The Most Common Reasons You Will Fail

If you start with affiliate marketing just by jumping into it with no advanced preparation, chances are quite high that you will fail.
I know this is the kind of thing that you don’t get from the typical affiliate marketing guidebook, but this is reality. If you are unclear on why people fail in this type of marketing, then the likelihood of you falling short increases.

A lot of people publish all sorts of products on a self-publishing basis. They come up with a sales page, they come up with a landing page, they pay money for Facebook marketing campaigns, and so on. They do the whole routine. Still, after all this time, effort, and money, nothing happens. Their self-published product does not sell.

The thing is that you can make no mistakes when you start with affiliate marketing. There is no place for errors, you just have to roll up your sleeves and do the work.

But, the big problem is that a lot of affiliate programs will tell you to just copy and paste their marketing material and you will make money. You see, there is the hype and there is reality, and a lot of people setting up make-money programs are not shy on hype. But you can’t build a business on hype. You can only build it on tried and proven performance. Believe me, one of the best ways to get your marketing efforts to perform is to come up with your own affiliate ads.

6 Steps To Affiliate Marketing Success

How do you make more money as an affiliate marketer? When you first start with affiliate marketing your sales will mostly not come as easy as thought. Closing sales will be more difficult than you thought.

You have to understand that if you want to close more sales as an affiliate, you have to follow certain steps otherwise you are just taking shorts in the dark and hoping to get lucky. Last time I checked, that is not much of a strategy.

Increase your chances of succeeding in the affiliate marketing game by being methodical enough to follow these six steps for ultimate success:

Be Relevant – The first thing you need to do is to offer relevant content to the right people. These are people who have certain problems. The content that you must present must address those problems. This way, people who have a certain problem and are looking for solutions will be drawn to your content that dwells on those problems.
Offer Valuable Information – When people go to your website, make sure you give them what they came for. They obviously have problems, so give them the solution for that. It doesn’t get any simpler than that. However, keep in mind that there is a big difference between conventional wisdom and tried and proven solutions. You are going to use both. But you are going to treat them so as to get them to buy whatever it is you are promoting.
Shoot Down Alternatives – This is where the rubber meets the rope. Your website is going to be informative. If people have a problem, you are going to give them the solutions to their problem. You are not going to play around. You are going to offer real value. Here is the trick. You are going to give the information, but you are also to tease them and tell them that if they are looking for something faster, more convenient, cheaper, or more powerful, click here.
This way, they get what they came for but you also opened their minds to something better. That is marketing. Because otherwise, you are just being a reporter. You are just basically giving them the stuff that they came for without getting anything in return. You are not going to make money as an affiliate if you do that. You have to shoot down the common solutions to the problem that you are offering. Then, position your offer as something better.
Build Credibility Through Supporting Content – It is not enough for you to say tath I have a better way of doing things. You have to walk your talk. You have to present some case studies. You have to show some video or infographic to prove to the reader that you know what you are talking about. This builds credibility because the more credible your solution becomes, the more likely people would buy it.
Filter Interests Using Deep Content – With each supporting piece of content that you link to your website, you are drawing the prospect deeper and deeper into the conversion funnel. You have to understand that there are going to be a lot of people reading your stuff. But at the end of the process, only a very few will read article after article until they reach a sales page.
Those are the people that you are trying to reach. Those are the people that you are trying to convert. You do this by making sure that each link that they go to leads to credible information with a lot of supporting content. Also, the deeper they get into your website, the more finely tuned the content is as far as their interests are concerned. You are always making an appeal to this solution. You are constantly reminding them that whatever it is that you are offering, it is far superior to the other generic information you have shared in previous pages.
Call Your Reader To Action – Eventually, you should lead your reader deep into the bowels of your blog or website and hit them hard. How to do this? You present content that has a lot of hard-hitting supporting information. You then call your reader to action by drawing a link between their purchase of the solution and the emotional payoff or the benefits that they personally get from the product. You have to stir people through these six steps otherwise it is going to be very hard to get that affiliate conversion. You cannot skip a step.

This is what you should do when you start with affiliate marketing. You can not overjump some steps because if you do you will not succeed, maybe you will make some sales but not over time.

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The 3 Most Neglected Factors

There is no shortage of affiliate marketing success blueprints out there. All people who start with affiliate marketing must follow the steps, otherwise, they will fail.
These blueprints supposedly walk you through all the steps you need to achieve success with your affiliate marketing business. They give you all sorts of technical information. Many come with great-looking pictures and charts. So far so good right?

The problem is a lot of those resources simply hype you up and get you all excited about affiliate marketing, but at the end of the day they leave you hanging. How come?
Well, it is one thing to figure out what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. As important as these pieces of information may be, ultimately if you don’t know why you should be doing things, you will fail. It is only a matter of time. Failure will get the better of you sooner rather than later.

This is why it is really important to understand the power of purpose as reflected by the three factors I am going to talk about below. Ignore these and you should not be surprised if your affiliate marketing business doesn’t get the result that you had hoped for. In fact, don’t be too shocked if it doesn’t get any results at all. It may well turn out that you have put together an affiliate marketing business that lacks the three most important ingredients for ultimate success.

