This article is intended to introduce you to 5 challenges with Affiliate Marketing. It is not as difficult as you may think…providing you have a proven strategy.
It is no secret that affiliate marketing is an excellent business model. It is certainly not new by any means, but it is rapidly becoming recognised by large companies as a way to generate more sales. They do this by having an army of people working on their behalf driving traffic to their products. Rather than increase their staff, they give away a percentage of their profits to Affiliate marketers.
This image below paints a thousand words. It screams of a trend in the direction us Affiliate Marketers appreciate because it helps our business to thrive. Where merchants run affiliate programs, it allows Affiliate Marketers to expand into new areas, promoting new products.
If you want to get into this as a business, then you need to learn how to start out in this market and how to drive traffic to product sales pages.
The question is, do you see yourself as an Affiliate Marketer? If not, that is no problem, because all you need is a desire to learn and have the mental capacity to push forward to make your own business a success, even when the going gets tough.
Affiliate Marketing Is Relatively Straightforward When You Follow A Strategy
So here we are talking about the common challenges with Affiliate Marketing and the solutions:
Many Affiliates prefer to stick to a specific niche area, one they are familiar with. This may be because they already have experience in a particular area. It is always a good idea to start looking to sell items that interest you, but you need to make sure there is a target market for the product or set of products you want to promote. Finding the right balance between something that interests you and the profit it will generate is something to bear in mind.
Solution: Detailed research and planning will be required before you choose a niche. You may be able to look on Affiliate Networks and see what is already selling very well for other people. It is always better to go into a hungry market where people are ready to buy. You want to try and earn as much profit from the beginning as you can to give your business the seeds it needs to grow.
It can be difficult to think what types of content your potential customers will like. With this brings it’s own challenge, in that you may feel like you are spending time creating content and guessing what the customer wants, and never very sure If this will capture their interest. Customer attention span is ever changing.
Interesting content on your website will help you to generate sales, and on the other-hand if you have poor content, it will affect the SEO and not be a good customer to product match
Solution: Know your customers and what they want. A lot of this comes down to being able to do the right level of research, and then giving the customer what they want. You could go out an do this yourself if on a budget, or if you have funds available, look to hire a freelancer who can generate content for you. The efforts of either option will pay off with product sales, when you generate a vast amount of traffic to your website.
Traffic is the center of any online business. If you have no traffic, everything else you do will be useless unless you have people browsing your content. Generating traffic is where most new Affiliate Marketers fail, but when you know exactly what to do….it is actually easy to do. SEO on the other hand is an organic way to generate traffic, you just need to build it overtime.
There is a difference between simply getting visitor, and getting a targeted visitor who is interested in what you are trying to sell. Personally, I am happy to have fewer website visitors, but at a higher conversion rate, than it be the other way around.
Solution: You will focus on quality traffic only. You should use a mixture of free and paid traffic techniques. Paid traffic is where the big players are, and this is where most money is made. Here we are focusing on SEO for free traffic, or when looking at paid, we would look at Social Media, Pay Per Click, Traffic and Advertising Networks.
Running an online business is one of the most rewardable things you can do. Affiliate Marketing will give you a superb work life balance once you have built your business to a point where it is generating commissions on auto pilot. Yes, this is possible.
There are times when an affiliate links are not tracking correctly….and 99% of the time it is because the Affiliate as set something up incorrectly, or the offer has expired. You do not want to be paying for traffic and sending traffic to an offer via your affiliate link if it is not correctly assigning yourself as a referrer of that product.
Solution: You will master the creation of affiliate links for your products. This is different within every Affiliate Network that you join, and 99% of the time you will be provided with a unique link. Courses such as four percent will team you how to go about setting up the affiliate links and tracking visitors and product sales.
Affiliate Marketing is a numbers game, and with any business that involves volume, it can be difficult to sustain if you do not know your numbers or where they are coming from. This is number 5 on our list, but right up there next to traffic generation with regards to importance.
Businesses close because of a slowdown in sales, and this is normally because traffic levels have dropped or no longer exist. When you send traffic, without the correct setup, it can be difficult to know where they are coming from, or whether they liked your offer, or even if they simply turned away from your website without opting in to any of your free offers
Solution: You will learn to master traffic generation, traffic and keyword research as it is the lifeblood of any affiliate marketing business. When you can actively track your visitors from the moment they hit your website, to the time they arrived on your free offer or thank you page, you are starting to know your numbers and really grasping the Affiliate Marketing game.