3 Most Common Mistakes Affiliate Marketers Make
Affiliate marketing is big businesses these days. 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. Lets take a look at three of the most common and fatal mistakes made by affiliate sellers.
Thinking too small. Be very careful when moving into an unknown market that you don’t forget just how big it has to be to support not only the actually sellers, but also affiliates underneath them. 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. 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.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 like gifts and ebooks for example is far more likely to get results and people are more likely to buy these quickly.
Not strong enough. 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 major difference of course is that you are hoping to get a certain percentage of the overall sale, whilst they have the larger incentive of getting the total amount of the sale. This means you need to stay one step ahead of the game if you want to turn any sort of profit.