8 Tips to Avoid Common Mistakes in Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a specialized business and one of the most interesting and lucrative industries on the Internet. It hinges strictly on commissions earning by affiliates depending on how well they are able to help drive sales for products merchants. It presents as one great opportunity for marketers and advertisers to partner with others to promote their products, services, brands or affiliate programs. As an affiliate, the more time and effort you invest into learning and testing everything first, the more likely that you’ll make it real good in the business. Hereunder are some tips that can help you to avoid many common mistakes most affiliate marketers tend to make when they are starting out.

#1. Never Stop Learning

Just as the internet grows and changes, so are internet marketing techniques. To be on top of your game in affiliate marketing, you must be open to continuous learning. For every good affiliate marketer therefore, there is no end to learning or knowledge sharing. It is a continuous process because the industry tends to change very rapidly. New trends appear all the time just as old ones die out quickly. For this reason, you must be ready to take full advantage of new changes and to spend some time and resources on learning new trends and techniques of the business.

#2. Don’t Overvalue your Products

It is inevitable that you must have to promote products/services in affiliate marketing. In most cases, this promotion is directly out of your own affiliate website/blog. However, you must make sure you don’t overvalue the products/services you are promoting. If you do, it could backfire on your business in the long run. Your main consideration as an affiliate marketer is to curt and service a loyal audience by providing valuable resources, information and insights that will help them to solve their problems. Doing so consistently helps you to build traffic. As soon as good traffic starts coming to your website, you then create an offer that's closely related to what you consistently share on your website/blog to your audience. That helps your marketing efforts a great deal.

#3. Never Fail to Track your Marketing Metrics

Without consistent tracking, it is virtually impossible to know how well your affiliate marketing campaigns are doing. It is therefore quite critical to track analytics and determine which marketing channels are bringing in the most traffic. The insights from such metrics help you to know where to focus more efforts and where to de-emphasize when it comes to promoting affiliate offers. Important metrics to track are unique daily visits and repeat visits, daily and weekly sales volume, where and through what channels visitors come to your website, which content attracts more visitors’ attention and so on and so forth.

#4. Don't Expect Sudden Huge Earnings

When starting out in affiliate marketing, you’ll be hugely disappointed if you expect to earn huge commissions quickly. It is always a gradual process and as you learn the ropes. The competition is huge as well. One reason you should lower your revenue expectations is that there are literally thousands of web publishers doing same things you are doing and they’ve been at it sometimes for years and still struggle to find good revenue. It is the nature of the business. What is important is to be patient and to work diligently hard before you can get appreciable results. So, your earned income will depend largely on how much time, effort and patience you're willing to invest in the business particularly at the outset.

#5. Don't be Afraid to Give Up if you Must

Always have an eye for what is not working and be ready to discard it at the earliest opportunity. It may be hard to walk away from an affiliate campaign or website that is not yielding desired results. What is best however is to do so to free up your resources, time and efforts for something else that has a better chance of getting the results you want. The watchword is to always do what makes good business sense at any point in time.

 

#6. Never Sell your Visitors Short

It is unethical to sell your website visitors short. It is one huge marketing mistake to sell visitors short. What you should be doing is to always provide them high-quality offers that match well with what they want and need. Website visitors are not just aimless web surfers. Many are on the web actively searching for what they want. You do better business if you help them to meet their needs. So, before trying to sell your visitors something, make sure that you've done your research well. That is the only way you can better arrive at offers that closely match what your audience is looking for.

#7. Never Fail to Embrace Testing

You cannot succeed in affiliate marketing if you are unable to thoroughly test ideas and techniques to know how they work and how you can take advantage of them in your marketing efforts. It is a no, no to rely on guess works. You must be ready to test ideas and be sure of what works before investing more time, effort and money. Most marketers rely on A/B testing tools for many of their campaigns. These tools help to give very valuable insights into what's working and at what risks if any.

#8. Don't Shutout your Earnings

If you are relatively new in affiliate marketing, there are some things you may choose to do which are capable of shutting out some of your earnings. For instance, many affiliate marketers may be quick to start promoting a new offer the moment it goes live even before fully optimizing and promoting it before making it available. If this happens, you may be missing out of some of your earnings for failing to run the right tests before promoting the offer widely. When you do the right testing, it gives you a better chance of converting more visitors into subscribers or buyers, because you've taken adequate time to work on optimizing your entire marketing from start to finish. Affiliate marketers tend to get the best results particularly from new campaigns and they earn more if they test and optimize their marketing well enough.

How Affiliate Marketing Benefits Influencers

In affiliate marketing, merchants rely heavily on influencers as dependable affiliates to market their products. If you’ve had a bit of experience in Internet marketing, there is no doubt you already know why and how affiliate marketing works. Affiliate marketing derives its effectiveness by serving as an online referral program for merchant’s products/services. It thus serves as a very powerful marketing method where a trusted influencer helps to get a merchant’s product/service in front of the right buyers by way of influencer activities online.

Online, many affiliates know very well that affiliate marketing has lots of benefits for businesses and consumers. What many of such affiliates tend to overlook are the benefits in the affiliate relationship for themselves. Since it is¬ human beings who are influencers, many affiliates usually have lots of good reasons why they personally recommend items to their follower’s base online. They all know that all well-known affiliate marketing structures inevitably involve three parties, viz: the merchant/ business selling a product/service, the publisher/blogger/influencer promoting the product/service and the consumer. Without all three benefitting adequately from the marketing structure, it cannot yield good results. Influencers too benefit a great deal from this structure, the reason many take their influencer activities as real business.


