Affiliate marketing is big businesses these days. The increasing number and variety of ecommerce sites these days means that there are lots more pieces of the pie to go around and affiliates can make money whilst sending more sales to an online retailer. 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. Below are details of 3 killer mistakes that many affiliates make, and you can avoid.
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 large. 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 will spend time pondering, weighing the options and doing further research for example. When they actually get to a stage that they are ready to make the purchase, your affiliate referral will have been lost in the ether. Sticking to smaller items including gifts and downloads is far more likely to get results and people are more likely to buy these quickly.
Not competitive enough. 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.