Avoiding the Pitfalls of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing, as we all know, can be a lucrative addition to your online business. Otherwise, not many people would be doing it. It is, however, not without its potential downfalls. Let’s look at some of these.

To begin with, let’s get a clear idea of what Affilate Marketing is. Essentially, it’s the promotion of someone else’s product. There are several ways to make money off of this. First, you can get a percentage of sales commission from your Affiliate. This is dependent on actually making a sale from your affiliate link, and it can be negated if the customer refunds within the given time period. Compared to pay per click commissions, though, the pay off per sale is huge.

Secondly, you can get a pay per click or pay per impression commission. That is, you make a few cents every time a person clicks your link. This has the advantage of not being dependent on sales, and you don’t have to give it back if a lead gets a refund. However, in terms of looking at hundreds of clicks at a few cents a piece, it can make it hard to track your commissions.

With that in mind, it seems like a “can’t lose” situation; that you have everything to gain and nothing to lose. However, there are other considerations in Affiliate Marketing that CAN actually make you lose business on your own website.

One major issue is that if you affiliate indiscriminately, as you may if you get affiliates from an affiliate list website, you might get embarrassing or inappropriate affiliate links.

As an example, let’s say you sell computer components online. Do you think that your business would benefit from having affiliate links to dating or webcam chat sites? In this case, probably not. However, if your business isn’t dependent on having a professional image, it probably wouldn’t hurt anything.

An even worse problem can arise by indiscriminate affiliation. You could find yourself advertising for your competition! This may sound like a ridiculous proposal, but the fact that it has happened makes it bear mentioning.

An obvious solution to these problems is to be picky about who you affiliate with. This may not be necessarily possible if you go to an affiliate list site to find affiliates. To begin with, you can be picky about which affiliate list page you use.

You also don’t want to get too many affiliate links on one page, especially if it’s your landing page. This can confuse the viewer, and it may cause them to not move on to your money page. It can obscure your message, and it also provides several avenues of “escape” from your otherwise finely crafted squeeze page.

Another way of avoiding this problem is to do it the old fashioned way. That is, build relationships with other online business people. Go to forums, attend seminars, make yourself a virtual socialite among your peers. Besides, humans are, after all, social animals, right?