Look Out For Hypes
If you want to succeed with affiliate marketing, there is no room for mistakes. You just have to roll up your sleeves and do the hard work.
Many affiliate programs will tell you just copy and paste their marketing material and you will make money and succeed with affiliate marketing.
There is the hype and there is reality. A lot of companies are not shy about hype. Unfortunately, you cannot build a business on hype. You can only build it on tried and proven performance. Believe me, one of the best ways to succeed with affiliate marketing is to perform and come up with your own affiliate leads.
There is no shortage of affiliate programs out there. These programs have a wide range of offers. It seems like each offer is as good as the one that preceded it and the one that succeed it. You can keep looking at these offers, their sales pages, and other sales elements until you’re blue in the face.
5 Types Of Programs You Should Promote
Unless you know what to look for, chances are all these affiliate programs would look equally valid and equally good to promote. That’s a serious problem because you’ll find out in often the most painful way possible that affiliate programs are not created equal. Some make you money, but the vast majority won’t. Learn how to tell them apart.
Here are five types of programs you should be promoting if you want to succeed with affiliate marketing:
- Direct Niche Focus – The affiliate program you should promote must directly address your niche. It must be all about your niche. Its offers must address the problems of your niche audience members. Do not compromise on this.
- Large Existing Promotional Material Base – When you join an affiliate program, it should already have enough marketing materials for you to get out of the gate a winner. You should get out of the gate strong and this means that you have a ready library of premade promotional materials at your disposal. You canät just make this stuff up on the ly. That’s just not going to work. These must already exist. Also, there has to be tremendous diversity of them because you don’t know which of these promotional materials will work for your campaign.
- Wide Selection Of Promotional Methods – An affiliate program that is worth its salt and that is truly dedicated to the success of its affiliates gives its publishers a lot of rope. You should be given wide latitude in how you should promote their offers. If you notice that they keep on a tight leash, and they’re very strict regarding how you should and should not promote them, you might want to find another affiliate program. The restrictions might get in the way of your success. You might not get enough freedom for you to do a good job converting your traffic with the premade ads that the sponsor makes available to you.
- Wide Amount Of Promotional Materials – The more varied the affiliate program’s promotional materials are, the better. This means that they’re giving you the tool you need to promote in many different contexts. This increases your likelihood of success.
- They Give You The Right To Come Up With Your Own Promotional Materials – Truly serious and professional affiliate programs will give you wide management to come up with your own promotional materials. They’re not just going to give you a wide selection of promo methods, instead, they would give you freedom, within limits mind you, to come up with your own material.
They understand that you have a specific audience. They understand that you have a relationship with your audience. They then give you the freedom to come up with specially made promotional materials for that specific audience. Of course, you’re going to have to pay for your own materials, but this little bit of freedom can translate to a big payoff.
Keep these five tips for solid affiliate programs in mind. It will help you succeed with affiliate marketing. These tips go a long way in helping you separate the vast majority of programs targeting your niche from the ones that will actually make you money. Learn to spot the difference.
6 Most Common Causes Of Failure
Affiliate programs come and go all the time. In fact, affiliate programs are formed and belly up constantly. It will not be the same company. But there is enough turnover in the industry to make you want to think twice about casually picking an affiliate program to promote.
As an affiliate marketer, your fortunes are tied to the success of the affiliate program you will be promoting. They are the ones who come up with the offers and products that you will eventually promote. You suffer tremendously when the affiliate program behind the offer you’re promoting bellies up.
You have to protect yourself from this possibility by understanding the six most common causes behind affiliate program failure. By understanding these, you will be able to recognize the warning signs and hopefully learn to avoid companies that exhibit these signs.
- Lack Of Niche Specificity – If you come across a program that has one offer in your niche, but has tons of other offers on a million other niches, be very suspicious. Don’t just jump in and promote that program. It seems that the company or the person behind that program is not quite sure what to focus on. If this is the case, they might be losing money in so many different niches. It will only be a matter of time before the whole company bellis up. Alternatively, the company may be thinly spread among many different niches that they really can’t do a decent job servicing their niches equally.
- Untested Or Failed Sales Page – It seems like the affiliate program that you’re promoting has offered pages that look very similar to each other, you might want to hold off. Take a step back and look at these pages. Would you want to buy stuff from these sales pages? If the answer is not, look for another affiliate program to work with. If there is any indicator that their pages are brand new, untested, or otherwise unproven, you might want to hold off.