Bad Niche Targeting – A lot of self-published products fail because they are barking up the wrong tree. They offer things that are bid deal solutions to problems. The challenge is getting other people to agree with you. It may well be turned out that people may not agree that this is a problem big enough for them to shell out dollars for. Do you see how this works?
You may also be targeting a problem that a lot of people have. But these people are not really interested in paying a lot of money for the solution. Whatever the case may be, you targeted the wrong niche. The money may not be there. Or, there may be money but it has a low return on investment. Also, there may be too much competition.
No Reverse Engineering – A lot of self-published products fall by the wayside because they were produced on a whim. The author got all excited about a particular concept and put in the time and effort to write a book. He or she is convinced that the book is the best thing since sliced bread. Well, the book is published and nobody is buying. One reason for this is the fact that the author did not bother to look at other books or digital products that address the same problem.
How did they address the problem? How did they approach the problem? By copying and pasting the approach, the book can position itself in such a way that prospective buyers would at least view it as familiar enough to consider.
If you donät reverse engineer your competitors, your book may seem too weird, too unusual, or too innovative for them to bother with. They might think that you are a genius. But that does not necessarily translate to them whipping out their wallets and buying stuff from you.
Untested Sales Page – It is not uncommon for many self-published authors to copy and paste a sales page from a pamphlet. They just plug in their words, use a template, then call it a day. If this is how you do things, don’t be surprised that you are not making any sales. Sales pages are starting points. You can use a template to put them up, but you are going to have to run traffic through it, make changes, run traffic again, and keep on optimizing it until it produces the conversions that you are looking for. Otherwise, if you put it up and forget about it, you are not going to move that many products.
No Relationship Marketing Through a Mailing List – Make no mistake. A lot of affiliate marketers are only able to convert their traffic into buyers because they set up a mailing list. Do yourself a big favor. Set up a mailing list. Create a relationship between your content and your audience. The more credible your content is, the more likely the audience will trust you regarding the stuff that you are trying to promote. This is very hard to do with ads. This is very hard to do with blog posts. With a mailing list, however, you can send update after updates to build credibility and authority to reach a point where your readers would click a link and buy stuff from you.

If you fail to wrap your mind around the reasons above, don’t be surprised if your affiliate marketing business and self-publishing efforts are running into challenges.
You have to start with affiliate marketing from the ground and learn from the hard lessons described above.

4 Reasons Why You Need A Mailing List

Why do you need to build a mailing list? A lot of people keep repeating the mantra, the money is in the list. They repeatedly say this mantra like some sort of religious duty. It almost borders on some sort of cult spirituality. Well, there is a reason why experienced and seasoned affiliate marketers keep on saying this. After all, where there is smoke, there is fire. People will not risk their professional credibility by saying something that is patently false. They are not liars nor are they rolling the dice with their reputation by steering people wrong. Instead, they are saying the truth. But you need to be clear as to why this is the truth.

Here are the four reasons why you should build a mailing list:

You Won’t Convert With Ads Usually – When was the last time you visited a website, saw an ad, clicked it, read the sales page, and whipped out your credit card to buy stuff? I would venture to guess that those times are few and far between.
Usually, ads do not convert. What they do is create some level of familiarity with people. When a link is clicked, then people figure out what the ad is about. They keep seeing the ad. They become familiar with it and eventually clicked on it again. They read more and ultimately some of them would join a mailing list where they would get marketed to several times. The more you get your offer in front of a person’s eyes, the more chances you get to make your case.
Get Them To Come Back – The vast majority of people who visit a website will never come back. Maybe they just did a one-time Google search. Maybe somebody just referred them via email. Whatever the case may be, they found the website, found it lacking, or found the information interesting, but not interesting enough for them to buy stuff. For whatever reason, they bounced out and most of them don’t come back.
When you get people to sign up for your mailing list, you get a chance to direct them back to your website when you send an update. Maybe you posted a new blog post. Maybe you are launching a new release. whatever the case may be, you give people a reason to come back to your site. You end up recycling a lot of the dead traffic that you could have lost permanently.
Position Yourself As a Trustworthy Expert – When you send out update after update, you are basically telling your mailing list members to pay attention to you because you know what you are talking about. The more emails they read, the more credible they find you. The more emails they open, the more they are impressed with your expertise and subject matter authority.
The key here is to get them to like you enough for them to feel that you know what you are talking about. If you keep this up, they will trust you and it will only be a matter of time until they trust you enough to buy whatever it is that you are promoting. Of course, this takes time. Some people don’t need much persuasion. You only need to send a few emails for them to buy stuff. Others take a longer time to decide. Whatever the case may be, you put yourself in this situation.
Use A General Info List – Finally, building a mailing list enables you to convert more of the people interested in your website. These people become mailing list members because they have visited your website. They are interested. Now once they are on your website, send out high-quality updates to establish your credibility. Also, send out a one-dollar offer for a small book or booklet that you have published. You are not going to make money out of the one-dollar deals. Instead, you are using it as a device to filter buyers from tire kickers. Tire kickers are people who would just want to receive email after email, but they would not buy anything.

When you send out a one-dollar deal, you are making it very easy for people to segregate themselves. They are signaling to you that they are serious enough to buy stuff later on. You may only be making a dollar from this deal, but once you get them on your buyer’s list, then you can send them offers that charge more money. Your chances of success are much higher because these people are tried and proven buyers.

Wrapping Up – Start With Affiliate Marketing

Remember, make no mistake when you start with affiliate marketing, if you do, you will not succeed.

If you want to make money as an affiliate marketer, then you should follow the tips in this article. They are proven to work for years and a lot of marketers have made some really good money just by following these tips.

Also, don’t forget to sign up for a list builder before you start because it is really true, the money is in the list. Work hard, and target the right niche, by not targeting the right niche you will for sure fail. You will see a lot of money opportunities just passing by.