Why Blogger Fail at Affiliate Marketing
There are many obstacles that beginners face in affiliate marketing; some of those obstacles have more impact than the others (in terms of overall success).
Most affiliate marketers struggle because of the lack of knowledge on many aspects of their affiliate marketing business.
A deep understanding of how affiliate marketing works is required, along with a solid affiliate marketing strategy. Here you do need a strong sense of copywriting or content marketing.
That’s not to say that the lack of experience is the sole reason why many beginners fail in affiliate marketing.
There are other affiliate marketers who have enough experience but lack a proper budget to implement their vision and strategies.
Knowing how to spend your budget especially at the start is very important; you need to avoid needless expenses.
It is a fact that to run a solid long term affiliate marketing business, you need to spend some money, at least to get yourself started with a blog, email autoresponder account and Ads.
In this article, I will outline the most common mistakes that affiliate marketers make, why affiliate marketing does not work and how to avoid and fix them if needed.
Mistakes Made When Building Your Affiliate Website – Affiliate Marketing Mistakes
Think of your affiliate website as a physical store, you shouldn’t underestimate the work required to build it.
- The first mistake which beginners make is focusing too much on saving money on their web hosting account.
Yes you need to save money but that shouldn’t compromise the quality of your affiliate website hosting and development.
The quality of your web hosting company can affect your sales figures directly.
Poor and cheap web hosting providers have low uptime, meaning that your website can be inaccessible for many potential buyers.
If you have an affiliate website already running then make sure that there is no major up time issues (check your email for complaints).
And if indeed your web hosting company is causing you issues, then think about changing hosts. You can read about the different types of Hosting here as I shared earlier.
If you haven’t built your affiliate website yet, then consider getting a reliable web host (preferably WordPress hosting company if you are running an affiliate blog).
- Your domain name is another important factor in the success of your affiliate website.
It might be too late to change it if you are already live, but for those who didn’t build their affiliate website yet, they need to follow these guidelines:
- Add niche relevant keyword in your domain name
- For product centric websites, add your product name in the domain
These are all good tips, and could help you more than by just creating a domain name as your real name.
Common Blogging Niche Selection Mistakes
It is possible to target a market that is not profitable; a common mistake more than you can imagine.
Affiliate marketing niches are not all profitable or at least their profitability varies from one another.
- Imagine targeting a niche with small buyers’ base and having to compete with other affiliates marketers for that small number of buyers.
- Even worst, you could be tempted to target a large niche but only to find out that there isn’t large buyers ‘base in there.
Luckily for you there is a solution to this problem, which is “niche segmentation”.
The idea behind niche segmentation is to take a large or mid-sized niche and divide it into smaller niches.
You then pick the most profitable micro niche (segment) and target it on your affiliate website.
To segment your niche, enter you main niche keyword in Google plus “a,b,c..etc”
Those will all be good segments to consider.
To choose the profitable ones among them is by finding out if there are products sold in your micro niches.
If there are many products being sold then it means there is a good buyers base; giving how those product owners already made this kind of research before building their products.
Detecting the buyers’ base of any niche is easy.
Enter your micro niche keyword in Google and search for it:
The above micro niche has products so it is considered as a profitable niche that you can choose safely.
On the other hand if you picked another micro niche like “eating plan”:
You can see that the majority of the search results are information articles, meaning that there aren’t enough products to promote.
This is something that should give you an indication of the niche profitability.
- Avoid Promoting Low-Quality Products
Another problem that could affect your affiliate sales is the product you are promoting.
Low-quality products don’t generate much sales mainly because of their reputation and their inability to reply to their customers promptly.
Now many customers voice their opinion about the products they are using; they can either sing the product’s praise or condemn it to failure.
So it is a good idea to do some research on the product you are currently promoting or you are going to.
Google is a good tool to use if you want to find out any product’s online reputation and to see how well its customers perceive it.
Search “PRODUCT inurl:forum”
This will make Google give us a list of online forums and communities where people talk about your affiliate product.
Just visit each forum and read what is being said on the product.
The good thing about this research technique is that you can also take positive opinions and add them to your product review page as testimonials.
This is something which can give you a great boost to your sales conversion rates.
Another thing you need to consider when choosing your affiliate product is its price and the affiliate commission being offered.
It will be great to find a product with good reputation and also offers high profits.
This is why you should do product research if you want to run a successful affiliate marketing business.
My Conclusion
Being able to pin point why exactly your affiliate marketing business hasn’t gone according to your plans is an important skill.
With a combination of niche, product and customers research you will be able to eliminate any problems that could be affecting your affiliate success.
A great source of affiliate marketing information is blog posts, but joining a course or training can help you start your affiliate business with minimal mistakes.
