought a first product (front-end product. lead product) from you.
Most online marketers make much more money selling customers the second, third, fourth etc. product than selling their first product. The reason is that people who’ve already bought from you once are much more likely to buy again.
Strategies like back-end offers shifts the focus from the short sighted “take the money and run” strategy that is so much in use on the internet today. You’ve seen these sites all over. The focus is on getting a massive amount of traffic and then selling visitors an over-priced product that doesn’t deliver what was promised. They might make money in the short run but they will only sell to each customer once and will have to continue spending a lot of money on advertising to get new suckers to visit their site.
More successful sites focus on building a strong relationship with their customers. Your main goal shouldn’t be to just make sure your customers are somewhat satisfied…you want them to be extremely satisfied. If you deliver the goods, your customers will trust you more. If you have their trust, you can sell them anything. When you send your very satisfied customers an email offering another product that they would be interested in, they will flock to your site to buy it because they trust you. Trust is everything.
Identifying an Existing Hot Demand
Every small business owner knows that competition is tough, but he or she may not be able to pinpoint exactly what changes are needed in order to get to the top. Conducting business as usual may no longer be sufficient. Investing in the technology that is now available can be a great help or a bank breaker. It seems that most small business and home based business are either starving (they don?t have enough technology) or they are obese (they have everything piece of new technology that comes down the pike).
There is, however, some fairly new technology that every small or home business owner needs. It can answer questions like; how can small businesses identify noteworthy trends, Identify an existing hot demand and make better decisions faster? Answer: business intelligence software. Business intelligence is the crystal ball of the 21st century.
Purchasing business intelligence (BI) software is one of the most strategic investments that a business can make. Using data mining, reporting and querying, BI helps businesses understand, monitor, manage and respond to specified situations. This software empowers decision-makers and staff to connect the dots around key business numbers in a way previously unimaginable. BI helps you figure out:
- Which customers are profitable?
- Which customers appear profitable but aren’t?
- Are you close to or far from reaching critical milestones?
- When is the best time to launch a marketing campaign?
- What was the best performing product or service last quarter?
Business Intelligence software may be more of an investment than small businesses can bear. It can certainly be pricy. Small business or home business owners, however, can subscribe to BI services on the Internet at a fairly reasonable cost. There are several to choose from.
eBay also published a Hot Items list the first week of each month. It gives valuable information to eBay sellers who use drop shippers.
Have a Mailing List of Your Own
An email list that YOU COLLECT YOURSELF is worth its weight in gold. This can be accomplished by using a list manager on your site. List managers also provide the HTML coding for the form on the Gateway pages. A list manager collects the email addresses that are gathered with the form. Thus, your email list is collected. This might take some time so there are methods to use until you get your own email list built.
One way to build a mailing list is to do ad swaps with other list owners. The way this works is, you (as company A) have an email list that you send newsletters to and another list owner (company B) has a list they send newsletters to. Company A and Company B place ads on one another?s mailing lists. Each of you is promoting the other?s list.
You can rent or buy targeted email lists. The list you develop using your own customers? names is called your ?house list.? Of course, when you?re first starting out, your house list is likely to be skimpy. To augment it, one way to go is rent or buy a mailing list. There are two ways to buy or rent a mailing list?approaching the company you want to rent from directly or using a list broker. Any company that emails information to its customers usually has a list manager, who handles inquiries and orders for the mailing list.
Another way to build an email list is to list your newsletter in all of the ezine directories.
Have Your Own Voice Through Creating Special Reports
You’re probably searching for additional revenue streams to keep your business solid and secure in this contracting economy and uncertain world. Producing specialized content for sale is one of the fastest, most reliable methods of making extra income fast. Writing a “white paper” or a special report, is a great way to set yourself up as an expert in your field, and share valuable information with your prospects.
You may already have most of the ingredients for an e-book or special report in your files or archives. Find out which ingredients make customers willing to pay you for material available from other sources, and what elements you should include in your marketing copy to spark their interest in buying now.
Here are the steps to take when writing your special report:
- Have your end goal in mind before you start.
- Do you want to find a way to increase sales, while reducing your cost to acquire those sales?
- Who are you trying to impress and what is important to them?
- What distribution method will be best?
- How many people do you want to impact with this report?
- Make sure the layout of your special report looks pleasing, and is very easy to read.
- Keep in mind that it?s basically salesmanship in print.
- Keep your facts accurate, very brief and to the point. The denser your information, the more valuable and more likely to keep the interest of your reader.
- Write an attention getting headline. 95% of your readers will decide if they will read your special report based totally on your headline, so make it great and make it benefit driven.
Get it on the web. When emailing others, include your white paper URL in your SIG line of your Email or include the URL when promoting your special report on Email discussion lists.
