Affiliate marketing gives you the opportunity to earn money online automatically, once you have setup your website successfully and have gotten a decent flow of traffic. It is considered to be very simple and also an easy way to creat a good income source with affiliate marketing. On the other hand it is not easy, as it has high competition. A small percentage of people entering in this field become successful affiliate marketers, while others do not earn at all even though they have put money into it.
I will discuss three major mistakes that affiliate marketers make that causes their business to collapse. I will try to help you in earning a steady income, even if it is $20 a month. If you can avoid these mistakes, then you can sit back and enjoy your steady and monthly “passive” income.
In affiliate marketing, you get commissions for promoting products and services of a merchant, be it a digital product or a physical product. It is the merchants responsibility to pay you the sales commission. The role of the affiliate marketer is to promote the products or services for the merchant. The merchant is the investor, who pays commissions to the affiliate marketers, when any of their products or services are sold.
Here are the three fatal mistakes that affiliate marketers can make:
Don’t send your visitors directly to an affiliate website
Don’t send your visitors directly to the merchants website without offering any free benefits to the consumer because there is a possibility that they will not like the product and close the website without even buying a single product, which will decrease your sales. Now you have lost this potential customer forever because it's obvious that the next time they will choose to visit another site.
If you want your customers to visit the website again and again, offer them some kind of free benefit like free information, gifts or software bundles. You can send them a free newsletter or weekly horoscope at their email address, if you have their permission. If you are successful in grabbing their email address, then you can send them advertisements on their email address on a regular basis too, just make sure not to spam them a lot.
Don’t Create a Website Full of affiliate links, and flashy banners (Banner Farms)
If your website is full of affiliate links, lots of flashy banners and other advertisements then your visitor may become confused and they may simply leave your website because it does not provide any detailed content. I would just put one image and an honest product review to get the visitor’s attention. I would put two lines of text ads instead of ten flashy banners. An important fact is that text links are more successful than flashy banners. Visitors like to see what they want and not the fancy graphics. Also the load time of simple websites is much faster compared to full graphics because it takes time for images to load. People like to visit the sites that opens in seconds.
Banner Farms, a website that has only banners with no text, are not a good way to promote anything because it only shows images with little or no content. I would focus on the content before adding maybe one or two banners, not a whole page of them.
Losing Commission
Commission theft is one of the biggest drawbacks in this field because people can delete the last part of your affiliate link, meaning you do not get the credit for the sale. It is not possible to eliminate it completely, but you can use some tricks to minimize it. Cloaking and redirecting affiliate links are the best options for you in this situation.
The affiliate links contain your affiliate id at the end of the merchant website’s URL. An example of this is:
https://www.website.com?aff_id=your_affiliate_id
This is not a good style to choose. Anyone can easily drop your “aff_id” from the above link and can visit the merchants website to make a purchase. In this case the sale is made but you are not credited and will not get any commission. The solution to this problem is “cloaking”. After cloaking your affiliate link will be like:
https://www.website.com/affiliate_site
or you can use a shorten service to hide your long links, like google or bitly as these two are popular or there are others that also pay you a small amount when advertsing your links.
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