Avoid These Common Pitfalls Faced By Affiliate Marketers

Affiliate marketing is big businesses these days. The increasing number and variety of e-commerce 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. Its a win-win situation at the end of the day. That said, there are some big problems that affiliates face, and they usually pop up time after time. 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 its 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 survive in such a niche. What affiliate sites should do is broaden the horizons and cover, in this case, all extreme sports for example, not just snowboarding.

Thinking too large. When products cost a great deal of money, like buying a swimming pool or maybe luxury cruises for example, sellers take a lot of time over their decisions.It is quite rare for buyers to follow affiliate links for expensive goods or services and then buy them on the same day. They will spend time pondering, weighing the options and doing further research for example. And by the time they come to make the purchase the tracking cookie or alternative will have expired in lots of cases. Sticking to smaller items including gifts and digital products is far more likely to get results and people are more likely to buy these quickly.

Too uncompetitive. You need to remember that the online publicity arena is very competitive and you will be in the ring with not only other affiliates, but also those merchants who you are affiliates for. The difference being that they are working to get 100% of the profit, whilst you are only working for a proportion of that. This means you need either work harder or smarter than they do to make any money.

Photograph courtesy Kriss Szkurlatowski