How Not To Run an Affiliate Sales Campaign

The affiliate marketing industry has grown at the same rapid rate as the Internet itself. The increasing number and variety of ecommerce sites these days means that there are lots more pieces of the pie to go around and affiliates can make money whilst sending more sales to an online retailer. It’s a win-win situation at the end of the day. However, people are still learning quickly in this game and there are mistakes that seem to be quite common. Below are details of 3 killer mistakes that many affiliates make, and you can avoid.

Thinking too niche. Overestimating the size of a market is a common mistake for affiliate sellers as they tend to forgot that they will only ever be able to capture the percentage of it that is being offered by merchants. This site advertising snowboards for example may be able to survive, but seeing as they will only pass on around 10% of the profits to affiliates, it is unlikely that affiliates sites could servive in such a niche. This means that affiliates are required to umbrella a good number of smaller niches in order to stand a chance of capturing a decent amount of the overall market.

Thinking too large. When products cost a great deal of money, like buying a swimming pool or luxury cruises for example, sellers take a lot of time over their decisions. People are very unlikely to follow an affiliate link and book an expensive holiday right then and there. They tend to compare offers to a greater extent and take more time in the consideration period of the purchasing cycle. They will then actually buy the item a little bit further down the line, by time your affiliate referral tracking would have been lost. Sticking to smaller items including gifts and downloads is far more likely to get results and people are more likely to buy these quickly.

Not strong enough. You need to remember that the online publicity arena is very competitive and you will be in the ring with not only other affiliates, but also those merchants who you are affiliates for. The major difference of course is that you are hoping to get a certain percentage of the overall sale, whilst they have the larger incentive of getting the total amount of the sale. This means you need to stay one step ahead of the game if you want to turn any sort of profit.