How to Promote Affiliate Products

 Products promotion simply means to drive traffic to the products and get people to see and buy them. Depending on the niche of your blog, you can apply directly to companies and become an affiliate. Thereafter, by means of your website or blog, you commence promoting the products you have selected. Your promotions work best and are most effective if you have your own website or blog. When you drive traffic to your website or blog you are not just promoting the affiliate product, you are promoting yourself too. Promoting yourself effectively helps a great deal to increasing your channels of making money online.
Some effective channels and tools you can use to promote affiliate products include but not limited to:

Hand bills
Placing banners in your website or blog
Inserting affiliate links in your website or blog
Paid traffic
Writing product reviews
Email marketing
Social media marketing
Search engine traffic, SEO
Flyers
Car stickers, etc.
If your promotions are efficient, you start earning commissions almost immediately. When you start earning commissions, getting paid should not be a problem. For now, the most popular and reliable payment methods are through PayPal Accounts, Direct bank deposits, Cheques and Payoneer Master Card. You must endeavor to find out what is accepted and smooth to use in your Country of operation before you settle for any of these methods.

 

3-Steps to Start an Affiliate Marketing Business

Everyone must go through this process if they seriously want to be affiliate marketers. You too can start affiliate marketing even as a beginner in just 3 steps.



01. Pick a niche

The first thing you must to do before you venture into affiliate marketing is to pick a niche. A niche is simply a topic or an area of interest which you like and are really knowledgeable about. Settling for a niche you like enables you to speak to a particular target audience instead of trying to talk to everybody thereby dissipating energy needlessly. Some examples of very popular niches are:

Food
Drinks
Business
Family
Entertainment
Automobiles
Finance
Health
Travels, etc
For full effects, each of these broad niches can be further broken down into sub-niches. If you are a beginner, you are best advised to settle for a narrower sub-niche instead of focusing on a broad niche where your knowledge and expertise may not be fully convincing. Another advantage of having a narrow niche is because it allows you to focus on a much targeted customer base. Instead of focusing on Health for example as a broad niche, you can decide to target dieting, weight loss, skin care, health supplements, etc, etc which are narrower but still on health matters all the same.

02. Build a website or a blog around that niche
 
After settling for a niche of your choice, the next thing you must do is to build a website or a blog around that niche. The website or blog now serves as your online promotional base for the business. If you want long-term success in the business, having a website or a blog gives you an indispensable advantage. With them, you derive the freedom to connect with your readers with a view to giving them helpful and fresh information on a regular basis. That way, you can build a subscriber base and follow-up with them until they trust you enough to follow your recommendations as they come from you. If you have your own website or blog, instead of sending visitors directly to an affiliate offer, you can direct those visitors to your own website or blog where you can convert them to loyal followers through your email list. A reliable email list allows you to promote many other affiliate offers through your email list thereby expanding your business exponentially.

03. Join Affiliate Programs

There are many credible and reliable affiliate programs online. Search and locate them, making sure you understand and agree with their rules of engagement before signing up. If you have your own website or blog, the next step is to sign up for affiliate programs and start making some money as you promote products out of your website or blog. Be sure you select only good, proven and effective products to promote. Doing so will enable you to hit commissions real quick. That is what most affiliate marketers really want, making real money from commissions.

 

What Type of Business Model is Affiliate Marketing?

Simply put, an affiliate marketer is an online salesperson who promotes products in exchange for a commission. It is an online business model where you are paid commission for promoting other peoples’ products and services. In the business, the people promoting the goods and services are called affiliates while the people who have a product affiliates can promote to earn a commission are known as merchants. Of course, the people who buy the products are invariably called customers.

In that type of business model, the affiliate is expected to do just 3 routine things:

Promote products

Gets paid for every sale you generate

Repeat the two processes over and over
 
Simple no doubt! If as a marketer you are able to do these things repeatedly, there is no upper limit to how much you can earn as an affiliate marketer. The harder and better you work, the more you earn, simple! So, how much you earn depends entirely on you. This simplicity makes affiliate marketing one of the most popular home-based businesses around. If you are keen, you can start your own affiliate marketing business right now in your room, making hundreds of dollars any time from now. This model stands out as one of the simplest ways to start a home-based business even without formal training or experience.

