Affiliate Selling – What Not To Do
Wednesday, December 16, 2009 8:15The affiliate marketing industry has grown at the same rapid rate as the Internet itself. As online retailers become more widespread and better established, affiliate sites provide another way to drive targeted traffic and at the same time make some bucks for themselves. It’s a win-win situation at the end of the day. However, people are still learning quickly in this game and there are mistakes that seem to be quite common. Here are 3 of the top errors that are found in affiliate marketing and how to avoid them yourselves.
Thinking too niche. What most affiliate marketers forget is that even if a market is big enough to support an online retailer or two, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s big enough to support affiliates. This site advertising snowboards for example may be able to survive, but seeing as they will only pass on around 10% of the profits to affiliates, it is unlikely that affiliates sites could servive in such a niche. This means that affiliates are required to umbrella a good number of smaller niches in order to stand a chance of capturing a decent amount of the overall market.
Thinking too big. When products cost a great deal of money, like buying a swimming pool or luxury cruises for example, sellers take a lot of time over their decisions. People are very unlikely to follow an affiliate link and book an expensive holiday right then and there. They tend to compare offers to a greater extent and take more time in the consideration period of the purchasing cycle. They will then actually buy the item a little bit further down the line, by time your affiliate referral tracking would have been lost. Sticking to smaller items like gifts and digital products is far more likely to get results and people are more likely to buy these quickly.
Too weak. With any successful market it is not long before it attracts quite a crowd, and you find that you are not only competing with lots more affiliate marketers, but on top of that you have to try and boost your profile over the online merchant. The major difference of course is that you are hoping to get a certain percentage of the overall sale, whilst they have the larger incentive of getting the total amount of the sale. This means you need either work harder or smarter than they do to make any money.
