Posts Tagged ‘affiliate’
5 Reasons Why Affiliate Marketing May Not Be The Answer For Your Blog
Credit: evagor@sxc.hu
Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to make money blogging. As long as you are writing about a niche that a few people care about, there is a good chance you can find affiliate programs that can help you promote products to your readers and get compensated when they buy using your links. There is no magic number of dollars that you can make with affiliate marketing. Many bloggers assume that there is no ceiling to how much money you can earn from affiliate products. While that may be true, since you are only getting a small percentage of what you are selling on your blog, there is so much money you can earn. But there is a floor. That’s when you don’t sell any products. So affiliate marketing is quite risky for publishers especially if you have CPM deals lined up for your blog.
I have been fond of affiliate marketing for years now. It’s what allowed me to start my business and fund it when I didn’t have enough resources to hire people or purchase equipment and services for my business. So affiliate marketing will always have a special place in my heart. But there are reasons I am not focusing my efforts on affiliate marketing anymore. The business has changed dramatically in the past few years, and while the industry is not dead, it is being pressured from all sides. Here are just a few reasons why I don’t consider affiliate marketing to be right for my business:
- Control: when you start your own business, you’d hope that you can have control on what’s going on with your business, and what you can do to increase your revenue. In reality, affiliate marketers are not in control of their destiny. In many cases, affiliate programs are too uptight with all their rules and policies. Some affiliate programs don’t pay you if you blog about their products. Others will right off your affiliate commissions if you refer people to them through the search engines. Worst of all, your affiliate program could ask you to make major changes to your website in order to continue your relationship with them. Don’t get me wrong. I have worked in the corporate environment, and I am aware of the challenges of working with partner companies in the past. But I have found many affiliate programs to be too demanding and uptight.
- Unfavorable Landscape: affiliate programs have shown that they really don’t care about their affiliates. When companies cut their affiliates off the minute Internet tax is imposed in a certain state, you know you are not a priority for your affiliate partner. I guess it’s only fair as affiliates are there to generate leads for their merchants. So expecting merchants to care too much about affiliates may be wishful thinking. Many merchants are struggling these days and affiliate marketers are getting the boot as a result. Fair? Read more »
The Wrong Way To Promote Affiliate Products On Your Blog
Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to make money on your blog. You put a lot of time to research and write your blog posts, so the last thing you want to do is look for a job to supplement your income just because you are not monetizing your blog. Affiliate programs provide you with a great opportunity to provide value to your readers and make some money on your blog as well [the key here being providing value to your audience]. Just like anything in life, where there is an opportunity, there are pitfalls. You can’t just expect to post affiliate links to your blog and expect people to use them to earn your money. Your audience is not interested in how much money you are going to make. Your visitors are more concerned with what you have to say and what value you can provide them with. It’s not about you. It’s about them!
Affiliate Marketing Mistakes for Bloggers
It’s so easy to get carried away when you are making money from affiliate marketing. Maybe you are just struggling to make your monthly income goals. Maybe you need money to start that new project. It’s so easy to be tempted to push products that maybe are not that great but earn you nice commission checks. And your audience will certainly realize that you mean no harm, right? Wrong! Promoting products on your blog without testing them first is one of the biggest mistakes you can ever make in your blogging career. You may get lucky once in a while but if you promote a disastrous product, you are going to lose all your credibility with your audience. And don’t start promoting products that don’t provide any value to your readers. Your audience will see through you and leave you in a blink of an eye.
Sometimes you have the best interest of your audience in mind but you just make a bad move with good intentions. Whatever the case, it’s better to be honest with your audience and let them know what you are up to. Your audience will appreciate your honesty, and you may even earn more trust. What you don’t want to do is make these 5 mistakes:
- Promote useless products: you should always consider what your audience may deem useful and try to promote those products. You should never promote a product just because you are out of blogging ideas or want to make some quick cash.
- Promote untested products: don’t ever promote a product that you have not tested. Some top marketers have had to apologize just days after promoting a product they hadn’t tested. You won’t look good if you have to apologize for such a big mistake.
- Try to keep manufacturers happy at all costs: sometimes a manufacturer may send you a product to test. You may even get to keep the product for yourself. That doesn’t mean you should go easy on them. Your audience is not stupid. It will figure out what you are up to if you keep writing rosy reviews for all kinds of products on your blog. If a product is terrible, don’t hesitate to talk about its flaws.
- Be Sneaky: don’t be sneaky. I have seen marketers who promote affiliate products and get a lot of clicks by telling their readers that their lives will be over unless they click. I personally rather put all the facts on the table and let my readers decide whether they want to take advantage.
- Promote too many products: you want to make some money. Who doesn’t? But if you have too many affiliate products on your site, you are essentially not doing your blog justice. Don’t forget that variety is what keeps your readers interested in coming back for more. Besides, you don’t want to give you audience the indication that you are in it for the wrong reasons.
Ultimately, you should be more concerned about providing value than making quick cash when it comes to blogging. Once you build your traffic up by providing solid content on a consistent basis, you are going to make money one way or another. Don’t sacrifice your credibility and earned trust by getting greedy.
How To Use Affiliate Marketing To Fund Your Blogging Business
Blogging about your passion is fun thing to do. There is no doubt about it. But at some point you need to find a way to monetize your blog. You can always use Adsense, but I personally find it to be unprofessional. In fact, most top bloggers do not use Adsense on their authority sites. It just looks cheap and brings down your blog a notch lower. I have personally had a lot of success with affiliate marketing, and I know a lot of other folks in the industry are using the same channel to raise funds for their businesses.
Affiliate marketing is very lucrative to bloggers as it requires no inventory, and you can earn commissions on the items that are being sold in your niche and beyond. If you are in the blogging niche, you can sell blogging books, blogging tools, premium blog subscriptions, and even blogging conferences. In addition, you can go beyond this by selling things that are somewhat related to your niche but are not specifically made for the folks that are interested in your niche.
Choose the right offer to promote
If you get to promote the right offer on your blog, you can achieve immense success and make a lot of money in the process. I personally go after items that are a necessity for the folks who are visiting my blog. In addition, I avoid promoting products that cost a fortune on my blog (you should leave that to your list). This is a volume-based strategy. You can also take a commission-based strategy and promote super-expensive products. Both of these strategies work, but it takes work to make them work.
It is all about conversion
you should always test multiple offers on your blog to find out which one works the best. That’s why we have split testing folks. You are working hard on your blog, and you deserve to get paid for your efforts. But if you promote a product that comes with a sales-page that scares your leads away, then you probably should not promote that product. It does not matter how much conversion an affiliate program pays per sale or how related the product is to your niche. If you can’t convert, you don’t get paid.
Where to look for affiliate offers
You can always look for affiliate programs on sites such as LinkShare, CJ, or ClickBank. But there is a sneaky way to find out what offers are working for other affiliates in your niche. You can check sites such as Squidoo and E-zinearticles to see if anyone is writing reviews about products in your niche. If someone is going through the effort of putting up a review on these sites, the chances are the product is worth a look. If your niche is broad enough, the chances are you are not going to have a whole lot of trouble finding a product to promote.
At the end of the day, your focus should be conversion and not commission. You should test everything that you can (headers, content, links, colors,…). It is tough work. But once you start converting, you are going to find that extra energy to go for more. Now that’s the beauty of running a business on the Internet.