Therefore, anyone can start affiliate marketing and make money. There are no financial risks involved. You needn’t pay anything to promote an affiliate product. If the product does not convert well, you are always free to switch to any other products you want. Even if you may not need to have prior experience at selling, you must however be willing to commit to a learning process if you want to succeed fast enough in the business.

As an added advantage, you do not have to design, develop or manufacture any products yourself. It is the sole business of affiliate merchants to design and produce their own products and promotion materials like images, banners, product links etc. The only job you have as an affiliate marketer is to simply promote the products using the materials such as banners and product links as supplied by the merchants. There is a lot of money to be made in the business and that can not elude you even if you are a newbie.


 

Best Affiliate Networks Online

Every newbie affiliate marketer always wants to know where they can be to get good results. We are immensely pleased to make some recommendations. At the moment, some affiliate networks offer hundreds of affiliate marketing programs all in one place. Instead of chasing numerous individual programs, you are best advised to simply register with an affiliate network to enable you gain access to numerous affiliate marketing programs they have on board. In my view, the very best options currently available are:

VigiLinks

Skimlinks

CJ Affiliate

ShareAsale

Rakuten LinkShare

Avangate

LinkConnector

FlexOffers

Affiliate Window


 

Best Affiliate Marketing Programs Online

 Many affiliate marketing programs online offer different variants and commission paying structures. You can check them all out, research them and sign up to work for any of them you fancy. Here are some of the best and most popular affiliate marketing programs you can get on the web presently.

Aweber

SFI

Amazon

AliExpress

EBay

HostGator

Warrior Plus

Gearbest

ClickBank

Shopify

SEMRush

 

Effects of News and Viral Sites on Affiliate Marketing

Compared to evergreen content, newsy content characteristically always have a very short life span. If you are unable to quickly take advantage of the moment, you hardly stand a chance while doing affiliate marketing on a viral website. Some kind if dilemma if you ask me! Characteristically, news sites tend to get more views on their home page. For that reason, it is best to highlight your best promotions on the home page. News content is not entirely useless for affiliate marketing. They are most effective in promoting deals which are time bound and hot, exact same way the news itself could be hot. You can always try to make the deal hot news and it gets attention and clicks that way.

Let’s say for example a dealer is offering a 20% discount on a certain product, instead of just plastering the promotional banners all over your website, you could write a news article alerting your audience of this once in a while offer to buy a good quality product at a very reduced price. You get your commission as a marketer if in your news promo, you add an affiliate link to the product from the dealer to enable them easily secure the offer. Many marketers rely on same strategy for pre-order and product launch announcements as well as highlighting best deals during popular sales seasons like Black Fridays.

Tips for Successful Affiliate Marketing Program

 If you are involved in affiliate marketing, no doubt you want to do business and make money. If that is the case, here now are some tips to help you in that quest by increasing the conversion rate of your affiliate marketing campaigns:

You Must Be Authentic

Rely always on ways to present the facts as they are but in a compelling way while recommending only good quality products and services. Do not over sell any product; hype it or lie about in order to get people to buy. You must endeavor to be authentic at all times because that is the best way to build a good reputation.



Focus more on Targeted Traffic

In affiliate marketing, traffic is important, but targeted traffic is king. Targeted traffic ensures your content is seen more by people who have a buying intention. That is all you need if you want to be really successful as an affiliate marketer. The more targeted traffic you get, the better your results.

Habitually Track your Performance
 
Results, results and results, that’s what most marketers really care about.  Knowing what people are looking for puts you in a great stead to give it to them. Sometimes, visitors may be looking for products on your website that you currently do not cover. Knowing about these content gaps opens new earning opportunities for you. By deploying online tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track content gaps, you can get the intelligence information you require to target your content better to satisfy your visitors. The real reason you must endeavor to habitually track your results.

Be Contextual

One of the best ways to succeed at affiliate marketing is to ensure that the promotions you are sharing are relevant to the content and your audience. The trick is to ensure that affiliate ads you are promoting match the content you are selling. For great effects, your content should always be relevant to the product you are promoting.

Use Deep links

The business of affiliate marketing if online is all about promoting and propagating links online. Most affiliate marketing programs usually offer links and banners to make it easy for you to start promoting their products and services. The problem with these promotional materials is they are usually pointing to the home page or a category page, which is most cases is too generic. For best results, it is recommended that you use deep link tools to point to the exact product or service you want to promote. Why, because the deep link tool will enable you convert any product link from the merchant website to an affiliate link thereby enhancing click rates.

