The attraction of affiliate marketing is very seductive indeed. When done right the successful affiliate marketer looks like this:

 

  1. He or she has a business based on the hard work of other people who have developed products and markets to purchase these products
  2. Has no customer service issues to deal with
  3. Runs the business from home with no staff
  4. Has an endless supply of income that arrives by virtual autopilot
  5. Has completely left the 9 to 5 rate race behind

 

With such an incredible business model at our disposal, why is that most of the affiliate profits go to the top 2% of affiliate marketers with 98% of affiliates left to pick up the crumbs that fall from the Internet Marketing table? From my extensive research and trial and error over the past 3 years I would have to say the pitfalls that catch the unsuspecting almost like clockwork, arrange themselves like wild beasts on the path way to success and must be avoided if you are going to join that elusive top 2% of successful affiliate marketers taking home the lions share of the extremely generous commission pay checks.

The No#1 Top Reason for Affiliate Failure – Selling The Wrong Products

Now I didn’t list this as the top for any random reason, but for a very specific point that needs to be made here. I also didn’t say attempt to sell but actually sell the wrong products. Firstly you will never be able to succeed in this game if you are trying to sell ice to Eskimos – they don’t need it. Picking the first affiliate offer that comes your way is what most newbie affiliate marketers do and it sets them off in the wrong direction. So no matter how well you market your product you are doomed to be flogging a dead horse. You must do your research first to establish what products the market is actually buying. Choosing the wrong products is the first mistake and the worst as it doesn’t matter if you know how to attract website traffic that is explicitly targeted to the product, if for a number of reasons the traffic either doesn’t convert to sales or the total market is just too small or too tight a niche, you are destined to a trickle of income at best. So wrong product, in the wrong market is the first trap that must be avoided if you are to be successful as an affiliate marketer. The right research tools can lead you to the right products that people are demanding and purchasing.

The No#2 Top Reason for Affiliate Marketing Failure – Not Enough Targeted Visitors

So lets just assume for the moment that you got the first one correct and you did your research and you choose the right products to promote based on proven market performance, indicating that you indeed have something that a hungry crowd are eager to purchase from your promotions. Great! Now for the next trap… You have setup a website or a sales page and you are attempting to drive traffic to the offer and you decide to do one of two things that are common and obvious ways of getting visitors:

 

  1. PPC- pay per click advertising such as Google AdWords
  2. SEO- pay per your time and effort to create backlinks to raise your search engine results pages (SERPS)

 

Most affiliates discover the hard way that PPC is very difficult to master and they lose money hand over fist, then they slow down their campaigns until the cost doesn’t seem too bad but still their sales are usually less. Then there is the other choice of doing some SEO (search engine optimization) work to get your sites listed in the search engine pages high enough to get the traffic that you need to convert into paying customers. This involves a lot of hard work that can takes months and is also a very technical exercise that can backfire on you if you do things the wrong way. If Google thinks that you attempting to game their system they can remove you from their index completely. That means all your hard work can vanish over night! Getting banned from the search engines is a major reason that many affiliates over eager to get up to the top of the first page on Google fail to get the website visitors that they need to succeed. There are right ways and wrong ways of attempting to build traffic, you really need to learn a system and stick to it once you know that it works. Here’s a clue, just think about what websites impresses you and influences you towards either believing something (information site) or buying something (product site). Then make these types of pages.

No#3 Reason for Affiliate Marketing Failure – Not Good At Promoting A Product

Well it is the top third reason where most new marketers fall off the wagon completely. Even if you choose the right products to promoter and get a healthy chunk of website visitors to your sales pages and websites, but once they are there they don’t automatically turn into paying customers. Your conversion rates are too low. Funny that isn’t it? You would think that if you had a great product and there were lots of people looking at it then the sales should come, but no they don’t just happen. Trust is paramount to your success. People will not buy from you unless they trust you. It is a simple fact that is often over looked. Parting with money for goods is called selling and the truth is most people don’t like being sold to. On the other hand people love to buy products that they want as long as they trust the person they are handing their cash to. The art of selling while looking like you are providing useful information is a skill that requires a good deal of professionalism and is best left to the professionals who have a proven track record in this field. A good example of this done well is to not send traffic to your own site but send by direct linking to the merchants page where your customer is going to be confronted with all the very best sales collateral that has the best chance of converting the website visitor into a customer.

No#4 Reason for Affiliate Marketing Failure – Procrastination

With so many choices it is easy to get side tracked and in a state of indecision as to what to do, and then the choice is made by default – do nothing with the promise of getting around to doing it sometime. That sometime never arrives and so the idea of getting a successful affiliate marketing business just keeps disappearing further on down the road to oblivion. The confusion that inevitably arises from an over crowded inbox with the latest and greatest internet marketing tool that you just have to have, is the major contributing factor here. So how does one overcome this inbox distraction? Unsubscribe from all of the bottom dwellers and stick with the best and most highly recommended from a good number of sources to make sure you are choosing correctly. The best guys are the ones that are spoken of highly in the forums where people spill the beans on who is worth listening to and who are the shonks worth staying away from. If you don’t act you will never get past square one.

No#5 Reason for Affiliate Market Failure – Buy Every Product That Comes Along

This one is closely related to the #4 reason of failure. In an over enthusiastic effort to “do something” in newbie affiliate marketer just goes out and buys every product he can get his hands on. The opposite of procrastination but equally as disappointing as doing nothing at all. The notion that if I buy this product I will be instantly successful is a grand lie and you need to understand this if you are to move forward at all. Doing something is not about signing up to the latest and greatest thing only to find after your initial enthusiasm has waned, you have not made any sales and you are off to look for the next latest and greatest thing on offer.

I have made money selling other peoples products when I have avoided these costly 5 mistakes. I know how to choose the right highly sought after products, how to attract highly targeted website visitors and how to enjoy a high conversion rate once they are at my sites. Sometimes as high as 12% conversions are possible if you get all your jacks in a row. If you would like to find out how to become a successful affiliate marketer then I can suggest someone who is far more successful than myself. Someone who makes $2million dollars plus per year, know how to choose, promote and where to sell other peoples products. His name is Mack Michaels and he has a website called Maverick Money Makers.

If you would like to take a closer look at the Maverick Money Makers and be guided step by step towards your own success then please click this link:http://www.Consumer–reports.org/Maverick-Money-Makers/

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