The Top Affiliate Marketing Mistakes

No matter how much you get right when it comes to affiliate marketing, it only takes a few mistakes to undermine your success and to set yourself back.

If you’re currently making money from products online but it’s not to the extent that you imagined, then you may be wondering what it is holding you back. Why aren’t you making as much money as all those bloggers who take photos of themselves in front of airplanes and private yachts?

Here are just a few of the common mistakes that may be holding you back…

The Product is too Generic

Are you selling an e-book called ‘Make Money Online’?

Well guess what… so is literally everyone else. Even if the actual product you’re selling isn’t being shoved down everyone’s throats already, if it’s generic, then you can bet that various different versions of it are. Ask yourself how you can stand out and how you’re going to set yourself apart from the crowd.

Going in for the Kill too Early

This is a particularly big mistake people make when it comes to selling affiliate products through e-mail marketing. If you have a product and you’re trying to sell it through e-mail, then it’s very important that you try to build anticipation and generate trust to begin with. Otherwise, why should anyone listen to you? Why would they care?

You Don’t Believe in the Product

You don’t have to sell something life changing but you should at least have faith that the product you’re selling is good. However much you try to pretend you love that 3 page e-book you’re going to find that it comes across that you aren’t 100% committed. And if nothing else, having a product that you genuinely believe in will mean you have more good points to mention about it. In an ideal situation, you should be trying to sell a product that you have bought and used yourself.

You Don’t Have a Route to Market

Finding your route to market is one of the big keys to success with affiliate marketing. This is the way you’re going to connect with your target demographic. Identifying this route to market is one of the very best things you can do right from the word go and in fact you should have this in mind even before you have selected your product.

Follow these tips and you should see your profits start to go up!

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How to Create or Acquire Products to Sell From Your Site

There are a ton of resources out there that you can look into if your objective is to start selling online. You can find guides to persuasive writing, to creating a sales funnel and to managing a PPC campaign.
But before you can take advantage of any of this advice, you first need something to sell. And that’s the one important step that a lot of people tend to forget!
So the question is: how can you acquire or create a product that’s worth selling? Let’s take a look…


E-books and Digital Products


One option is to sell an e-book or a digital product. In fact, this is one of the most common things to sell from a website or a sales funnel and in many cases, this is why guides don’t explain how to make products – they assume you’ll go this route!
Creating a digital product is relatively very simple and tends to only involve writing text into a document and then saving it as a PDF. Courses are a little harder and involve recording some footage as well.
You can either make this yourself, buy a PLR book (private label rights, which you can resell), hire someone to write something for you or sell something as an affiliate. That last option means that you’re effectively working as a salesman and keeping commission. This is an easy business model with zero risk but of course you lose some control and some profit.


Physical Products


Selling physical products is harder but it is possible and there are once again plenty of options to enable you to do this.
One of the most obvious options is to sell a physical product via drop shipping. Drop shipping means that a company is letting you sell its product and will then handle fulfilment when you pass on the order. What’s more, is that they’ll even let you put your brand on the product and remain a white label service throughout!
You can once again sell physical products as an affiliate too, though the commission tends to be much lower. Specifically, this will tend to earn you about 4-8% instead of 75% for a digital product – this is a big difference.
Want to create your own physical product from scratch? Then you’re going to need a prototype, plans and ‘Bill Of Materials’. Find a manufacturing partner and be ready to put down a big deposit on your order!

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How to Make Your Digital Product a Hit

If you’re launching a digital product, then you have the potential to make a large amount of profit with absolutely zero overheads. This is the amazing thing about digital products: while it might cost you to create them if you outsource the process, it’s not going to cost you anything to sell them. There is no ‘COGS’ (Cost Of Goods Sold), meaning that you make 100% profit for each sale.

But there are problems here too.

The biggest issue with selling a digital product, is that they can often seem less exciting than physical products and many of potential buyers might even question whether there’s any point in them buying from you.

Imagine you’ve got an e-book about fitness.

That sounds like a great product until you bear in mind that there are thousands of websites on the net that are all giving away the very same information… for free! So how do you go about making your digital product seem exciting and fresh and how do you make sure that your audience are on board with it?

Have Something to Say

The first and most important thing to do about this, is to make sure you have something to say. In fact, you should flip the entire way you approach the creation of your digital product on its head. Too often, we decide that we want to start selling a digital product and then we set out to look for a topic to cover. If you do this, then you’re potentially setting yourself up for failure.