How to Promote Affiliate Marketing on Social Media

These days, nearly everyone is on social media. Many already have a formidable audience built up over time on social media. For that reason, social media has become another effective way of promoting with relative ease affiliate products and services. If you are a celebrity, with the help of social media, you can easily play an influencer role to promote products and services. As a celebrity influencer, your fans will respond to your recommendations simply because they like or trust you. Many of such fans routinely follow your lead so when you endorse a product or service, you easily get them to try the product or service based solely on your endorsement. That is the power of social media. Here is how it works in some of the most popular social media platforms around.


 
Affiliate Marketing on Facebook

With about 2.2 billion active monthly users, Facebook appears to be the most popular social networking platform at the moment. On Facebook, if you are having a Facebook page or group that is focused to a niche, it is likely to be more effective to promote any affiliate marketing product/service. It is therefore readily one of the best platforms to do affiliate marketing. It is most advisable to use Facebook Groups more to promote affiliate links because organic engagement is still positive in Facebook Groups inspite of platform restrictions elsewhere.

Affiliate Marketing on Instagram

This is a photo-friendly social media platform. But, one big drawback on Instagram about affiliate marketing is that it does not allow you add links to your posts. The only effective way around this drawback is for affiliate marketers to routinely put the affiliate links (shortened by way of URL shortening service on Google anyway) in their profiles for the duration their ads campaigns will be running. That is the only way your site visitors can get to have an opportunity to click on the link displayed in your profile.

Affiliate Marketing on YouTube

This no doubt is the most popular search engine and the largest social media platform for videos. This dual nature makes YouTube a very effective source of traffic for affiliate marketing. As an affiliate marketer, you can use YouTube effectively if you can create a video guide, tip, how to, or review of the product or service you want to sell. In this description, you can add links to the product using your affiliate link. When your viewers get to know through the information you provide that you have included a link to the product or service for their convenience, you get them really curious and that earns higher click-through rates as a result.

Affiliate Marketing with Email Marketing
 
Many marketers sometimes argue that Email marketing is a thing of the past but to others, it is another effective way to promote your affiliate partnerships. Most experienced Email marketers still believe in it and use it efficiently. For good results using Email marketing, first you must build a list of email addresses of leads and customers using the opt-in form in the entry point of your sales funnel. That done, you can then offer your visitors something of value like an e-book for free then ask them to enter their email addresses in the form so that you can send them the free offer. After building up the list, you can segment the audience for effective affiliate marketing campaigns. That done, it becomes fairly easy to target the appropriate deals, and offers to the right audience. Ultimately, such efforts lead to more responses and better sales which is what thrills many affiliate marketers. 

 

Best Content Types for Affiliate Marketing

Content marketing and affiliate marketing are gradually becoming completely interwoven. They depend heavily on each other to get the desired results online even though not all types of content go well with affiliate marketing. Experience has shown that news website and gossip blogs do struggle to succeed with affiliate marketing. The reason for that is simple to discern. It is only targeted content that gets the best results in attracting the right visitors. When such content is evergreen, it becomes an icing on the cake. Everyone wants information on how to get things done. If you have a content which deals with that effectively, you get better results with it.


 
Here now are 4 main issues your content should address to make it useful for Affiliate Marketing:

01. Product Reviews

When reviewing a product, what you must try to do for your readers is to share the features of the product or service with them as best you can. This you can do by writing about the good qualities of a product you use and how useful it is to solve your problems. You can balance that by highlighting what you like and hate about the product or service, not forgetting to include links to your affiliate marketing partners where interested visitors can buy the product or service if they so decide.

02. Useful Tips

Everyone wants information on how a particular product or service can help solve their problems. Useful tips in that direction are always loved by visitors to your site. If your content shows knowledge and expertise, people will get to appreciate your tips and recommendations about a product or service. When authority speaks, people generally listen and appreciate.

