Friday, December 12, 2008

4 Mistakes That You Should Avoid in Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a proven profitable online business that enables many affiliates live in wealthy lifestyle. If you are not making any money or money that is good enough to replace your day job, then there must be somewhere wrong in the way you do affiliate marketing. Check out whether you have made any of these 4 mistakes which you should avoid if you want to success in an affiliate business:

Mistake #1: Not selecting the right product


Not all affiliate products will make you money, you need to select the right product that demand by the consumers and generate enough commission to make profit out of each sale makes through your affiliate link. In selecting a product to sell in affiliate marketing, you need to take into a few considerations:
Merchant's landing page. It must be able to convert the visitors into buying customers. Commission must be high enough to cover your marketing or advertising cost based on an accurate estimation of traffic-to-sale conversion rate. The product should have good market demand. This can be estimated by analyzing the related keywords search volume.

Mistake #2: Lazy to test the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns

You have setup a number of marketing campaigns through Google Adwords and other pay-per-click advertising media, but you never keep track on how your campaigns are performing. Hence, you don't know which campaigns make money and which are not. When you encounter losses in affiliate marketing due to the cost of marketing is more than the revenue generated, you quit. If you have tracked your campaigns performance, most of time, you can turn the loss into profit just by removing ineffective campaigns.

Mistake #3: Do not own a website

Most affiliates use direct-linking method to channel the traffic generated from their pay-per-click ads to merchant's website. Direct-linking may work well in the past, but not in today's competitive affiliate marketing environment. Moreover, people hate to be hard-sell, which is done by most merchant websites. Instead, the customers prefer to be soft-sell or pre-sell where they get more details information about the product or service they are interested in, and then they will follow the recommendation or refer link to the merchant website if they are interest to buy it. Therefore, you should have a website to pre-sell your visitors before you direct them to the merchant website.

Mistake #4: Sign up too many affiliate programs

Many affiliates especially those who are new tend to sign up with many affiliate programs and try to promote every of them. This action most like do more harm then good. When you try to promote too many affiliate products from too many affiliate programs, you tend to lose focus and direction, making you unable to apply effective marketing strategies that make you profit from affiliate marketing. Sign up with too many affiliate programs and promoting too many affiliate products will lead you to nowhere.

Summary

Affiliate marketing is a proven business model and you should be able to success making money from it unless you have made the common mistakes done by most affiliates who have failed in their affiliate marketing efforts.

By : Scott Bamboo

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