Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Online Affiliate Marketing - Beginners, Did You Make These Mistakes?

Online affiliate marketing attracts beginners like magnetic. You probably have the perception that you can easily make truckloads of affiliate marketing income.

If only it is really that easy. Yet I can't blame you for thinking this way. There are simply too much hype online. Everyday you hear someone telling saying it is easy to make money online, but you're not having the result you want. It's frustrating, isn't it?

I'm sure if you have some marketing experience under your belt, you can related to what I said. And if you're totally new, this article will be your short cut to make decent affiliate marketing income online.

In my opinion, and you need to offer the most suitable product to your visitors.

Honestly speaking, setting up a site is the easiest part of an online affiliate marketing business. After that, the nightmare begins. You need to have a strategy for driving traffic to your site. You also need to know how to convert your visitors to buyers. The last statement is really what truly matters, isn't it?

Lack of Advertising

An online affiliate marketing business is no different from a traditional brick and mortar business. You need to advertise. Pay per click and ezine advertisements are relatively cheaper than running newspaper or magazines advertisements. By far, these are 2 of the best ways to bring your product in front of thousands if not millions of searchers globally.

Confusing Your Visitors

You task as an affiliate marketer is to educate your visitors. Think about why people come online. It's basically to search for information. Yet I see so many web sites with more advertisement banners than useful information. If you do that, you're confusing your visitors. They will wonder what your site is about and leave almost immediately. That's not what you want. You want your visitors to stay long enough to read your content, and in the process, monetize them.

So you should make your site stick by providing your visitors with valuable content. As the saying goes: The more you tell, the more you sell. That's exactly what you should do. However, you can provide good content together with advertising banners. The best way to use monetize your visitors is to put up banners related to the content you write about.

Promoting too Many Products

Beginners are almost always overwhelmed by the number of products they can market. They end up signing for many, but rarely spend enough time promoting any.

To be clearer, if you send your visitors to a page full of products you are affiliated to, you are not likely convert them to buyers. The reason is simple. You are confusing them.

If visitors are confused with too many choices, they will not buy. My advice is to give them only one recommendation. And that should be the best one.

As a new affiliate marketer, you are doomed to fail in this business unless your put in effort to learn affiliate marketing. Staying away from these 3 mistakes is only the beginning. You need to see the big picture. At the same time, you also need to have detailed step by step instructions that to show you how to make good online affiliate marketing income.