Affiliates struggling to earn $100 a month often find it hard to believe that other people could possibly earn as much as $10,000 or even $100,000 a month in commissions.
Believe it. Big commissions do happen. And you can expect to hear about even bigger commissions.
Forrester Research predicts that affiliate programs and affiliate networks will produce $280 billion annually in e-commerce sales by 2008.
In most programs, 5% of the affiliates generate the vast majority of the sales. If you're not in that 5% and want to be, you'll have to change what you're doing.
Here are 12 mistakes you could be making, and how to fix them.
1. Are you telling people how to make money on the Internet when you don't know how yourself?
Perhaps - just perhaps - you can succeed at this, but it's the most obvious trap into which new affiliates fall. You join a few affiliate programs and set up a site offering Internet marketing tips, work-from-home tips, instant-business tips, or be-your-own-boss tips.
The advantages of doing this include having great products to promote, high commissions and lots of help from Internet marketers.
However, if you do this, you face two massive challenges.
1. You'll have hundreds of thousands of web pages out there competing with yours.
2. You're competing with the planet's best marketing EXPERTS. Some of the brightest brains in Internet marketing are working full-time to grab the attention of your target audience.
I'm not saying you can't succeed in this field, but if you're new to affiliate programs, this is definitely NOT the best place to begin. If you're struggling, find a less well traveled path.
You don't have to abandon your existing website. Just launch a new one based on a new theme. Later, when you've learned more and really have something to offer, it will be time to revamp your marketing tips site.
Choose a new theme. Try a new niche.
2. Are you promoting the PROGRAM instead of the PRODUCT?
Over and over again, affiliates join a two-tier affiliate program and then create a page telling other people to join it. I've done this myself with LifetimeCustomers.com. However, that site is not my core business. It's just one page, which I created fairly quickly.
Feel free to try that technique, but don't pin all your hopes on it.
Unless you're really skilled at signing up key people in key places, or know how to sign up many thousands of affiliates, you're not likely to get rich on second-tier commissions.
The people you sign up will tend to copy you and try to sign up more people... Whoops! That sounds like the worst aspects of multi-level marketing. Who's going to actually SELL something and earn commissions?
I once read a report which claimed that my success with the SiteSell affiliate program is due to the fact that I've signed up thousands of sub-affiliates.
That suggestion was just a silly guess - and it's utter rubbish.
Only a tiny percentage of the thousands of dollars I earn each month from SiteSell is from second-tier commissions. I succeed because I promote the PRODUCTS. They're incredibly good value, I believe in them, and I succeed by telling people so.
Here's proof that "affiliate programs" is a tough, competitive field.
Try typing "affiliate programs" into Google. You're competing with 33,000,000 other pages. Try the phrase without the quotation marks and you're competing with 118,000,000 other pages. That's a mammoth increase on the pages found a couple of years ago. [UPDATE: Those are August 2006 figures.]
Promote the PRODUCTS.
| 3. Are you using banners instead of endorsements? |
know. It takes time, effort and money to buy and study the product you're trying to sell. It's much easier just to cut and paste a bit of HTML code. However, personal, enthusiastic endorsements out-sell everything else by miles.
If you put in the effort, you'll get the sales. You can probably quadruple your sales by endorsing the products you sell.
You can also combine graphics, text, short descriptions and relevant articles. However, best of all are your own, original personal endorsements.
Write honest, enthusiastic endorsements.
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