03. How Tos

The main task before you as an affiliate marketer is to identify the best products offered by your affiliate marketing partners which you have enough knowledge about to promote. With that knowledge, you can craft your content in such a way as to show how such products really help in solving certain problems then recommend the products with your content. Show how the product can be used and how it can help out in solving identified problems. This is best done by identifying a problem in your niche and providing a detailed solution on how to solve it. To solve the problem, you then recommend certain products and services that may be required.

04. Comparison

Buyers always rely on their inalienable right to decide on their own choices. A good comparison of two or more problems gives the information they need to help their decisions. A good content must include such information. If such content is really able to highlight the pros and cons of each product or service, adding links of the products or services from your affiliate marketing partners where the products and service can be obtained is good for the business of affiliate marketing.


 

Strategies for Link Building in Affiliate Marketing

 These days, most serious marketers routinely build links in their websites or blogs. This is because it is no longer in dispute the importance of link building in the business. Link building is important because, the number, quality, and relevance of links pointing to any content is an important ranking factor used by foremost Search Engines like Google. Once your content is on-site SEO compliant, a little link building will boost its position in the search ranking. That is what most marketers really need to succeed in affiliate marketing. So, every smart marketer has got to build links as part of their on-site and off-site SEO strategies.

Some of these link building strategies include:

Blog commenting on other people’s blogs then linking back to your site.

Guest Posting on sites which allow it then link back to your own site.

Posting on Relevant Communities and Forums and linking back to your site.

The next very effective strategy is to build internal links to an evergreen content.

What exactly is Evergreen Content? If you manage to post an evergreen content, it is like finding gold in affiliate content marketing. Such content is usually the type people search for continually irrespective of its age. What an evergreen content does is to ensure that once you rank well in Search Engines you will be getting steady traffic from the content. Because such old content keeps turning in a steady traffic of visitors, your traffic is bound to grow as you increasingly add more relevant content linked with it. If you have managed to post evergreen content in the past, you may not need to write too frequently anymore. Even if you write once or twice a month, you can still get loads of traffic if you can handle your on-site and off-site SEO bit well enough.


 

How to Use Websites and Blogs for Affiliate Marketing

 The business of affiliate marketing simply revolves around products promotions and sales. You can promote products and services on an existing website or blog or you can identify a product and build a website around it. If you already have a website with a sizable audience, you can start by partnering with affiliate programs that are relevant in your niche. Doing so could help you to get started real quick and to get a handle on affiliate marketing much faster. If however you do not have a website, all you’ll have to do is to build one especially if you intend being in affiliate marketing for the long run. You do not necessarily need a website or blog, but having one gives you more control and a real advantage over your marketing campaigns.

Online marketing experts believe that a website is the only ethical way to build your email list, which is the input of your sales funnel that will bring in highly relevant leads. Even if you do not start with a website, you can have it in your plans to have at least one website or blog. Experienced marketers routinely have multiple websites with each targeted to a niche and used to sell products and services relevant to the niche. It takes real practical experience and expertise to get that done for good results.

Expert marketers believe that a niche website works best with affiliate marketing. Because such a site is usually focused to a niche, it attracts mostly people interested in that niche. They are the only ones who will most likely visit the site. What that means is that such people will more positively respond to promotions if they are relevant to the niche they are interested in. Niches like trends, fashion, wines, foods, flowers, furniture, technology, jewelry, travels, resorts etc, etc, are very popular niches anyone can build a website around depending on your tastes, experience, likes and expertise.

Effective Channels to Promote Affiliate Marketing Programs

 According to many online marketing experts, the business of affiliate marketing simply revolves around products promotions and sales. You can promote products and services of your affiliate marketing program using a number of affiliate marketing channels like your website or blog. Social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter are also very handy and easy to use. Their popularity, ease of use and speed of spreading messages are always a big boost for all marketing efforts.

Part of your ads campaign may also include email marketing with a sales funnel. In addition, you may choose to buy traffic from sources like Google, Facebook and YouTube. What works for you and gives you the best results is what you use. Of very popular use are the following different channels which you are at liberty to choose from. They can all be effectively and efficiently used to promote products and services of your affiliate marketing program. The most popular of these channels are:

Email Marketing
Social Media (YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, WhatsApp)
A Website or Blog
Search Engine Ads (Google, YouTube, Bing)
Social Media Ads (Facebook, YouTube, Instagram)

9 Factors to Consider When Choosing an Affiliate Program

Online Marketing Experts advise that no one should just jump into the business without deep reflections and planning. These days, starting an affiliate marketing program can be a bit tricky because of the proliferation of scam businesses everywhere. There a literally thousands of affiliate programs from merchants and online stores out there promising to pay commissions for all sales you can generate. Many of these schemes could be scams, while many others are genuine. The real reason you must do all due diligence before you get involved in any. Here are some 9 factors you must consider before deciding.


