How Smart Bloggers Make Dumb Choices

 Do you know the pluses and minuses of affiliate marketing? Great if you do. Even if you don’t, it just takes a bit of digging behind-the-scenes to look. You’ll discover many dumb things even expert bloggers do. Here’s a sampler.

Some merchants may be above-board, but may not be a good fit for your own type of audience. Sticking with such merchants is a dumb thing to do. 


 
Regularly, some bloggers get fooled by unscrupulous merchants all in the name of business. For all you care, all the noise about a particular product may just be mere hyping and some bloggers easily get carried away by that. More often than not, these bloggers forget the cliché, “If an opportunity seems too good to be true, it probably is.” Not heeding that is exactly why many bloggers sometimes get seduced by the tactics of less ethical and unscrupulous merchants.

It is easy to find numerous tips and tricks in affiliate marketing forums that might help you make a quick buck.  Such tricks could quickly lead to a break in trust with your audience. That is not the best way to go. In any business, trust counts for much and once it is lost, a lot is lost.

Anyone, no matter how experienced and expert they are can get fooled once in a while. Here are some quick tips to help you stay safe:

Don’t promote any product until you have all the vital information you need to promote it. To get this information, be sure you’ve subscribed to your affiliate partners’ email list and know exactly what your readers can expect in terms of follow-up marketing. That leaves you on very sure and safe grounds to promote the product as expected.

Do not pay a fee to become an affiliate. That is inclusive of membership or setup fees. Most credible affiliate program are FREE to join and many even entice people with sign-up bonuses. When you see product merchants asking for fees, it is likely they are running scams. Beware!

Don’t get involved in using tricks and unethical methods to promote any product.  Some marketers habitually use aggressive SEO tactics that focus exclusively on tricking search engines to market their products. That is a very dumb thing to do even if you may record a few successes here and there. If humans don’t wise up to your tricks soon enough, search engines will and they could have you banned from search engine listings. A real disaster if that happens.

 

Why Bloggers Love Affiliate Marketing

If you are an affiliate marketer, blogging is not only the in-thing to do, it is also a very smart thing to do. I blog real good and I recommend it as well. Here are some really compelling reasons you too should get involved if you want what is good for your business. All pretty significant advantages to you and your business if you are a devoted blogger.

As many bloggers have found out, blogging for affiliate marketing really rocks if you know what you are doing even if you are a newbie. Here’s why:

You don’t need specialized expertise. Anyone can get involved and pronto they are into blogging real time. No one needs to be a world-renowned expert in any niche. The most you need to get cracking is to be familiar enough with your topic area to know what products are good and worth recommending to your audience. That’s it!!



You put in low-effort and at low-risk. Blogging for affiliate marketing doesn’t require any significant time or money investment on your part. You put in relatively low efforts and at very low or insignificant risks to get the business going. That rocks too if you are in the business.

You find it very easy to start and implement. The product merchants traditionally handle all the support the product needs. They also provide for you all the tools particularly links needed to promote the product. Very significantly, it is not your lot to worry about tracking sales, providing customer service, setting up payments, or anything else to help sales. All you need do as a marketer is to share the links provided by the merchants with your readers. That’s it! Easy and simple no doubt!

You don’t need any support team in place. With Affiliate marketing, you can easily run a one-man-show. Be your own boss that is. It is the product merchant who needs support teams not the marketer.  Your business is to promote and promote the product as best you can and in your own time and space. Now, that’s really business freedom no doubt!

You think that’s all? Not exactly, here’s some kind of icing on the cake. By getting involved in affiliate marketing:

It is easy to learn what types of products your audience is clamoring for thereby reducing the risk of any future product launch of your own, with its attendant costs, risks and all.

It is easy to build trust with your blog readers and getting them used to the idea of buying from you preferably.

It becomes fairly easy for you to make money by monetizing your blog.

With all the foregoing benefits, it is easy to see why bloggers love affiliate marketing. For them, the business really rocks no doubt.