Avoid The Top Three Affiliate Marketing Fails – Part 1
‘Tis the season to make money. Everyone and their dog needs an extra buck during the holiday season and folks are turning, in droves, to affiliate marketing on the internet as their “get rich quick” solution. I wish I could snap my fingers and get everyone’s attention at once before I point out a few things to them… alas, this little article series will have to do.
There are some basic features that most failed affiliate marketers share. There are more than three, but a few issues seem to show up over and over again – and I’m not even a person who voluntarily works with affiliate marketers and I see this… so they merit some individual attention.
Affiliate Marketing Fail #1 – Lack of Research
This is an odd conundrum. Folks who are jumping on the affiliate bandwagons are often using shortcuts to get into business for themselves… I don’t mean to insult anyone but that act in itself is just a tad bit lazy. So expecting new affiliate marketers who are all hyped up on the latest “Amway” presentation to slow down for five minutes and actually do some real research is probably futile. But the sad fact is that if you don’t stop and think out your plan of action, you will royally screw yourself.
I have two real life incidents to illustrate how folks who get all caught up in the hype (emotion) of the next great thing have wasted time and money because they failed to engage the brain (logic) and actually plan their moves. In another article I wrote about a gentlman who planned to take the world by storm by selling lessons on how to use Google. You see, he had paid some ridiculous amount of money to take a class himself on how to use Google – you know, how to use all the advanced operands and so forth. He took notes and downloaded recordings and basically copied the entire course and decided to sell it himself, as well as have affiliates sell his course for him. He spent several thousand dollars having a company re-do all the instructional work as new Flash presentations. He then hired the same company to build him a new Flash-based web site. He could afford this because he only had to spend 4 cents per click to bid on “google” in Adwords – Google’s keyword estimator said so. He was going to make a killing because his advertising, and that of his affiliates, would be so cheap.
Not once had this guy ever bothered to actually type in “google” into Google’s search field and see what came up. You can imagine my reaction to this “killer PPC strategy.” It was pretty much, “Dude, you really think Google is about to let anyone advertise on their brand for 4 cents a click? Wake up.” At one point he actually bid up to $10 a click and his ads still never ran.
Now I’m not talking about some heavy duty, all-night research here – this is basic. Type in a search term and see who you compete against. It’s not hard. If you see NO ONE advertising in the paid ad space, there’s a reason. There is no such thing as the magic keyword that no one ever thought to bid on…
But what if there are advertisers?
My second example is an actual affiliate, who decided that he could make a fortune using PPC to push ads to his affiliate site, which is how it’s supposed to work, right? He bought a domain name, paid someone to build a site, and was in the process of collecting bid proposals for PPC work when I ran across his RFP… to build an Adwords campaign for electronic cigarettes.
Ok, yes, there are people advertising these things because they spring up faster than Google can squash them. But the plain fact is that it is against Adwords policy to advertise any cigarette product, electronic or not. They state it quite plainly in their editorial guidelines. The same thing happened with a site that sold organic herbs who decided to carry and advertise absinthe… great idea. Too bad it’s against policy. Google disables the ads and if you keep re-enabling them, Google will ban your account, plain and simple. If you want to set up another account and try again, good luck – have some spare credit cards all with separate billing addresses and knock yourself out.
In both those cases, a complete lack of familiarity with PPC guidelines cost these folks more money than they ever made, simply because they didn’t take the time to research the market, or ask an expert before jumping into their venture with both feet.
If your businesses success is predicated on PPC success, you owe it to yourself to either dig down and get the facts or hire a consultant for an hour and get their opinion of your plan… and you must have a plan.
Sorry, ouija has no special extra insight.
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i signed up with the Amazon Omakaze affiliate program. i am not yet earning from this affiliate program because my blog is still very new..,`
I defenitely have been guilty of lack of research. I think we all have and it COST!
Rapid Automated Income´s last blog ..Matt Benwell- A Scam Artist