 
01. Reputation of the Affiliate Program
 
When picking an affiliate program to join, you must start with merchants who have a good reputation. This makes your job easier as all you have to do is to simply point your ads leads to them. Company good reputation is all embracing. It includes past sales records, tracking methods, reliability, good payments/commissions methods as well as good news and reviews about the company. A thorough internet search for news and information about the merchants can always help out here.

02. Can I Sell the Product/Service?

This is rather obvious. You can only make money on a product you are capable of selling. You will only be paid if you can successfully sell a product/service. If not, you will merely be laboring in vain. To sell a product/service, you have to be sufficiently convincing. If you are not well vast and knowledgeable about a product/service, you will find it difficult convincing others to buy. When choosing an affiliate marketing program therefore, you must consider choosing those that sell the kind of products and services that you can promote successfully on and offline.

03. Does the Program support my Country?
 
When choosing an affiliate program, you must choose the ones that support your country because that is where your earnings will be sent. Without country support, you may end up promoting and selling products/services for merchants without receiving payments as due for all your troubles. You can’t claim to be in business if you are unable to earn from it.

04. What are the payment options?

This is always a major concern because everyone wants to earn commissions as due. For that reason, if the payment options supported by your affiliate marketing program are not supported in your country, you will not be able to receive your payments. A real dilemma no doubt! So, before selling for an affiliate, make sure you will be able to receive your commissions seamlessly. Luckily for most marketers, web technologies support many payment options these days. You have credible payment options like Bank Cheques, Wire Transfers, PayPal, Payoneer Master Card, and Direct Deposits. Find out what works in your country before getting involved.

05. What is the Cookie Timeout?

This is one important but very interesting technicality in affiliate marketing. Cookies! Cookie timeouts!! Cookies help to identify correctly where a sale was initiated online. Cookie timeout determines how long from the time you first pointed a lead to an affiliate merchant’s website that a purchase from them will earn you a commission. Cookie timeouts vary from 24 hours, one week, two weeks, 30 days, or up to 90 days or even more depending on the product/service and the merchants.


 
06. Commission Structure in place

Since every marketer wants to earn commissions, some attention must be paid to the commission structure involved in the business. You must find out what percentage of commission you are entitled to when you help point buyers to the merchants and when a sale is made. Google adsense web technologies are very popular in determining commission volumes and payouts online. This you can research easily through Google. From the merchants, you can find out if the commissions they pay are one-time commissions, recurring commissions, or residual commissions.

07. Promotion Methods Allowed

You’ve got to find out the different methods the affiliate program allows you to promote their products/services. It is very smart to make sure that your preferred methods of promotion are permitted by the affiliate program. Some may prohibit advertising on Search Engines like Google while others may kick against using social media. Conversely, some social media platforms prohibit the promotion of certain products/services on their platforms. You must take all these into account before settling for an affiliate program because without being able to promote a product/service successfully, you can’t expect to help sell it.

08. Are there Sales Support Services?

Selling could be very problematic for marketers if sales support services are not available. Brochures, banners, text links, manuals and even sales training help provide the much needed marketing promotions support to the buyers through the sales force. Merchants providing these things and even having in place prompt response and feedback time somehow help to oil the entire selling process. Sales support services are credible ways an affiliate program can help you succeed faster and better since your success directly impacts on their own success.

09. Timely Payments

It helps to always confirm the payment procedure of an affiliate program before joining. This you can do by asking the right questions such as:
How often can you receive Payment (Weekly, Monthly or Quarterly)?
What is the minimum balance payment threshold you must accumulate before you are paid?
What is the Payment Cycle? 
With what currency will you be paid?
Any withholding deductions for tax purposes or charities?