So what should you be doing instead?

Simple: you wait until you have something to say and then you set about creating a digital product in order to say that. This is why it is so important to always write about subjects that you are passionate about. Don’t write a book you think will sell, write a book you want to write and then try and sell it.
Now you have something different. Now you have something new to say. And now you have something that people will be excited to learn more about. And you can see this when you look at the top selling digital products on the market. They’re always ‘new systems’ for making money, or whole new theories pertaining to fitness. They’re new and different and that is how they spread and build a following.

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Learn to Master Your Niche Research Skills

If you want to succeed in any given niche, then you need to offer something different that the competition isn’t already offering. This is how you stand out as different and memorable and this is how you make links ‘clickable’ and sharable.
But coming up with new content is hard. Especially in a crowded niche where there are thousands of new articles published every day!
Moreover, you’re going to have to do your research if you want to appear accurate, reliable and trustworthy too. So how do you go about mastering your research skills so that you can really stand out? You read on, that’s how!


Your Inspiration


The more information you take in, the more inspiration you put out. Without meaning to get too philosophical here, most psychologists now agree that there’s no such thing as a truly ‘original’ idea. Instead, our ideas are created when we combine different ideas we already had.
So the more information you are taking in on a regular basis, the more bits of data you will have available to recombine into something brand new.
And this shouldn’t just mean reading on the topics that you’re writing about either. Reading on different topics is also important as this way you can bring related knowledge in from other fields or combine subjects in order to come up with something completely new.
What’s more, reading other blogs and websites can give you ideas for structuring articles or spinning them that you can apply to your own work in new ways. Like that article on how to dress like a bodybuilder? How about taking it and applying it to your own niche for an article on ‘how to dress like an entrepreneur’?
Great places to get ideas and material then include:

  • Websites
  • Blogs
  • Magazines
  • Books
  • TV
    Subscribe to some RSS feeds and keep reading!


Looking for News


It’s also important to try and stay up-to-date by following the latest news and developments. This sometimes means going straight to the source, which can mean reading journal studies (look for them on Google Scholar) or looking at press releases (you can find sites that collect and publish these).


Taking it Further


The truly unique and interesting stuff though comes when you start going deeper and really researching into your topic. Often this begins with asking the right questions. When you next read an article telling you about a new discovery for instance, ask why that’s true. Why does that new workout routine work so well? And what if you were to turn it up a notch or introduce a new element?

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Affiliate Programs Explained

More people are discovering the power of affiliate marketing to supplement or even replace their existing income. But there are even more people who would like to have a slice of this exciting world. But, are unsure exactly what an affiliate program is or what it consists of.

When discussing an affiliate program, it helps to compare it to a traditional networking company. Where a network of salespeople and distributors are recruited to sell their products to all corners of the globe.

Example, instead of a company selling directly to their customers it sells products through a series of distributors and salespeople. In turn, the members of this distribution and sales network enjoy a very good living promoting other peoples products.

In essence, the affiliate programs found on the internet are distribution and sales efforts taken to the online world. The affiliate website takes the place of the distributor and sales network. Affiliates get paid by the seller when a sale is made. There are affiliate programs where physical products have to be shipped. But there are also many other affiliate programs where software or informational products have to be downloaded.

It is easy to understand why this arrangement is so popular. From the point of view of both the merchant and the owner of the web site. The merchant benefits from increased sales and at the same time, does not have to pay for additional advertising. He can expand his network without the need for additional and sometimes expensive advertising. The affiliate on the other hand may not have a product of his own to make money from. Selling someone else’s product for a share of the selling price gives him the opportunity to start his own business.

Requires effort to promote the product you are selling. There are many ways to promote affiliate offers. An example would be if the affiliate already has a website and a link
added directly to the merchant site. It costs nothing to set up and is very easy to do with a little cut and paste.

All good affiliate programs will have a back office with tools to use. Its always advisable to protect your affiliate links and therefore your commissions. Always disguise links with bitly.com to avoid use by anyone else. You can find a good program to use to prevent theft of your commission at http://www.1st-4-income.com/stopcommissiontheft.html.

Commissions paid by merchants vary. You can expect anything up to 70% or even more with some affiliate programs. But these will mainly be software downloads. If you go to Clickbank you will find thousands of such programs to promote. Its easy to see why the promotion of software programs is a great way to make money online. At the other end of the scale though some affiliate programs pay a pittance. Commissions as low as 1.5% in some cases. You will have to ask yourself if these will be worth the effort.

