I count myself in this group as I really haven’t done a whole lot with affiliate marketing.
Reason #1: Proper Planning
One of the first things that come to mind is proper planning. The old addage goes like this, “If you fail to plan, then you plan to fail”.
Ken Evoy in sitesell.com stresses making your own site around a topic you like and enjoy and working at getting the site to a point where it is a well oiled machine that is going to bring in customers looking for exactly what you’re website is about. Not just a niche website but a niche IN A niche website. Instead of a site about mustangs, a website about rebuilding mustangs.
Reason #2: Be Specific
Google returns 5,100,000 sites for “mustang” while “only” 590,000 for “rebuilding mustangs”. Which one do you think it would be eaiser to rank higher on. Thinking about and planning what topic you want to focus on and build an information site around that topic, not necesarilly the one with the most hits will get your site noticed faster and THEN using it to sell affiliated items as well as other monetization methods.
Reason #3: Invest Time in Promoting the Products
It has become harder to promote affiliate programs through Google Adsense as Google now only allows one affiliate per program. It is the resourceful person who doesn’t let that stop them and uses other low cost methods such as highlighted in “Highly Effective Forum Marketing Videos” and the accompanied Craig$list book. This information shows how to promote your products using forums. Many internet marketers started selling on forums and it continues to this day. Russell Brunson, started this way as well as untold thousands of other IM’ers.
Reason #4: They Don’t Presell
Every fulltime internet marketer will recomend you setup a presell page. You don’t have to spend a lot of money, but you will need your own site to presell their product. The important thing
However, spending a little money upfront is going to make the money you spend on advertising a whole lot more effective. People are naturally skeptical of salesletters. Most people don’t want to be sold. They want information. Your job is to provide what appears to be a third party review of the product you are trying to promote. People may not like salesletters, but they absolutely love to read reviews. They want to know how a product works for someone who’s actually used it, and how a real person has actually used it.
When setting up your presell page, try to stay neutral in the beginning or your page. If you start out saying how great this product is that you’re trying to sell, people are going to be almost as skeptical of what you’re saying as they are of the actual salesletter page. You don’t want that. So give your visitor what they want. Give them a review of the product.
Of course, this is by no means an exhaustive list, in fact this was originally titled “7 reasons why most affiliate marketers fail”, but I had left it as a draft for over a month. I decided to post like this and just finish it up as a secondary post later on, hopefully not too much later on, as I would like to write a whole lot more often.
