There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make money with minimal effort, especially when that lazyness is not going to cause any prejudice to your customers. This is especially true of affiliate marketing, where you use the leverage of another person or company’s product to generate a profit. When you think about it, if you are an affiliate working 12 hours a day, there’s no point starting an online business since you don’t have time to spend your money on anything you like!
However, the very nature of affiliate marketing, i.e. promoting someone else’s product in exchange for a commission, is devastating the typical newbie internet marketer so bad that statistics show 97% of them fail to generate a pofit online. Why is that?
Or course, there are many marketers out there that obey to the basic fantasy of overnight fortune making and are not building a list, nor learning how to become a better marketer. But a good proportion of newbies are serious about their business and yet, they fail to make a living with it. Clearly, one can be serious and yet badly mistaken.
In my view, the number one factor for this massive fiasco is the idea that affiliate marketers can save themselves the trouble of building a webpage and focus on traffic, since their affiliate link will take their customers to a product sales page designed by the vendor.
Many people are affraid they don’t possess the technical skills to have their own website, or believe it’s not important to have one as an affiliate. There are several reasons why this is a terrible miskake:
- obviously, sales pages promoted by affiliates all look alike. Therefore, customers aren’t compelled to go to one instead of another, not to mention the odds are they will have seen the very same page as yours multiple times before seeing yours. This creates VERY poor odds of anyone buying or signing up through a non personalized sales page
- search engines hate web pages that don’t bring value to the internet community. Affiliate pages fit perfectly into that definition. In terms of search engine optmization, a standardized affiliate page is the worst one you can use. Two years ago, I personally suffered a ban from google indexing because of a NOT SUFFICIENTLY PERSONALIZED AFFILIATE PAGE, although I did bring some changes to it and set it up on my own domain!
- nowadays, the web is flooded with products and offers, so it’s foolish to believe that people will buy from your typical sales pitch rather than from a page that gives an honest opinion on the product you sell
- last but not least, affiliates promoting a standardized sales page are not building their list. This is the most devastating element of not having your own affiliate site. Lists are the heart of any successful ebusiness. Even people saying you don’t need one simply mean they will teach you how to build one… or are flat out lying. A prospect who doesn’t get the chance to signup to your newsletter is lost forever. Even if 1% of prospects actually get on your list, that 1% can mean a lot of money for you. With enough traffic, any business can work with 1% of prospect opting in. But you can do MUCH better than this.
Now for the good news if you don’t have you own site:
- it is easy and cheap to have a website and an autoresponder (autoresponders are the only way you can build a list)
- applying these simple tips increases the odds of finally making good money online dramatically
- I’m in the process of editing a series of videos that describes the process of building an affiliate page from A to Z, starting from picking up a product to generating traffic to your site.
Until then, work smart.
Cheers,
Damien