Affiliate marketing is a popular choice for many entrepreneurs, in part because it is easy to get started with, and requires minimal resources compared to other business models. While anyone can get started with affiliate marketing, it takes a lot of skill and hard work to create a profitable affiliate business. Here are a few tips that every affiliate marketer should remember.
1. Experiment with several networks and programs
There are many scammers in the affiliate-marketing world, and even legitimate networks and programs occasionally have problems. Do not limit yourself to a single network or merchant. Instead, sign up for several programs and promote a range of related products and services. This ensures that if one of your merchants closes their program, has server issues, or decides to reduce their commission offerings, you will not lose your entire revenue stream.
2. Be honest about your work as an affiliate
Web users hate being sold to, and if they notice that you are cloaking your affiliate links or trying to pass off marketing posts as those of “an enthusiastic user”, then they will assume the worst about your posts. Be up-front about your affiliate links. Instead of trying to sell things in all of your posts, offer users valuable information, with occasional links to the products you sell. Tell your users that you get commission from those links, and emphasize that you promote only products that you would use yourself.
3. Give your users free gifts
The best way to establish a reputation and make your readers trust you is to give them something for nothing. Offer free reports, ebooks, or other downloadable gifts as a thank-you for people who sign up to your mailing list. Send out other small freebies periodically throughout the year. A week or so after giving out those freebies, send out a sales message. Your subscribers will be more receptive to your sales pitch if they have just downloaded, and enjoyed, a free product.
4. Focus on obtaining quality traffic
During the early days of the Internet, webmasters boasted about the huge numbers of hits that their websites attracted, and advertisers were awestruck by these figures. This attitude still exists today, even though hits are a meaningless statistic. Instead of worrying about attracting huge amounts of traffic, focus on bringing in visitors that will spend money on your website.
5. There is no such thing as a passive income
The lure of the passive income is one thing that attracts many webmasters to the affiliate marketing business. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a truly passive income. It is true that your affiliate-marketing website will survive for a couple of days without updates, but you do need to maintain your website regularly.
Many novice marketers make the mistake of abandoning their websites as soon as they start making a profit, moving on to their next project and assuming that the old website will continue to attract traffic and sales. It will, for a while, but eventually the site’s traffic will fall off and it will lose its spot in the SERPs. To keep your website ticking over, be sure to update it once or twice a week. If you don’t have time to do that, you should at the very least schedule some posts so that the site looks like it is still being maintained.
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