Four Common Affiliate Mistakes!

By Andrea Beadle

www.Online-HomeBusiness-Opportunities.com

Myths concerning affiliate marketing abound. There are hundreds of stories of people making fortunes using affiliate marketing and just as many stories of people that sunk lots of money into it and failed. The latter give affiliate marketing a bad name and lead others to believe that it is a scam or that only a few people will succeed.

Affiliate marketing can be financially rewarding. Those that have succeeded know that it can bring the kind of income and lifestyle that would not have been possible without following such a route. However, the key thing is that successful affiliates understand that nothing comes easy. Whilst affiliate marketing can be lucrative, you have to do a lot of work to make it happen!

Assuming it is going to be easy is one of the main reasons why there are lots of people who fail miserably in the internet business. They are likely to be those who believe the myths concerning the easy money involved in systems such as affiliate marketing.

What they don’t realise is that the people who have wasted time, effort and too many resources in trying to pursue the life of ease that they believe this business will give them are the same people that have not put in enough effort to make sure they are doing the right things! And so they go into affiliate marketing armed with nothing but myths and fantastical notions of wealth, never realising that they bound to make the mistakes that prove to be their downfall.

In my view, the main reason affiliates fail is their ignorance of facts concerning how the entire business works. Affiliate marketing is not as simple as promoting someone else’s products through your website and getting paid for it. It is also about knowing the market and the customers at hand.

Discovering what the most common mistakes affiliates make might help those concerned understand that like any other business, there are dos and don’ts and that you need to make each of your steps count. A lack of understanding of the principles involved in this business is key.

The four common mistakes

1. Affiliate marketing involves advertising, and advertising through the internet means understanding search engines. What every affiliate has to do is to make these search engines his best friend through studying search engine optimization closely. This way, he is able to know what to do in connection with building a better website to ultimately use for his business.

Mastering advertising on the Internet is a whole lesson is itself and many new businesses find themselves floundering trying to get to grips with how to do it. Gone are the days of placing a simple ad in the local paper to generate your business. Advertising costs money and the truth is that most people that fail, fail to advertise effectively.

One of the best tricks I learned about advertising came from The Rich Jerk. Whilst his adverts are a little insulting to some, the content of his section on Search Engine advertising tricks was worth far more to me that the $10 dollars it cost me to download the report!

2. Most affiliates make the mistake of decorating their sites with banners that firstly put potential customers off and secondly that do not provide enough information about the product itself. The best way to overcome this mistake is to provide good content hand-in-hand with such banners. It is important for customers to know and understand the features of a product, and good content will be able to help them understand the benefit to them.

3. Many affiliates make the mistake of promoting only one product. Consequently, customers are not given enough options to choose from. There is also the risk of generating fewer sales as buyers like feeling that they have a choice in what they are buying. It is always better to give them a few alternatives than to give them only one.

4. Other affiliates make the mistake of promoting too many products. As a result, customers are confused and end up not making a choice at all. It is perhaps good to give them only a few really good choices. This gives them the balance between having some choice (point 3) and just enough choice to actually make a decision.

All in all, affiliates that are doomed to fail in this business are those who do not put in enough effort to understand the industry that they are in. Understanding their path and planning it step by careful step will prove successful in the long term.