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Affiliate marketing is currently taking the internet by storm. It seems that everywhere you go online, you have an opportunity to become an affiliate marketer and make lots of money. But does affiliate marketing deliver?Affiliate marketing DOES have many advantages. But there are also some problems with affiliate marketing that the beginner marketer would not be able to recognize without a more thorough knowledge of sound internet marketing principles.First, we’ll look at the ADVANTAGES.* It’s a ready-made product. You don’t have to create your own product.* The company provides a website. You don’t need to know how to build websites. Just plug into theirs.* No worries about collecting money from the sale or delivering the product. The company will do all of that for you.* You can start immediately. Just start advertising their website and start collecting commissions!* It’s a good way to get started marketing online, especially if you’ve never done anything like it before. It’s an inexpensive, non-threatening way to learn internet marketing.These are all TRUE advantages of affiliate marketing. But there are also some inherent DISADVANTAGES that would not be recognized by someone who does not know anything about sound internet marketing principles. Before we can talk about the disadvantages, we must first discuss internet marketing.* Internet Superstore. Have you ever been to a Wal-Mart Supercenter? Of course you have. Everything under one roof, right? One-stop shopping for everything from groceries to digital cameras to garden hoses to clothing. But what works well for brick and mortar businesses does not necessarily convert well to internet marketing.A homepage that is “busy,” displaying many different products – especially many different TYPES of products – can be counterproductive. If you advertise a product, then send your customer to a busy homepage where they must SEARCH to find the product that you just advertised, you will lose them. It works much better if you send the customer directly to the specific page of the website that contains information about the specific product that you advertised.The page must have ONE goal, and ONE specific call to action. All of the copy on that page must be aimed at COMPELLING your customer to do that one action – whether it be to buy something, or to join your email list for more info about your product or service.Most affiliate programs will not allow you to do this. You must send your customers to their homepage first in order for your affiliate number to register this customer as your customer. (Or the only advertising link that they give you is to their homepage, and you have no way to change it.) Your customers will visit the busy homepage, then leave before they find the product they went there for.* Email collection. If you send a person to a website and they don’t buy anything the first time, they will be gone… forever. Most of the sales actually occur in the follow up, not on the initial website visit. But most affiliate sites have no follow up plan in place. The website should be designed to collect email addresses. Then the potential customer should receive regular (and automated) emails to build a RELATIONSHIP with the company. It is out of this RELATIONSHIP that most sales are made. If your affiliate program has no viable follow up plan, there is nothing you can do to improve it.* Advertising copy. One of the MOST IMPORTANT aspects of advertising, be it online or off line, is to test, test, test. Whether you are using banner ads, Google adwords, postcards, or newspaper ads, you should ALWAYS run two ads and track the response from each ad. Then you keep the better ad as your “control ad” and delete the otherone. Next you write a new ad, always trying to beat the response of your control ad, and then keeping the better of the two. This way, you are always working toward increasing the response to your advertising, thereby maximizing your advertising dollars.The same holds true for the verbiage (the copy) of the website itself. Website copy MUST be test, tested, and tested again – always working toward the highest conversion rate (converting hits to PAYING customers). You must find an affiliate program that has a website with a high conversion rate. You could learn how to test your ads until they are screaming, sending thousands of qualified hits to the website, but if the website copy hasn’t been tested – it doesn’t have a high conversion rate – all your advertising effort, and money, is wasted. You might take a look at the website of the affiliate company and think that it looks good. But you never really know if it is actually effective unless it has been tested.Here’s the truth that I’ve discovered about many online companies (whether they have an affiliate program or not). The product is developed by the owner of the company. The website is designed and built to the specifications of the owner by a website designer who is a computer geek, not a marketing specialist. But marketing is a science, and nowhere in the process did they employ a marketer who understands effective marketing (i.e. using TESTING of website and ad copy to improve performance). So they put up a website that looks pretty, it has all the techno bells and whistles, and it makes the owner feel great to own such a nice looking website – BUT IT DOESN’T CONVERT hits into paying customers because it isn’t compelling enough, and it hasn’t been tested! It has a low conversion rate, and because it’s not your website, there’s nothing you can do to increase the conversion rate. Once again, your advertising efforts are being wasted if the website doesn’t convert hits to paying customers.Here’s what I suggest: before you spend any money advertising an affiliate program, find out what the conversion rate of the website is. (I bet many website owners don’t even know what their conversion rate is! If they had tested it, they would know.) That way, you will know whether you’re wasting your time, or whether you have the potential to earn any money with this particular affiliate program.CONCLUSIONAll of the advantages of affiliate programs mentioned above are valid. Joining one could be a great thing, IF their website has one or several closely related products (not a superstore), IF it has a good (automated) follow up email system, and IF it has excellent copy which COMPELS people to buy, as evidenced by a HIGH conversion rate. If you can find an affiliate program like that – GO FOR IT!
February 28th, 2010
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