The affiliate marketing industry has grown at the same rapid rate as the Internet itself. 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, as with any developing industry there will always be common mistakes that are made. Below are details of 3 killer mistakes that many affiliates make, and you can avoid.
Thinking too small. 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. Affiliates then need to think about the larger market and try to cover as many niches as they can whilst still remaining competitive.
Thinking too big. 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.Not many people will click an affiliate link for something very costly and then convert in a small time-frame. They will do more research, ask relatives, go to travel agents etc. They will then actually buy the item a little bit further down the line, by time your affiliate referral tracking would have been lost. Sticking to smaller items such as gifts and ebooks for example is far more likely to get results and people are more likely to buy these quickly.
Not competitive enough. As mentioned earlier the affiliate market in growing at a rapid rate, which means that you are going to be in competition with more affiliate sellers each day, but additionally likely to be competing with the original online sellers at the same time. 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 to stay one step ahead of the game if you want to turn any sort of profit.