So you’ve seen late-night TV ads announcing that you can make millions of dollars by directly promoting other people’s products or services online via affiliate marketing (like the shortcut to millions of ads you see from time to time about attacking people) rich with your program). Or maybe you are looking for work on various job search sites, such as career builders. See an attractive work-at-home opportunity that seems to have its name (Herbalife is an example of this). Whatever the existing program, practically any work at home will say that it is easy to earn millions by merely promoting what companies have to offer.
Obviously, if you are a typical newbie in the affiliate marketing (as I am) when you adopt this program and start working to earn commissions. You will probably find that generating successful sales and revenue (not to mention big commissions) can be easier. Talk about what to do. Also, depending on your skill level, making good money online can take days, weeks, or even months before you get good results. I’ve been doing affiliate marketing since July last year, with no previous sales and marketing experience. I can say firsthand that making money online certainly takes a lot of work. In this article, I will address at least seven obstacles you will face when it comes to generating income online. Please note that this article is totally my opinion and you may agree or disagree with me.
Affiliate Marketing Challenge # 1 Finding a Profitable Niche to Build Your Website
If you want to make relatively quick commissions online, you will find that many veteran affiliate marketers say you need to find a highly lucrative niche to build a website. A “niche” is basically the general theme on which your website creates. For example, if you built a website about your favorite vacation spot (let’s take Seattle, Washington as an example) and wanted to create a website about Seattle, your niche would be “Seattle.” Ideally, most affiliate marketers (e.g., Ken Evoy, Rosalind Gardiner, Average Joe Marketer, and others) will report that you need to build a site around a narrow niche that is frequently searched for and gets low results on search engines.
For example,
If you have dogs and want to create a dog-centric site in general, you can do this; however, if you search for “dogs” on most search engines (such as Google or Bing), you will find that you have millions of different sites that are competing for the top spot on search engines (they say you should rank among Top 20 search engine keyword results for better results through search engine marketing). Also, most search engines give all new sites a page rating of 0 initially (especially Google). So your site is near the end of search results unless your site is ranked higher. Obviously, it is not easy to find the best possible niche to build a website as many long-tail keywords are being used (especially popular niches).
If you were looking for dog ebooks, for example, you would find that when you search “dog ebooks” on Google. You will find that there are over 4,000,000 different lists for dog websites. Therefore, finding the perfect niche to build your site will take time and energy. Obviously, there are ways to simplify the task as there are tools available to help you find the perfect niche. This brings us to obstacle number 2.
Affiliate Marketing Challenge 2 – Competing in More Competitive Fields
This kind of challenge is undoubtedly common when it comes to turnkey sites (or sites you can buy from multiple vendors like Amazon, and profit plug-in sites that are loaded with prebuilt commercial content that covers various subjects and everything you really need). What you have to do is enter your affiliate ID in the links you own and just promote the site for profit rather than having to create the site from scratch). As well as most multi-level marketing companies where You have a signup link that you must promote to create your downline.
Analysis
So let’s say you have decided to adopt a competitive field in affiliate marketing and set up a website on Xbox 360. While Xbox 360 is an important topic of website creation, you will find many other sites on Xbox 360, but you do it anyway. You can follow this path, but search engine marketing alone is probably not the best way forward (unless you can build your inbound links and therefore rank your search engine in a short period of time). o Obviously, there are ways to market more competitive niches, such as building a site around multiple topics (if you create a generic site), doing paid advertising (where you can literally buy traffic to your site for a certain amount of money) as well. Like direct guerrilla marketing (i.e., blogs, social networks, classified ad serving, door-to-door sales, etc.).
Obviously, it can take time and money for you to build your customer base or get real results with this strategy. Also, if you choose to do paid advertising, some keywords are more expensive to offer than others (ideally, you want to get the most clicks from your dollar at the lowest possible price, but some keywords offer at $ 1.00 per click or higher, you will need to spend more money for the best results and can get expensive after a while). Even free traffic creation techniques have their distinct pros and cons (and can take a long time to generate good results, depending on how you promote).