 
Following are some of the most visible benefits influencers derive from affiliate marketing arrangements. 

Affiliate Marketing Helps to Grow Influencer Followers

The real strength of influencers always lies in their followers count. That is the income earning asset. Like every marketer knows full well, earning followers organically is always a very big challenge. For many influencers, to get in the big league, they do so many things to grow their followers count first before thinking of making money. With the advent of social media, many influencers now find it much easier to grow their followers count by promoting products /services on many social media channels. This way, they do increase their online popularity through valuable and well-tailored content they routinely post on these channels. When any of their posts manages to go viral on social media, their followers count benefits immensely as a result. What many readers want online are trust, authenticity and authoritativeness of content. Influencers who manage to give their followers these tend to earn more followers as a result. Social media is darn so popular that the ability of influencers to benefit from it is a given. All they need do is to always stand ready to give new ideas and content as well as brand new audiences which affiliate partnerships makes possible. Naturally, if a merchant whose products an influencer is promoting has a strong presence online and he opts to share the influencer’s content, that alone can help grow the influencer’s followers count in multiples. Affiliate partnerships with well-known brands are also a great way to boost influencers’ reputation and legitimacy. That ultimately leads to more followers for such influencers down the road.

Affiliate Marketing Enhances Unlimited Income for Influencers
 
In affiliate marketing, influencers tend to earn differently depending on their followers’ strength or the products they are promoting. There is practically no limit to what influencers can earn from their affiliate efforts. Earning income is probably number-one reason why most influencers choose to enter into affiliate contracts. On the average, many influencers earn some $5000-$50,000 per annum from affiliate income alone while some others by combining other online income streams earn some mind boggling sums. Many influencers with some 50 million or more followers earn big in affiliate marketing. At some point, the bulk of this income comes from passive income from contents they’ve posted in the past which had embedded ads and links.

Affiliate Marketing Allows Influencers to Work from Anywhere
 
Flexibility of work output stands today as an asset in an increasingly busy world. Building up influencer presence online can be quite tasking but with work flexibility, it can be taken on anywhere 24/7 provided there is internet access. That is work freedom which modern day workers really crave for. As an influencer, no matter where you are in the world, so long as you have a working internet connection, you can fully support and grow your affiliate marketing partnerships from there. If this coveted freedom allows you unfettered work to keep producing content such as photos, videos and blogs, you get to earn more clout and money as a result. Because of this work freedom, many influencers now use their own website/blog as a great way to combine their influencer marketing business with their affiliate income. They add passive income to that by working with merchants to embed banner ads/links into their websites and content. Inevitably, that translates to more earnings down the road.

 

How to Create Multiple Revenue Streams for Your Blog

There are multiple ways to make money from your blog if it has been getting some good measure of traffic.  I have used some of these methods myself while I have never tried some others but I hear of bloggers who routinely earn money from multiple streams of sources. Many bloggers earn just a second pay check from blogging while others earn a fulltime income from same sources. What you earn depends largely on the streams you are using, how good you are at blogging and how popular your blog had become. This popularity is measured by inbound traffic flow to the blog. That is really what brings in the income.


 
For most bloggers, making money with their blog is readily their most important objective for blogging. The better and more consistent they are at it, the more money they make. Many bloggers make averagely $5,000-$20,000 per year while some even post much higher figures from one of or a combination of the following methods.

#1. Display ads measured with Google Adsense where income comes from PPV, pay per view or PPC pay per click.
#2. Affiliate Display ads. You can also earn an agreed percentage in commissions from products actually purchased from ads displayed on your website as an Affiliate Marketer.
#3. Sale of E-books.
#4. Fees from Webinars.
#5. Sale of how-to videos.
#6. Sale of packaged courses.
#7. Direct payments for display ads to announce or promote events or products.
#8. Earned fees for letting others market with your Email list.
#9. Earned fees for helping to run surveys on your blog.
#10. Fees from Magazine or Bulletin subscription.

This list is by no means exhaustive. As bloggers get smarter by the day alongside the deepening of the internet and proliferation of smart hand-held devices like IPhones, Tablets and Smart phones, many more income earning ways get developed by bloggers. It is very crucial to have a viable revenue strategy for your blog because even if you are not interested in making a living from your blog earnings, you need resources to keep developing and growing the blog. You may need 2-5 hours daily to add good content to your blog. This is precious time that you are investing in your blog. This time must somehow be compensated for by what you earn from the blog. Without earnings from your blog, it will be difficult for you to fund and maintain your content creation. If you can’t maintain your content creation, you will not be able to grow your blog to keep it relevant and competitive enough in the densely saturated blogging world.


 

How SFI Business Provides a Level Playing Field for all Affiliates

The very good news about SFI business is that it provides a very level playing field for all its affiliates and Mr. Gery Carson and his team work round the clock to ensure that this field remains perpetually level. In SFI, there is something for everyone. Even if you joined SFI today, what you need to succeed applies to everyone no matter who they are or where they come from.

The tools available to someone who has been around the business for quite some time are also available to you. What you do with the tools and the training is entirely up to you. It has nothing to do with how long you have been in the business. For that reason, how best you succeed in SFI is entirely up to you. That has nothing to do with how long you have been in the business.

The earning potentials, the streams of income, the success tools, the training, the support, and even the opportunities apply to all affiliates equally without exception. Everything in SFI is so transparent that even rookies start to make money within hours of their joining SFI.

My friend, welcome to SFI. Start doing your own thing, follow the rules and be diligent in your business. The sky is your limit irrespective of whether you have been in SFI for a very long time or whether you are just joining.