Affiliate Marketing’s Three Most Common Pitfalls
If you haven’t noticed, there is plenty of money to be made in affiliate sales nowadays. 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. That said, there are some big problems that affiliates face, and they usually pop up time after time. Lets take a look at three of the most common and fatal mistakes made by affiliate sellers.
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 selling 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. This means that affiliates are required to umbrella a good number of smaller niches in order to stand a chance of capturing a decent amount of the overall market.
Thinking too big. When products cost a great deal of money, like buying a swimming pool or even 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 do more research, ask relatives, go to travel agents etc. When they actually get to a stage that they are ready to make the purchase, your affiliate referral will have been lost in the ether. Sticking to smaller items such as gifts and downloads is far more likely to get results and people are more likely to buy these quickly.
Too uncompetitive. With any successful market it is not long before it attracts quite a crowd, and you find that you are not only competing with lots more affiliate marketers, but on top of that you have to try and boost your profile over the online merchant. The difference being that they are working to get 100% of the profit, whilst you are only working for a proportion of that. What this essentially means then is you need to put in more effort or more ingenuity to keep ahead of the others.