Challenge # 3 – Low Skill Level
Ideally, if you plan to adopt affiliate marketing, it is helpful to have some successful marketing experience, preferably in a commission sales environment. This is because being an affiliate marketer is essentially commission sales work, which means you get paid for what you sell (although some companies pay per click or lead). Of course, some products and services will be easier to sell than others, and it is certainly worth knowing what you are doing when you adopt marketing. If you are good with commission sales programs, affiliate marketing can be very lucrative for you. While on the other hand, if you are a total newbie, earning commissions is easier. It may take months, weeks, or even years before you get good results if you do not know what you are doing.
On the plus side, there are mentors out there (even with some affiliate marketing companies), but many of them charge their customers for their services (which can be expensive depending on who is directing you). There are also videos, ebooks, and regular books, but not all are free, and some may be more useful than others. It may be easier not to do this yourself and to recruit people for your business who can help you get started.
For example, if you don’t know how to create a site, you can hire someone to create your site, and you can focus more on promotion, list building, and budgeting. Obviously, I don’t recommend affiliate marketing to anyone who doesn’t know what you’re doing and has little or no previous commission sales experience (unless you’re willing to hire people to help you promote your business).
Affiliate Marketing Challenge 4 – Don’t Put a Hole in Your Budget
With affiliate marketing, you basically run your own business. You set up your own website; you run marketing campaigns yourself, and so on. As with just about any business, you can expect to spend money on affiliate marketing at common costs, including web hosting for the website you build, advertising, maintaining an email list for your subscribers, training material, and similar. Obviously, if you are not careful about how you spend your money, costs can increase after a while. I made a mistake myself by pouring more than $ 2000 into my affiliate marketing efforts by buying eBooks, spending a lot of money on paid advertising, a $ 500 list building eBook, as well as improved traffic exchanges, and now My money is exceptionally fair.
There are a lot of resources out there, and you’re likely to attract spammers with your efforts (especially if you advertise on Craigslist, as people will ask you to try to get them to join the classified ads service), along with the occasional scam artist who You want to fool yourself, but if you give your money to all existing services, you’ll probably find yourself in a pit sooner or later (like huge credit card debt). Of course, there are ways to keep costs down, such as choosing your hosting service carefully (some services are more affordable than others you know), getting the most economic features for your business, trying to get the most clicks per dollar you spend on pay per click ads and don’t accept all the offers you see out there.
Challenge 5 – Become a “spam magnet.”
Alan Gardyne of Associate Programs says correctly in his tutorial article, “18 Step Affiliate Program Tutorial”, that once you create your site and wait for people to buy from the companies you represent, you will become the main target for spammers, as well as occasional scam artists (Gardyne). Since you need to expose your online presence, post your email address on websites, and also participate in various online networking sites, you will probably get other web marketers who will try to request it. For example, if you have invested in the multilevel marketing business, you can sometimes attract people from other MLMs who try to recruit you from the MLM company, usually saying theirs are better than yours.
My Experience
I myself understand, as a member of Global Domains International since September 2008, and now I get people from other MLMs trying to join theirs (some noteworthy include: carbon copy pro, vemma builder, Xango juice, max alive and extreme button). Obviously, I’m not going to invest my money in multiple MLMs out there, as it wouldn’t be expensive after a while, and it would also help to get a decent conversion rate with one program before moving to another (which is common sense). ) Another thing worth mentioning is that if you put your phone number online, some people will call you offering services for money. I remember a while ago when I joined Legit Online Jobs; For example, I got a guy representing the company who wanted to offer me an individual coaching service for at least $ 2000 in advance.
