Three Common Affiliate Marketing Errors to Avoid

This tip brought to you by our Entrepreneur Guru Carma Spence-Pothitt on Feb 18, 2010

O.K. So you have your affiliate marketing website set up. You're getting a lot of traffic to the site, too. But, for some reason, you're not getting all that many sales. Why?

It could be that you're making one of these three very common affiliate marketing mistakes.

You Are Not Pre-Selling

Are you trying to sell the affiliate product? That's not your job, so stop it.

This may sound counter intuitive, but stay with me a moment here. Think of it this way. A visitor comes to your site and reads your sales pitch. She clicks on your affiliate link only to find another sales pitch. Likely as not, she will just lost interest.

To avoid this common error, you need to make sure your website is pre-selling the affiliate product. Remember, your job as an affiliate marketer is to send people to the sales page -- not sell the product. That way you should be able to keep the attention of your visitors so that they go from being a visitor to your site to a customer of the merchant site -- rather than just a visitor to all sites selling the product!

Over-Advertising

There used to be this Kinney Shoes at my local mall that I avoided like the plague. Why? Because you couldn't walk by -- and heaven forbid if you even glanced in the store -- without this one salesperson practically jumping out at you and trying to sell you some shoes. If your website is covered in advertising, with not content, then your website is just like this salesperson. Yes, of course your affiliate website is there to sell affiliate products, but you need to be a bit more subtle.

Surveys and empirical evidence show that visitors to website want to leave the website with the feeling that they have learned something new -- they don't want to feel like they have just wasted their time. If you have all advertising and no content, this is exactly the feeling you will be leaving them with.

While you may well find that you are still making sales using this affiliate marketing strategy, the simple fact of the matter is that you are not maximizing the profits you could be making if you just took a little bit of time to replace some of the space currently taken up with advertising on your site with some powerful and useful content.

You should find that having a healthy mix between content and advertising helps you to get much higher search engine results, which itself should direct more traffic to your website.

Not Knowing and Understanding Your Niche

If you were an Eskimo living on a sheet of ice, would you buy a freezer? Although freezers have their uses, they probably won't be useful to an Eskimo living in the Arctic. What I'm getting at here is that you need to know who you are selling to and what kinds of products they are most likely to buy. If your niche is work at home moms, you'll probably not going to have much luck selling them hunting accessories. But you might have great success selling them things that will help them better manage raising children while working at home.