 

Popular Variants of Affiliate Marketing

The question is often asked by newbie marketers, how many variants of affiliate marketing are there? That question always leads many people to wondering whether there is more than one type of affiliate marketing. Indeed there is even though most established marketers argue otherwise claiming there isn’t really any distinction. For newbies in the business, it helps just to establish a little distinction hoping the information can help them to know where they are and what approach they need to succeed faster. For their benefit, let us limit our discussion to just two types of affiliate marketing.

Product Centric Affiliate Marketing and Content Centric Affiliate Marketing


 
What exactly do these mean?

1. Product Centric Affiliate Marketing

In real practice, most affiliate marketing efforts are traditionally built around a product/service. All that is required is to simply identify a product/service you like then use different marketing channels to promote it. One of these channels is to build a website around the product or niche the product belongs to then promote it like mad. Alternatively or in addition, you can build social media pages or groups around this product/service, buy ads on Facebook and Google, create email marketing, and sales funnel all to drive sale to this product/service to enable you earn handsome commissions. To maximize earnings, you could be doing this for multiple products and services simultaneously.

Also you could build dozens of small niche websites each targeted at the product/service you are selling. Even if you don’t have a website of your own, you can just buy ads from Social Networks, Search Engines, and other traffic sources to drive traffic to your affiliate products and services. The main business of a product centric affiliate marketer therefore is to build a business around simply selling a product/service through concerted promotional efforts.

2. Content Centric Affiliate Marketing

This is the second variant with some slight difference. As a Content Centric Affiliate Marketer, all you do is to build an audience by creating regular content online then use affiliate marketing as one of the ways to monetize your content creation. This is what most bloggers to online to earn a living. Your passion here is to share your content and build your brand.  Affiliate marketing is just one way you can make money from that passion. Assuming you write a very popular blog online with a high traffic of visitors. All you need do is to display banners and text ads around your blog posts to catch the attention of visitors to your blog. When these visitors click on these ads and or buy products through your links, you earn a commission. Good business no doubt but you must have an informative, educative and entertaining content to share regularly to keep the visitors coming. The advent of popular social media sites like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook which make it relatively easy to share content and photos has helped to revolutionize content centric affiliate marketing around the world.

It must be noted that nothing in the business restricts anyone to any of these two methods absolutely. In fact, it pays better to combine both if you can. A combination of both however requires some experience. As you go deeper and become more experienced in affiliate marketing, you will at some point find it very profitable incorporating the two approaches in your marketing strategy.

 

Welcome to Affiliate Marketing as a Business

 Well, these days everyone wants to make money online/offline whichever they prefer. Many get involved in promoting products/services and earning a commission from sales. You have probably heard about making money with Affiliate Marketing and wondering what it is all about and how you can tap into the opportunity. I guess your mind is working in the direction many marketers are now earning a decent living.

Now, what exactly is Affiliate Marketing? It means many things to many people depending on how involved they are in the business. It is nothing new or completely novel. Affiliate marketing in its simplest terms means referring people to buy a product or service in return for a commission from the product seller or service provider. 


 

“Affiliate Marketing is the process of promoting products or services online or offline in return for a certain percentage as commission for each successful sale from the merchant.”


That is rather simple and straightforward. It can be used for any business. That is exactly why many and varied businesses like Financial services companies such as insurance companies, banks, and asset managers have been using a variant of it for decades to build their businesses. Even though some of these businesses like to call their affiliate marketers such fanciful names as independent marketers, and call the commissions they pay out, performance bonuses, but the bottomline is, it is still affiliate marketing. Affiliate Marketing may have been around for decades, but its popularity ballooned when the internet happened. With the internet and proliferation of web technologies, affiliate marketing became simpler, attracting more interest from diverse people.

With the internet, Affiliate marketers no longer had to go knocking door to door to make a sale. They can simply unleash the power of web technologies to promote the products or services of their clients. That is one real advantage over traditional door-to-door salesman marketing methods. The internet also ensures that you are no longer restricted to your region to make a sale. That makes it possible to expanding your reach widely and increasing your potential sales volume as a consequence. If you have access to the internet, you can simply sit in your own little corner of the world and successfully sell products to people all over the world.  Same way, you also get paid and receive your commissions as well through same web technologies. All these combine to make Affiliate Marketing a really very exciting type of business.

7 Big Affiliate Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

 Yeah, you too can easily get involved if you want to make money from Affiliate Marketing. Many people get involved just to make money. The real reason they easily fall prey to online scammers. Everyone involved gets to make some mistakes along the line but if you manage to avoid these here mistakes, you stand a very good chance of long term success in the business.


