How not to promote an affiliate product?
This is the first of a series of posts on affiliate marketing mistakes.
Affiliate marketing is all about trust and once you build trust, it is probably the easiest passive income system on earth. Because trust not just helps build your credibility but also helps increase traffic to your websites.
Top marketers like Pat Flynn, Spencer Haws and the likes built their online affiliate marketing businesses on trust. And when you look at their businesses, you would see that they are in it for the long term.
They weren’t running their businesses in the fly-by model. They built their business, brick-by-brick, stone-by-stone and did it in such a way that it will live for a very long time.
Their businesses can be inherited by their kids and will stay as GENUINE businesses.
Why did I emphasize “GENUINE Businesses”?
Because a lot of newbie marketers fall for the shiny-object syndrome when they start off with affiliate marketing. In fact that is how affiliate marketing is promoted by a lot of GURUs.
According to them, you just hit the “START” button and money starts rolling into your bank accounts.
But the hard fact is that “it is not TRUE”.
Affiliate marketing just like all other businesses, involves a lot of hard work. But once you have done the hard work and set it up, then your business will keep generating passive income for life. All you have to then do, is keep tweaking things depending upon how things are evolving.
Though there is hard work involved, there is no other passive income generating business like Affiliate marketing.
But then there are a couple of things you should keep in mind with this business model.
- You wouldn’t become a millionaire overnight or, even in a month. It takes some time for a consistent livable income.
- There is no push button software on earth that can help you speed up any part of this business or, achieve overnight success. If something of that sort is promised, then it is a scam.
- There is no “SECRET” methods, sources or, goldmine etc. in affiliate marketing. Though a lot of so called GURUs promise all of these, the fact is that there is nothing like these. They are only trying to scam you.
Now with all of that out of the way, let me get onto the affiliate marketing mistakes for this post.
Affiliate Marketing Mistakes – What not to do when Promoting a Product
It was the last week I got this email from one of the affiliate marketers that I have been following for some time.
I have this habit of following people in my niche, especially people who are doing well just so that I am updated about what is happening in the industry and what people are doing.
After all when there is already a system that is in place and if somebody is doing it successfully, why would you want to reinvent the wheel. Isn’t it?
This is the exact same thing I recommend my mentees as well.
So I happened to get this email from this affiliate marketer (BTW, she does an awesome job with email marketing. You open your inbox and you will find one email from her every day. The only problem is that it is all promotional emails. There isn’t really any value in any of the emails which isn’t something I recommend).
Affiliate Marketing Mistakes # 1 – Never send only Promotional Emails
One of the biggest mistakes that affiliate marketers make is sending only promotional emails to their subscribers. They think that their subscribers joined their mailing list to receive only promotional emails.
I had done this mistake in my earlier days.
The result – a list of about 15,000 subscribers who were engaged with my blog posts and had bought my recommendations eventually ended up as a dead list with nobody opening my emails.
If you have built a list, I am sure you would realize the amount of effort that went into building that list. Every subscriber added to your list is a lot of hard work.
Don’t waste that list. Value each of those subscribers and provide value to them.
Anyways, back to the email I received.
So here’s what the email is all about.
This is about a product from a creator called Venkata Ramana and the product’s name is Swift.
Here’s how the sales page for this product looks.
Check that headline – “1-Click App puts any Link in Front of Up to 110M Hungry Buyers in Less than a Minute”.
When I see that kind of a headline, the first thing that comes to my mind is – If there indeed was such an app and this could happen in less than a minute, then wouldn’t every single person searching for “how to make money online” on the internet be a millionaire?
After all, traffic is the biggest problem for everybody. Isn’t it?
But unfortunately, that doesn’t happen because there is no such source.
When I see sales pages like that, I run as fast as I can from even the shadow of these products and product creators. And my recommendation is that, you too should do the same.
Affiliate Marketing Mistakes # 2 – Stay Away from Shady Products and Marketing Tactics
Never ever promote these kinds of products because they do not provide any value to anybody. It is just another way of making somebody buy something that is nothing more than crap.
There are a bunch of such product creators on the internet and you will find most of them selling their products on JVZoo or, Warrior Plus because these platforms doesn’t really quality check the products that are being promoted on their platform.
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration if I say that almost 70% of the products that you would find on these 2 platforms are crap and is nothing but a way of conning people.
I have been there, done that.
I used to buy every other such product that promised traffic and money in one click and in seconds only to find that it is totally farce and was just another way of inducing somebody to buy the product/service.
Once you are in, you will be shown a few more upsells and upgrades. You will buy those too, but with the same result.
I am sure that isn’t the experience you want to give your subscribers or, prospects. They joined you because they trust you and think that you will be able to solve a problem of theirs.
Don’t break their trust.
Stay away from such CRAPPY Products. Promote only genuine products from good affiliate programs.
Before I get into what this product is and why I recommend that you stay away from it, let us check the email that I received.
In addition to the fact that it is promoting a crap product, it also mentions the name of Neil Patel and says that this is something that he too has been using.
Utter lies and absolute CRAP!
I am sure this was one of those emails that the product creator would have given their affiliate marketers. And affiliate Marketers blindly use these emails.
Affiliate Marketing mistakes # 3 – Never Use Readymade email from Merchants
Most product creators and merchants provide emails swipes to their affiliates as part of the resources. And most affiliate marketers blindly copy these swipes and send it over to their subscribers.
In fact, some of them even forget to change placeholders. The emails that you receive will have something like {firstname_fix} etc. written in the greeting.
The subscribers on your list might also be on some other lists and there would be other marketers who would be sending similar emails to their list. In fact the product creator would also be sending the same email to their lists.
Now imagine if these subscribers see the same email coming to them from multiple sources.
They would surely mark it as “JUNK” and move on.
These readymade email swipes from product creators are supposed to be used for inspiration. You can customize it and tweak it according to your audience and your personality.
Your audience is used to seeing a specific style of writing from you. That style is what connects them to you. Maintain that style and write an email that suits your writing style.
Now that we spoke about some of these affiliate marketing mistakes, let me tell you about the product that I was talking about.
Do you know the what is that “Traffic Source” that the sales page talks about?
It is “Slideshare“.
And the strategy is to create powerpoint slides or, PDFs from your blogposts and submit it to Slideshare and other PDF sharing sites.
So, what exactly is this “1-Click App“?
It is a crappy software that generates powerpoint slides and PDFs from your blog posts.
So much for the hype. Isn’t it?
And the funnier piece is that the product doesn’t even talk about what to do with all of the PDF that you create!
These document sharing sites are extremely good for traffic generation. But they aren’t as easy as it is made to look. You will have to create valuable content and that takes a lot of hard work.
It is not just about copying and pasting the blog post. It is about presenting it in such a way that it is engaging and informative.
And once you have done that, you will have to wait for people to read those presentations and then click over to your offers/blogs/websites.
This traffic generation method is a volume game. You will have to create hundreds of presentations in order to generate a decent amount of traffic.
It isn’t impossible though and it is a good traffic source if you are willing to do the hard work. But none of these 1-Click apps are going to help you with that. And it is definitely not a 1-minute work.
Over to You
I hope these tips made sense.
Affiliate marketing is hard work. But the reward for the hard work is like no other. There are no short-cuts.
In fact, there are no short-cuts to making money or, getting rich except the lottery system.
So, if you are seriously looking to build your business using affiliate marketing, then be ready to put in that hard work. And don’t fall for that next shiny-object. Save your money and use it for something worthwhile.
Do comment below and let me know if there are any other affiliate marketing mistakes that you can think off.