Understanding Affiliate Marketing To Succeed At It

On the surface, affiliate marketing looks like a very simple concept. You find a product for sale and you recommend it to others who might buy it. In return, you get a percentage of the sale as a commission because you’re associated with it. It’s so simple.

Just like how it is with insurance agents, door to door salesmen and real estate brokers. Affiliate marketing is all about sales and commissions.

But here’s something you should know – simple and easy are two different things.

Trust

When you’re selling online, in most cases, you are not face-to-face with the prospect. The human element has been removed from the equation. Visitors to your site can leave with a click of the mouse.

Someone who doesn’t like your email can delete it and unsubscribe in seconds. Selling online while highly profitable is a slightly different ballgame.

For starters, people come online looking for information or to be entertained. In other words, they’re looking for ‘infotainment’… and even if you’re in a niche like gardening, golf or woodworking, the same rule applies.

Your content not only needs to help the reader, but it must hold their attention… and guess what? Social media sites, instant notifications, and a short attention span are all waiting to rob you of that sale.

Door to door salesmen never had it this tough. There is much more rejection online. The only difference is that it’s not so obvious.

So, always make your content relevant, entertaining and useful. The goal is to get the reader to trust you.

Use whatever it takes from infographics to videos to pictures of the product, etc. to remove all mental obstacles from the buyers’ minds and show how useful the product can be for solving their problems… and be subtle about it.

Traffic

The next thing you should know is that unlike real-life sales where the prospect comes to your store or you can go knocking on doors prospecting when it comes to online marketing, things are a little different.

Building a website alone doesn’t automatically mean that you’ll get floods of traffic. You may not get any for years. To sell online, you need to go and GET traffic. It’s all about ‘getting’ and not sitting around waiting.

You’ll need to drive traffic on your own by using free or paid methods. So, you must learn a few traffic generation techniques and take action.

Tracking

When running an online business, you must track your results.

Does your site have visitors? Do your products convert? Where is most of your traffic coming from?

Are your emails being opened? Which pages on your site see the most traffic? Which ads are performing well and which need to be shut down?

As you can, there are many variables involved and by tracking your results, you’ll know where to multiply your efforts and scale-up… and where your efforts are yielding no fruit.

You’ll also know where you’re not performing as well as you should and be able to remedy the problem. You’ll never know this if you don’t track.

So, remember the 3 T’s of affiliate marketing. Trust, traffic, and tracking.

If you follow these T’s to a T, you’ll succeed at affiliate marketing in record time.