 
01. Taking on Too Many Programs
 
Many Affiliate programs online habitually offer several variants. It is always a big mistake to get involved in all of them because of that reason. Experts advise, “Never join any and every affiliate program you came across.”  It pays to choose your affiliate programs wisely to avoid overloading yourself and overburdening your efforts.

 02. Not Enough Testing
 
 It is a mistake not to fully check out and test every affiliate program you want to get involved in. Always put yourself in the shoes of your customers. What you won’t like, it is pointless promoting it to others. Leading customers to promotions that can jam up their email boxes with thousands of mails is a real put off. Testing well enough before promoting is one great way around such a problem.

03. Not Enough Tracking

The ability to track your customers and sales is a very smart marketing technique. In Affiliate Marketing, making any commission is cool, but knowing where and how you made that commission is what makes you a better marketer. Doing so allows you to grow and scale your campaigns — as opposed to working blindly. It helps your ads budget too. Not tracking your sales enough is a no no.

04. Selling Instead of Helping

My mentor once told me never to present myself to prospects as trying to sell them something. It pays to offer help to solving a problem instead of attempting to sell. Yes, the word “marketing” is part of the phrase Affiliate Marketing, but for the most part, the real job of an affiliate is not to sell. His job is to lead people on to places where their problems can be solved. The selling job is better left to the sales page our affiliate links lead the reader to. Attempting to sell always instead of offering help first is one huge Affiliate Marketing mistake.


 
05. Making False Claims

Never make false claims about any Affiliate Marketing program. Excessive hyping too is not good. With the internet, people get to find the truth fairly easily and you can lose credibility real quick. Perhaps you’ve seen this before, ad lines such as “How I Made $1000 Dollars in one day” followed by a link to an affiliate site. Not everybody gets to make a grand so easily if ever. People always get out fast when they see through any falsehood and that easily taints your credibility as a marketer.

06. Not Comparing Enough

Experience shows that one of the best converting tactics to sell affiliate products online is to find a credible way to compare the “main” product with two or more similar products then leave the buying decision to the customer. When people are in buying mode for a physical product, they tend to have their options narrowed down to 2 or 3 and need help making the choice that is best for them. Giving options for comparison helps that decision. Not giving that option is a bad marketing decision. Here is why. Comparison web pages are not only very popular and helpful for readers; they are also very profitable for the marketer.

07. Allowing Distractions

Just like it sounds, distraction leads to wasted efforts and dissipation of energy in the wrong direction. It should be avoided. Sometimes, a marketer may already be working on something, all of a sudden, something looking great just pops up to attract attention. Deciding to just check it out could lead you off to go chasing some new idea to make money taking you off track completely. Such distractions should be avoided if you are already working on a project with good prospects. Truth be told, one completed and profitable campaign is worth so much more than 20 almost half-finished campaigns or projects. The real reason distractions should always be identified and pointedly ignored to allow full attention to the business already at hand.

Most Important Thing You Should be Doing as a New Team Leader

On lighter mood, the single most important thing you should be doing as a new Team Leader is LEADING. Ump!!! Well, it is you who asked for “the single most important thing.” There it is, just LEAD, that’s all. Talking seriously, to LEAD requires a lot of responsibilities. First and foremost you must endeavor to be a friend as well as a mentor. All these require a lot of leadership skills.

In this business, it is SFI's job to provide the infrastructure for building your own business. Your own job as a sponsor (or a co-sponsor) to those individuals in your team, is to provide the personal, one-on-one relationships so vital to your home-business success. That is why you must be ready to LEAD.

You lead by making sure every Affiliate in your team has checked out the actions outlined in the To-Do List at their SFI homepage. Assist them as they proceed through these steps. Make sure their questions are answered correctly and promptly. Getting started is the hardest part of the journey. Guide your team members through that journey skillfully and diligently. Your job as a sponsor or a co-sponsor is to be available to your team members. Make sure that you are there to offer friendly guidance and support in a timely manner for all Affiliates in your team to start out and make progress in their SFI business. It takes good leadership skills to be able to do all these.

As a new Team Leader, the single most import thing you should be doing is to provide leadership for your team.