Of course, $ 2000 is a lot of money to invest in affiliate marketing business training (especially if you can get advice from friends, a former employer, or even college professor, or even get a good ebook for less than $ 100, which explains the opportunity in detail). In short, new marketers should be aware: other marketers are looking for you for your money. Of course, there are a few ways to reduce spam, such as not subscribing to every newsletter you find online, being careful about publishing your information, getting people to “work” for your subscription, or even forwarding them to you — other advertising services.
Affiliate Marketing Challenge 6 – Promote your site or program without spam
In the last section, I talked about trying to promote a spam-free site, and now I’m going to talk about a similar problem you’ll probably find online: how to promote without spam. Of course, I’m not talking about spam as a good thing, but nowadays, where people are more cautious about web marketers and spammers, some people have a very broad definition of what spam is. For example, let’s say you don’t have the money to advertise your site on pay-per-click advertising (Google AdWords can get very expensive if you can’t generate sales with it after all), so decide to write an ad on Craigslist.
Things To Note
You can do this, but there are two things to note:
1) Craigslist prohibits direct affiliate marketing and 2) there are hidden flags on Craigslist that usually seek to apply the rules to the letter and therefore if your ad looks too attractive or you make your affiliate marketing efforts obvious (I’m sure that we all make this mistake at some point), someone will flag your ad and it will delete your ads. Consequently, you need to mask your promotional efforts to avoid Craigslist spam slightly. Also, for companies with invitation systems (such as Global Domains International), of course, you will probably try to invite people you know to join your downline, but if you’re not careful who you invite, some people may get upset and treat your invitation as spam.
Even on forums and social networking sites, you will find that some are more tolerant than others of what you post, as well as sites where there are “Stalinist” moderators who regard the link to your own website as “spam.” Some forums even have restrictions on what happens in your signature file. In fact, the other day, something interesting happened to me: I used to be a member of a popular business forum called business forums, and I don’t know what I said or did (or maybe it had something to do with it). Do it with me by displaying my site in the advertising section of the site), but one day when I tried to log in, I found that my IP address was banned.
Best Thing To Do
Of course, I’m not usually a spammer. Still, I must have accidentally annoyed someone, and the administrator decided to ban me (he never gave me a warning or gave me a chance to explain myself). Fortunately, this was just one of several forums I attended, but this example is to illustrate how easy it is to cross the line and be considered a
Perhaps the best thing you can do to stop spam is to mask your marketing efforts by using free methods. Not posting referral links on social networking sites (unless you restrict them) and slowing them down. Another thing you can do is follow the path of least resistance as there are websites that are more tolerant of promotion than others. For example, one type of site I tend to favor is a traffic exchange. Because you can post almost any link they want to promote (although some restrictions apply), browse other webmasters’ ads, and get easy page views.
The only downside to traffic exchanges is that you will find that the conversion rate is not very good for people. As most fellow surfers are likely to visit your site mainly for credit, so you would have to browse many sites ( preferably at least 1000 per day minimum credits) if you want better results, which can take time and work (such as spending up to 6 hours or more per day browsing websites for credit). You can also focus more on an offline promotion, where you can show your links to a friend, family, and others, you know.
Challenge 7 – Make “impressions” and “clicks” to really get “leads” and “sales.”
This is a challenge I’m facing right now, and I can’t really answer that: if you sell your site correctly, you’ll find that most of the time, you get clicks and occasional hits from the clicks you have. Obviously, the real challenge is getting some of your successes to turn into sales or leads to paying. You can get 1,000 impressions and 100 clicks on average, but if none of them become leads or sales. It can be more complicated to make money from affiliate marketing.
It would be nice if companies paid based on one click or one thousand impressions. But that’s not the case with most businesses. Even with pay per click AdSense, it can be tricky to generate extra clicks each day. Perhaps the best way to improve your conversion rate (or sales, leads/clicks, etc.) is to get feedback from people. Then, try to increase traffic and adjust your site to give people reasons to do more than just click on your links.
Well, these are all the challenges that are worth mentioning right now. I plan to post more as I come across more challenges over time.