Common Pitfalls in Affiliate Marketing

 As many marketers have discovered, Affiliate marketing is a great way to earn fast and easy money provided you target the right audience. As you very well know, promoting products is key in this business. However, there are some common mistakes affiliates make when it comes to promoting. If you are new in affiliate marketing field, you might want to keep the following 8 points at the back of your mind so that you can avoid them. They are all avoidable mistakes which many marketers inadvertently make from time to time. Keep a very keen eye on them unless you want to fail like other marketers who ignored this advice. Your promotional efforts will not yield the desired results if:

01. You do not capitalize on the right opportunities at the right time. Timing can be key in this business.

02. You go over the top by habitually bombarding your followers with requests to try the product you are promoting. You risk putting them off altogether if that is what you do.

03. You fail to verify that the people trying the product you are promoting have all the information that they need to know about the product. Information is always key in promotions so provide it well.

04. You do not pay enough attention to your customers’ social media presence. Social media is on nowadays and it helps products promotion very well. Pay enough attention there.

05. You do not realize that building a strong affiliate marketing structure takes time and effort, and you give up during the initial stages of becoming an affiliate. It takes time and efforts on the web to establish an authoritative and commanding presence. Be patient!

06. You promote your product or service to irrelevant groups and forums. That is a profound waste of time and resources and it should be avoided.

07. You keep emailing and messaging user groups every day or, worse still, every hour. That is called “pestering” and it can easily put off potential customers.

08. You do not spend enough time to research and find the right target audience for the product or service before promoting products to them. Very wrong approach! The use of Google Analytics comes in very handy here to measure and gauge consumer behavior which information you really need to direct your promotional efforts.

 

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.

 

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.


 

How Quality Sells Products and Services

“Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.” ~Henry Ford

In the market place, quality is one guaranteed selling point. If your product or service is high in quality, most cases, it sells real good and competes well. Once quality is guaranteed, customer loyalty is easier to build. Quality helps to build trust which is about all you need to keep your customers coming back. Integrity too helps to sustain quality. When you have integrity, people tend to trust you more and hence more comfortable doing business with you over a prolonged period of time. Dispensing guaranteed quality over time helps to build integrity. Quality really sells, believe me!

Take my advice here. No matter what you do in the course of your business, never you compromise on quality. If you do, you may never get very far. For instance, anytime word gets around that the best peanut butter in town is made by you, people get curious and they want to find out. If they find out, they too get out the word further and more people want to find out. If you continue to dispense real quality, your business grows exponentially. Who wouldn’t want that?

Get busy right now because…. “No pains, no gains. To get the prize, you must pay the price.”

Why Time is Highly Valuable

“If you don’t value your time, neither will others. Stop giving away your time and talents. Value what you know and start charging for it.” ~ Kim Garst
 
Do you know that many people live by simply selling their time? It is the value you bring to your time that others get to pay for. All of us have equal time allotted to us daily but the people who get to use their own time better tend to live better and are more successful in whatever they are doing for a living. Time is fleeting and waits for no one. Once gone, it is gone forever and never to be recovered. The more and better you deploy your time, the more successful you become in your chosen business.

The value of time becomes more apparent when you discover that paying for services rendered is measured in time. Traveling between two locations no matter the means of transportation is estimated in time even though the distance is known in mileage. Economists believe very rightly that time is money since nearly all of us live by selling our time to others. If you are a wage earner, the employer who pays your wages values it in the time you put in working for him. Even if you are self employed, the prices of your services/products are determined largely by the time you expend to get through with the service or to produce the product. The good news is, everyone has ample time daily to do what they like with. The people who get to make it better are those who are able to use their time economically and profitable. You too can if you give it a try, now that you know.

Get busy right now because…. “No pains, no gains. To get the prize, you must pay the price.”
 

 

6 Things You Want Your Customers Saying About Your Business

 The not-so-tricky trick he espouses is controlling what people say about your business—not by discouraging reviews or silencing criticism, but by deciding what you want customers to say and then providing the kind of product or service that will inspire those very praises. “The key to this idea working is to not settle for something like ‘we want them to say good things.’” Calloway writes. 

“That’s meaningless. The key is to be focused and specific on exactly what you want your customers saying about you.”

“Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day.” - Jim Rohn

To that end, he recommends identifying your three “what we want them to say” statements, which will be different for every business. For example, one business might want customers saying “they’ve got the lowest prices in town”; another might prefer “the service they provide is worth paying more for.” Here’s a sampling of compliments you might want customers sharing about your business:

1. They make it very easy to do business with them.

2. They always keep me informed.

3. They are problem solvers.

4. They respect me.

5. They have the best products.

6. I trust them.

Once you’ve identified the three things you want customers to say, your focus can and should be making sure they do, with services that target those specific goals. “You may have a business with a thousand moving parts,” Calloway writes. “You may feel, justifiably, that it’s very complicated. But I assure you that if you simplify your thinking to get clarity on and focus on the three things you must get right every single day, it will be the guiding force that drives success.”

Original Article Source: http://www.success.com/article

 

Real Challenges to Success in SFI Business

From my own experience, my greatest challenge to success in SFI business was MARKETING my business. Because I was unable to market my business effectively, I faced very tough challenges in selling products at Tripleclicks and even recruiting PSAs. I found out to my chagrin that because I could not recruit real active PSAs to grow my downline, succeeding in SFI became a real challenge. This challenge was exacerbated because: 

 
- I was too shy to talk to people.
- I was not very good in Internet marketing.
- I could not advertise my business effectively.
- My budget was very low for advertising.
- I was not learning very fast.
- I was not very optimistic.
- I was not even enthusiastic.
- I thought I was not smart enough for this kind of business.
- I did not believe in the usefulness of advertising my business.

How did I overcome these challenges? I sat down and thought long and hard. You know, I even considered quitting the business at some point. My saving grace was that I turned to fellow affiliates including my upline for help. That is what changed my thinking. That is when I discovered that all these factors which hitherto inhibited me from marketing my business effectively can be overcome by deliberate efforts. These efforts include reading/learning the business thoroughly, following the rules and using the tools provided to grow your business. Your upline, your sponsors and your a2a friends can also help you out to find a way to market your business effectively. From my experience in SFI, fellow affiliates willingly give to other affiliates free tips to market their business. This is aside from the free tips SFI Admin makes available to all affiliates on very regular basis. I have over time found these tips/opportunities to be very useful and have actually been using them. My business has been on the upswing ever since.

Best Cheap Products to Buy at TripleClicks Store

SFI is a worldwide business platform. Where ever you are in the world, so long as you have Internet access, you can do business in SFI. All products in SFI are great for international members provided the cost of shipping is not excessive. That is why most international members prefer to buy products with zero or low shipping costs. Even though they may want other products, shipping costs do discourage many from buying such products. It is for same reason that electronic products are very attractive to international members. 

 
Aside from the three best value items which are directly sold by SFI-TripleClicks which you mentioned yourself, there are still some more products that you can buy with ease as an international member. Listed below are some of such products.

1. Wave 3 Starter kit for W 3 membership.
2. New Member Pack (NMP).
3. TC Gift Certificates.
4. E-Books covering various topics.
5. Music downloads.
6. TC Gift Cards.

As you can see, all these listed items are electronic based. As such they have zero cost of shipping. That is largely what makes them cheap and very attractive to international members.

I hope you find this information helpful.

How to Motivate Prospective PRMs with Gift Cards

As every affiliate very well knows, Gift Cards are very effective marketing tools in SFI business. They are a very effective way to introduce SFI and Tripleclicks to other people. They are cute, beautiful and easily appreciated as simple gifts. Many people relish getting a gift card and most are always very appreciative of the cards. That is the singular reason why they are very effective to motivate prospective Personally Referred Members, PRMs. I am of the view that the best way to use them is by sending them to friends and prospective PRMs by email with the following very simple message.

“Dear friend,

I have some Gifts Cards that I'd like you to have as a token of my love and appreciation of our friendship.

You can redeem the cards at SFI Tripleclicks which is a very popular e-commerce platform like Amazon or eBay.

The card has a $12 value, redeemable in Tripleclicks products and merchandises. I personally recommend that you redeem the card with TCredits which you can use to play Eager Zebra games at TripleClicks among many other things requiring the use of TCredits therein.

The card itself tells you exactly how it can be redeemed.

The gift card redemption code is:
xxxxxxxxxxxx “

I believe this is a sufficient way to use gift cards effectively. Good luck !!!