Affiliate programs are very popular on the internet. If you don’t have your own product and want to have a shot at earning some money on the internet. Then affiliate marketing is the way to go. So if you’re not already familiar with the concept of affiliate marketing, why not check it out?

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Affiliate Programs And Affiliate Marketing: A Wealth Of Opportunities

Employment has been the way to make money. People have been looking for alternatives. Their dream of earning a huge salary without much work. The online revolution pried open many of the doors shut in the real world, Even now there is an air of disillusionment hanging around the Internet. After the dot com crash rumours and speculation abound about cyber security. One online industry that has welcomed people of all abilities, backgrounds and qualifications has continued to thrive. The affiliate marketing program offers regular website owners the chance to host advertisements and earn money.

Niche or Industry

Even in the affiliate program the big money doesn’t come easily, it takes time, patience and some good business decisions. The first of these decisions lies in which industry that a new affiliate wishes to join. The Internet is a hot bed of industry performance with an uninhibited global reach. Business and enterprise has become a cornerstone for the new e-industries. One of the most successful global sectors is that of online gaming. People have been signing up and playing along in some of the most exciting betting action ever seen. Betting is a hot industry, turning over billions of dollars a year. Maintaining one of the largest clientele of an industry. The sports betting sites provide the optimum partnership level for new affiliate. Looking to get a cut of the action.

Marketing Tools

All of the marketing tools to make their site a successful advertising forum are given to the affiliate. Making the transition from Internet user to marketing guru an easy one. No money exchanges hands in this initial transaction, affiliate paid on a commission basis. Each fully signed up customer the affiliate attracts brings them extra revenue. In the sports betting market revenue tends to be based around the financial gains that individual creates for the site. The sports betting sites ordinarily offer up to 35% of each player’s revenue, to the affiliate that attracted them. Affiliates can earn in line with the profits of an online bookmaker. Meaning that like the sports betting sites, the affiliate is able to earn without boundaries or caps.

With the ease with which a person can sign up and start earning through the online sports betting affiliate program. There is absolutely nothing stopping any person signing up and earning. The potential for custom in the sports betting market is unparalleled. The affiliate has a huge Internet clientele to exploit.

Affiliate earnings only inhibited by their willingness to experiment with online advertising.

Rewards of Affiliate Marketing

The affiliate marketing program offers opportunity in return for very little in the way of effort or financial backing. The affiliate reaps the rewards of their own labours. Whilst collecting more in the process, just through hosting advertisements.

Ten Essential Marketing Tips For Eveyone

Follow these ten easy wins for an instant marketing boost…

1. UNDERSTAND YOUR CUSTOMERS

Getting to know your customers is the most important stage of marketing process. The more accurate your information and knowledge, the more effective you will be at selling. Use all the information at your disposal to understand customer’s behaviour, demographics, and requirements. This information should steer your major business decisions and allow you to write a marketing plan.

2. OBSERVE THE MARKETING ENVIRONMENT

Knowing your customer is vital, but there may also be business opportunities which emerge as a result of changing global circumstances. For example, in recession budget brands such as camp sites or cheap food stores tend to flourish as people dial down their annual spending. Emerging technologies may make new products possible, and new legislation may shift consumer’s behaviours – a good example is the reduction in road tax for low polluting cars. Make sure you regularly ‘scan’ the external environment for opportunities (and threats).

3. DESIGN YOUR PRODUCT OR SERVICE AROUND THE CUSTOMER

Once you have a marketing plan in place, you need to make sure your product or service is tailored to your customers – from the packaging to the way it is promoted. Entrepreneurs often fall into the trap of making the product they want to sell, rather than designing and presenting things in the way the customer wants.

4. ENSURE YOU ARE SMOOTH AND EFFICIENT

The process of conducting your business is almost as important as the product itself – make sure delivery is quick, returns are dealt with courteously, your staff greet customers with a smile and a cup of coffee. Surprise and delight your customers by going above and beyond the call of duty for them. Word of mouth is a powerful selling tool and this is exactly the way to generate it.

5. DESIGN TARGETING ADVERTISING & CUSTOMER COMMUNICATIONS

Placing a few ads just isn’t enough to get noticed any more. Consumers are bombarded with hundreds of marketing messages every day of their lives and take less and less notice. You need to do something pretty special to stand out, so make sure your messages are clear and appeal to exactly the people you are trying to sell to. Use both emotional and rational arguments to demonstrate what you are selling and why they need it.

