Affiliate marketing is a great way to begin an online business as long as you take care to avoid these common mistakes made by affiliate marketers.
5 Mistakes Made By Newbie Affiliate Marketers
1. Believing "If You Build It, They Will Come"
Do you believe that once you have an affiliate marketing funnel in place, visitors will start arriving and converting? Not likely. It can take months to start seeing steady traffic from the search engines, and it may never be enough to sustain your business.
You need a marketing plan to drive traffic to your site, so you can optimize your funnel and show the search engines your value. You may choose a mix of:
* Social media shares
* Paid clicks
* Offline promotion (fliers and classified ads)
2. Ignoring Free Tools to Optimize Your Affiliate Marketing Funnel
Google offers a lot of free tools you can use to make the most of your website, including the aptly named "Website Optimizer". Use these tools to analyse your site's performance or risk having other websites outperform you.
With split-testing capability and goals that help you see which sources send you customers who convert and where you lose prospects in the funnel, there is no reason you cannot manage your site like a pro.
3. Failing to Collect Email Addresses
The key to a successful affiliate business is building an email list. With an email list you will be able to:
* Overcome buyer objections.
* Send future offers for the same niche.
Instead of sending visitors straight to the affiliate sales page, you can offer a freebie that entices visitors to join your list. When they confirm their subscriptions, you can send them to the affiliate sales page.
Also Check :
Top 4 Internet Marketing Tools For Small Business
How Twitter Has Changed The Internet Marketing Landscape
4. Not Using a Reliable Email System
Studies have shown that many prospects need to see an offering seven times before they will commit. Your follow-up email sequence is critical for turning one-time visitors into long-term customers.
Everything you do to advertise and optimize your affiliate offering will be a waste if your email system does not deliver your messages. Trying to save money on this is a false economy. A reliable email reseller mailing system like NetEffekt.com will help to ensure that every email you send gets where it should.
5. Quitting Too Soon
In the beginning, you may struggle to get visitors. If you are dealing with a 1 or 2% conversion rates, and you are only seeing a handful of visitors a day, you may not see any sales in the early weeks of your campaign.
Those who succeed in affiliate marketing stick with it and learn how to improve before throwing away the effort they made to build their website and marketing funnel. With a reliable email system and a plan to harvest email addresses, you can use this campaign to launch future ones and build on your success.