- No Landing Page Ready – Another warning sign that you should be on the lookout for involves templates. If it seems that the affiliate program is just using a template to crank out one landing page after another, you might want to reach out to your affiliate manager. Ask them if they can come up with a unique landing page. If the answer is no or if they come up with all sorts of excuses, drop them and look for another program to promote.
- Too Strict On Affiliate Marketing Materials – In the affiliate program you’re thinking of promoting grabs you by the neck and insists that you should only promote them using the few materials that they provide, be very doubtful. This is a serious problem. If they insist that you use only a small amount of materials to promote them, then all the other affiliates promoting that company would be using the exact same stuff! This is going to lead to saturation and overexposure. Also, you might not get the conversion that you are looking for.
- No Incentives For Top-Producing Affiliates – If the company doesn’t give a bonus to the top affiliates, you might want to consider another company. Either this company is strictly small time or they don’t really care to inspire their affiliate base. Neither of these situations is good. Look elsewhere.
- The Offer Cannot Be Repositioned Or Spun – If the affiliate program has terms that dictate to you how you should position the offer or the product, you might want to look elsewhere. They’re putting handcuffs on you. This is going to be hard if your niche is not a tight fit. Unfortunately, most of the time niches don’t exactly fit 100%. They have to be repositioned or adjusted. A Little bit of freedom goes a long way.
Keep these six common reasons for affiliate program failure, and why you not may succeed with affiliate marketing. Don’t hitch your affiliate marketing business on a dying horse. Make sure to spot problematic programs. Otherwise, they are going to take you down with them.
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4 Ways Social Media Can Help You Succeed With Affiliate Marketing
By now I’m pretty sure you’ve heard about social media marketing. It seems that a lot of marketers and marketing gurus talk about social media marketing like it’s the best thing since sliced bread. To say that there’s a lot of hype regarding this type of marketing would be underestimated indeed. Still, where there is smoke there is fire. Social media marekting can definitely help make money online and help you succeed with affiliate marketing. You just have to be clear on how.
Here are four ways marketing in social media platforms can help you explode your affiliate sales.
- Automation – The great thing about social media is that it can be automated. Take the case of Twitter. You can use certain online tools to publish to Twitter even though you’re sleeping. If you are at work or taking on a vacation, your Twitter account is still publishing day after day, week after week, month after month. You can set it up and you can forget it. This enables you to send out your marketing messages for an extended period of time, come back and analyze your results, optimize these messages and see if there is an improvement, This cuts down on your cost and can scale up your success.
- Repurposed Content – Another great reason why you should market on social media is that you can take one article and turn it into many different pieces of content. You can strip it down into questions and turn it into a series of tweets. You can turn the article text into a voice-over over the slideshow and share the video on YouTube. You can turn the information that you shared in the article into an informative graphic. There are so many ways you can repurpose your content. Each of that repurposed forms is a piece of content that you can share on social media.
- Trend Or Hashtag Marketing – People on Facebook and Twitter search for material using hashtags. If you know the most relevant hashtags in your niche, you can target those people precisely at the time when they are most interested to know more about your niche.
- Leverage Your Niche’s Top 3rd Party Content – In any niche, there are movers and shakers. In any niche, there are tried and proven credible authorities. Use these people’s content to build up your own authority. They wouldn’t mind because you’re driving traffic to them. This creates a win-win situation.
Wrap your mind around the four ways listed above. These help you explode your sales and succeed with affiliate marketing using social media. It can be done. I do it. You just have to be systematic and methodical about it. A little bit of advanced planning can definitely go a long way. You have to do things strategically. Otherwise, if you just proceed based on hype, don’t be shocked if you get disappointed time and time again. Learn the strong points of social media. Use it as it is intended to be used. Try not to expect results that don’t fit its internal mechanics and operations. View it with the proper perspective and it shouldn’t let you down.
Wrapping Up
If you want to succeed with affiliate marketing, there are some things you should look out for.
One of the most important things to look out for is hypes. Why? Because you will not make any money promoting hypes. The sales page of the specific product you want to promote is also very important. If the product doesn’t have a sales page, just leave. If the sales page looks really boring and does not produce in form of interest, just leave.
The affiliate program should also not be too strict on how you are allowed to promote the product.
But, if the affiliate product has a really nice and interesting sales page, give you a lot of promotional materials, then promote.
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