by Kara Ochoa

Affiliate marketing is not an exact science. There is no clear cut solution to everything and there are a lot of ways to get it right. But with a lot of "solutions" out there, there are also dozens of ways to get it wrong. Try avoiding these crucial mistakes:

Promoting Too Many Products. True enough, there are a lot of products to choose from. But that does not mean you have to pick every product imaginable just to generate sales.

Take this affiliate, for example, he can be seen as only focusing his efforts on one product. You can look through tools to get the products you can easily sell but trying to sell them all can be quite a challenge. And even worse when you try to sell so much in one landing page. Select a niche you can understand very well and therefore can focus your efforts on is your best bet when you start out.

Ignoring Yahoo! and Bing. Yes, Google is so cool. But everybody else thinks so too. If there is an opportunity to sell through other means of advertising, you will be a fool to keep ignoring it.

Not Maximizing Your Landing Page. Sending traffic straight to the merchant website without properly guiding your visitors is sending them without warning as to what to do or expect from the page. From ad to page, if they don’t see what they need at first glance, they will leave and you can say goodbye to your commissions.

Your landing page acts as the bridge between the customer and the merchant site so lead them well. Let your landing page be informative and focused on providing solutions and information that customers need instead of just establishing selling points that might turn off visitors.

Don’t overdo it with the flashy banner ads, it confuses visitors and irritates them, drawing the conclusion that you’re just another seller. Text links generate a better response whereas banners and graphics also slow down your website.

Not Having The List. The list refers to your list of leads. Generate a list of your niche and frequent visitors to have a constant market to divert your marketing campaign. Remember, affiliate marketing also comes in professional and informative email marketing (not spam). So offer regular email newsletters or free articles about your products and website and collect possible leads. Don’t forget to safe guard their information while you’re at it.

Avoiding Split Testing. With dozens of ads provided for by keyword tools. Blindly copying these ads may not go so well for you. They do work depending on how they are advertised; it’s not just about the copy itself.

Improve these ads and split test them once every few weeks to see which would work better at a given schedule. You get samples of these ads but you can always do better by improving and developing your own proven effective copies.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 23rd, 2009 at 11:53 pm and is filed under Keyword Research, Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.