6. INVEST IN YOUR PEOPLE

Your staff are your most precious asset – look after them and give them the training they need to do their jobs well. From your receptionist to your salesmen, make sure they are motivated, have the tools they need and understand their role in the business plan. If everyone works together, your business will look after itself.

7. MAKE SURE YOUR SHOP FRONT IS IMMACULATE

Good presentation is a huge influencing tool, it generates trust, motivates your staff and makes customers comfortable with their decision. If your front of house is messy, what does that say about your warehouse or filing systems? Even if things are chaotic behind the scenes, never lower the standards of your customer facing areas

8. HAVE A PRICING STRATEGY

Don’t just set a price based on production costs plus a margin. Pricing is a powerful tool to achieve your goals – decide what you are trying to achieve and what message you’re giving out by setting your price at a certain level. High prices mean you’re likely to sell less, but can give the impression of a premium product. Low prices can allow you to break into or dominate a particular market, although this may mean low profitability in the short term. Ensure pricing is part of a greater strategy, and include this in your marketing plan.

9. RESPOND TO COMPLAINTS WELL

Every complaint is an opportunity to turn around a dissatisfied customer – respond quickly and positively. Remember your brand is easily damaged, and the last thing you want is for people to be actively spreading bad stories about your business. A complaint that is dealt with well can often result in a loyal customer, they will have refreshed trust in your brand and the confidence to buy again knowing that if things do go wrong they will be sorted out quickly.

10. WRITE A MARKETING PLAN

Develop your strategy in the form of a written marketing plan, as this will ensure all members of your business understand the company direction. The plan is a comprehensive and well researched document which covers all essential aspects of taking your products to the customer, including the points listed above. When developing the plan, ask yourself the following questions.

  • Where are we now?
  • Where do we want to be?
  • What opportunities exist in the environment?
  • How will we get there?
  • Who will do what?
  • How will we know we’ve arrived?

Affiliate marketing success tips

If you are just starting out or have been doing affiliate marketing for some time, following these ten steps will help you improve your chances of success.

It you expect to make extra income from affiliate marketing you will need to create quality content. Answer your customers questions and provide them with detailed information but written in a way that is accessible and engaging.

Track your affiliate marketing success.

While you do not want to set it and forget It – knowing how visitors engage with your site is important. You want to know which ads and links are working and which ones are not. This will help you save valuable advertising spend and optimise your results.

All these questions will provide answers that you can use to improve and add actions.

Use your analytics to get answers you can use to determine what new content is needed or even where to place certain links on existing pages.

As an affiliate you are making recommendations to your visitors of various products, so that you stand out you need to be seen as an expert, or at least a place to get detailed information about the products you promote.

Engage your visitors

Most successful affiliate marketers talk to their visitors. If you have a blog, allow comments. This will provide you with useful feedback and build trust with your audience.

Concentrate on one niche affiliate business and always be testing and improving. Remember that a confused mind never buys so keep your ads focused on the niche you are promoting.

Set proper expectations.

You are probably not going to make a million dollars in a month. You need to set realistic expectations. It’s advisable to find an experienced mentor that has achieved what you are trying to do. They can help you avoid costly mistakes and shortcut your results.

Affiliate Marketing Success Tips

4 ways to validate your business idea

Before you invest your time and hard-earned money in a business idea you need to verify your plan to make sure it will be successful. You will need to do the research necessary to out if your target audience needs what you are selling. Here are some quick ways that you can validate if your business idea will work.

Testing

An Easy way for you to gage interest in your idea is to run a few necessary tests first. You can do this by placing various ads highlighting your product or service on social media to see if anyone would be interested. This is a relatively cheap and effective way to gain feedback on your business idea.

Assess yourself

Rather than focusing on building products that you think are innovative or cool, ask yourself if the product is something that you would use. The easiest way to test the market and validate your business idea is by surveying yourself.

Find an Industry Advisor or Mentor

There will always be people who have the expertise and experience that you lack. Often you can locate them at networking events or conferences, look for the ones with a proven track record. Its likely they have already accomplished what you are trying to do, and may have a blueprint that you can follow.

Conduct Surveys

There are many online tools that allow you to conduct surveys. Survey Monkeys offer a great service at a reasonable price. This is a great way to gage the interest, needs and gaps in specific industries.

If you want to start a successful business, then you must take steps to validate the viability of the idea.

