3 Crucial Checks that All Affiliate Marketers Need to Put In Place to be Successful! December 1, 2009 at 10:15 pm
Are you struggling to make your affiliate marketing business successful? Perhaps you’ve put a lot of time, energy and money into building your affiliate marketing business, but you’re really not making much income out of it yet… You might even be seeing a good amount of traffic to your website… and maybe you have a good click-through rate to your vendors’ websites… But the actual sales conversions and the affiliate commission checks that you’re getting don’t meet the levels that you’d expect!
Maybe you’re thinking that you’ve chosen the wrong niche or the wrong product to promote? Or perhaps, you’re starting to wonder if it’s all just hype and there’s really no money to be made in affiliate marketing? The truth is that there is definitely a lot of money to be made online in affiliate marketing!
But just like salespeople who sell physical products for big corporations, it takes time, energy and doing your homework to be successful! If you know what you’re doing… if you qualify your customer well, and if you’ve done your homework both about your audience and also about your vendor, then you really can make huge commissions in affiliate marketing. Not doing enough homework about vendors is an area where many affiliates fail, but I’ll cover that more in a moment.
Here are some checks you do if this sounds like you:
1. Check your stats and clicks
You want to know if you’re getting a good number of clicks on your affiliate links (a high click-through rate). If you’re not getting a high click-through rate for one or more of your affiliate links, then you need to go back to basics and check if your website copy or your ad campaign copy is actually addressing the needs of your target audience.
Remember the golden rule: Your job is to help your customers find a solution to a problem or situation that they’re experiencing. So if your copy doesn’t appear to show them that there’s light at the end of the tunnel for that problem, then that’s something you’ll want to fix. If you check your website stats and you find that you’re not getting much traffic to your website at all, then you need to go back to basics and look at ways to generate more traffic. If your primary traffic generation process is through Paid ad campaigns, change your ad campaign copy and do some testing to see what seems to work better. Change things and test and then test again. This takes time, but it will pay off in the long run..
2. Check your vendor’s website copy
If you are getting a good click-through rate to your vendor’s website, you need to check if the copy that you’re using to bring customers to your website, and the copy on your website that you use to promote your vendor’s product actually matches the information that they will read when they reach the product sales page. If it sounds like the product that you’re offering them is different to the product that your vendor is selling then you might be wasting a lot of time and energy (and money if you use paid advertising) to get people to your vendor’s page. Even if you have personally experienced the product and what you’re offering is exactly what the product does or offers, if your vendor’s sales page doesn’t compel your referred customers to buy it, then your efforts might be meaningless.
If your vendor’s sales page actually reads fine and is similar to the message that you’re sending to your customers, then there might be something far more sinister going on… Read on…
3. Check if your vendor is using covert tactics to steal your commissions from you
This is one of the biggest areas that most affiliates fail to do their homework in… Did you know that many affiliate marketing vendors really see the customers that their affiliates send to their websites purely as “free traffic”? Yes, it’s true. You read that right. They believe that they created (and own) the product and so while they like the fact that you’re bringing them customers, because they can’t see you and don’t know you personally, they don’t really think you have a right to any commission. Unfortunately this is more common than we’d like to know. There are many underhanded ways that vendors can, and do, covertly steal their affiliates’ sales commissions right out of their hands! And many of these covert tactics really look, to the innocent eye, as if they are harmless and necessary. And unless you know what these are and put into place the steps and checking processes to make sure that you’re not being ripped off, all of your efforts to build your affiliate marketing business, the time, energy and money you put in, might all be in vain. There are also many vendors who actually rip their affiliates off without even knowing their doing it.
Now none of us wants to work for nothing, so make sure you learn how to regularly check your vendors sales processes to make sure they’re doing their job and supporting your sales processes. Even if they’re ripping you off accidentally (which is possible), you need to make sure they’re not or you won’t be getting what you deserve!
Conclusion: If you’re not getting the affiliate commissions that you believe you should be, then it might be because your copy or message or website aren’t up-to-scratch, or maybe even because the product you’ve chosen to promote, or the niche you’ve chosen to focus on aren’t as popular as others… But the reality is that most niche’s have definite possibility and it’s often more about your skills in marketing the product than the niche itself. But it might also be that you are doing everything okay, but that your vendor is employing underhanded (or accidental) strategies that, no matter how much work you put in, will prevent you from earning the commissions you deserve! Find out if this is happening to you. At the end of the day, affiliate marketing is a great business opportunity that we love and want to see grow.
It really can be a win-win-win. Your vendor gets to win because they sell their product. Your customer gets to win because they find a product that will help solve their problem. And, hopefully, provided your vendor isn’t inadvertently or deliberately stealing your commissions… you get to be paid for your sales and marketing efforts. But if you are being robbed by your vendor, then you need to find out how it happens and make sure you do what it takes to stop it. Otherwise all of the time, energy and money that you put in to promoting this product and building your affiliate marketing business will be for nothing!
WP Robot WordPress Autoposter
Leave a Reply