Affiliate Marketing’s Three Most Common Pitfalls

Affiliate marketing is big businesses these days. 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. When it comes down to it, both parties win. That said, there are some big problems that affiliates face, and they usually pop up time after time. Lets take a look at three of the most common and fatal mistakes made by affiliate sellers.

Thinking too niche. What most affiliate marketers forget is that even if a market is big enough to support an online retailer or two, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s big enough to support affiliates. This site selling 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. Affiliates then need to think about the larger market and try to cover as many niches as they can whilst still remaining competitive.

Thinking too big. 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 such as gifts and downloads is far more likely to get results and people are more likely to buy these quickly.

Not strong enough. As mentioned earlier the affiliate market in growing at a rapid rate, which means that you are going to be in competition with more affiliate sellers each day, but additionally likely to be competing with the original online sellers at the same time. 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.