These four easy ways to verify an idea can quickly tell you whether your plan is feasible. Don’t waste time and money on a business idea that won’t be able to get off the ground.

Research your idea

Optimizing Your Website SEO

Five ways to optimize SEO, SEO is the key to getting your website discovered via search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. The traditional approach to SEO involves two sets of tactics: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

On-page SEO is the strategic implementation of keywords on your website, including in page titles, headers, meta descriptions, and more.

Off-page SEO, in comparison, refers to improving your website’s overall authority on the web, which is determined by what other websites are linking to you. The goal with off-page SEO is to attract inbound links (or “backlinks”) from relevant, authoritative websites.

While on-page and off-page SEO are helpful concepts, they are rooted in an approach that is going by the wayside. In the past, the goal of SEO was to impress (or trick) the search engines so that they’d give you higher rankings — with the goal being to achieve the coveted #1 spot in the search results for one of your target keywords.

Today, search engines are smarter. They can tell the difference between spammy websites that are designed to game the system, and legitimate websites that are providing, relevant high-quality content. Modern SEO is about optimizing for the searchers, not the search engines.

  • Page Titles – A page title is the text you see at the top of your browser window when viewing a web page. It’s also the title of a page that is presented in search engine results. Page titles can be found and edited in your site’s HTML. The text that is surrounded with the <Title> tag is your page’s title. Here are some guidelines for coming up with effective page titles:
  • Write page titles that describe – and align with — a page’s content.
    • Include relevant keywords (which should happen naturally if you follow the above tip).
    • Place keywords as close to the beginning of the title as possible.
    • Make it fewer than 70 characters long. (Longer page titles will get cut off by web browsers and in search results. If you make the page title too long, it will also dilute the importance of the keywords mentioned.)
    • Include your company name at the end of the page title, unless you are a big brand and people search for you through your brand name.
    • Use unique page titles for each page of your website

Five ways to optimize SEO

  1. Meta Descriptions- A meta description is a short summary that you can write for a web page, which search engines display in search results. These descriptions don’t count toward search engine rankings, but they are still incredibly useful. When creating a description, the goal should be to write compelling copy that accurately describes what’s on a page so searchers will be enticed to click.
  2. Headings – If a piece of text appears larger or more prominent than the other text on a page, it’s probably part of a heading. You can verify this by checking the HTML code of your website and looking for text with an <h1>, <h2>, or <h3> tag surrounding it. Both search engines and searchers tend to pay more attention to headings in comparison to regular paragraph text. For this reason, it is good to include keywords in your headings whenever possible. Keep in mind that tags give the text more weight as keywords than <h2> or <h3> tags.

3. Including too many headings dilutes the importance of keywords in other headings, so we recommend using the <h1> tag only once. If the page is text heavy (like a blog post) then feel free to throw in a few <h2> or <h3> tags as paragraph titles.

4. Images – Images on a web page can enhance user experience. When inserting images into your website, however, you should keep in mind the following:

•   Don’t use images excessively. More pictures can slow down the loading of your page, thus negatively impacting both user experience and SEO

•   Associate text with pictures. For whatever reason, the images on your site may fail to render. To ensure that visitors can still understand the information you’re presenting, use the “alt text” HTML attribute to provide relevant text descriptions of your images.

•   Include keywords in your image file name. This will help you draw in relevant traffic from image searches. Separate the words in the file name with a dash (-).

5. URL Structure – The URL of a web page is its web address. For example, HubSpot’s http://blog.hubspot.com. URL structure refers to how the text in a URL is organized, as well as how the different URLs on your website interact with one another.

When structuring your website’s URLs, there are a few best practices to keep in mind:

  • Separate keywords with dashes. For your internal page URLs, separate individual keywords with dashes (-). For example: http://hubspot.com/marketing-resources/ is a good URL that captures ‘marketing’ and ‘resources’ as keywords.
  • Describe what’s on the page. Structure your URLs so that searchers can easily understand what information they’re going to find. For example, if you land on a company’s products page, seeing the URL http://company.com/products/product1 will be much more reassuring than something like http://company.com/1543?/eh?.
  • Use 301 redirects when necessary. A 301 redirect forwards an old URL to a new one. Make sure you do this if you change the URL of a page on your site. (A common mistake is not applying a 301 redirect between yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com. This can be quite a problem from an SEO standpoint, because search engines will give separate credit to both versions of your site.)

Five ways to optimize your SEO