Why So Many Affiliate Marketing Beginners Crash and Burn

How Everybody and Their Mom Does Affiliate Marketing (Almost)

While many attempt to fight the affiliate marketing war thru banners, the truth is that its a battle that’s won almost exclusively thru email.  Why? B/c at best if you are building a general interest or authority blog, you’re only going to get perhaps 10 to 20 percent of your traffic to be targeted.

Why Banners Don’t Work for Affiliate Marketers

The rest is so general that they won’t even notice your lil’ banners.  Plus, the louder marketers get the better the target audience gets at tuning mass marketing type messages out.

This means your click thru rate will be really low.  For example, let’s say on your blog you talk about your hobbies, family, and your philosophy on life, and oh by the way….your niche.

Click Thru Rates

You might be lucky to have a click thru ratio of 0.04%.  That means that out of every 100 visitors to your blog 0.4 of them might click your banners…This means that to increase your chances of getting one click you’d really need 300 visitors.  i.e. 300 visitors x 0.004 click thru rate = 1.2 people clicking your banner.

Then out of the 1.2% clicking your banner let’s say that 3 percent like it enough to take action, right?  With a click thru ratio of 0.04% you’d need 10,000 visitors to get 40 clicks.  And if you were fortunate to have 3% of the people that click the ads actually buy the affiliate product then for every 40 ad clicks you could see 1 new affiliate sale.  Does this sound familiar folks?

If it doesn’t think about it for a minute…If you’ve had your banners up for over a month and haven’t gotten any sales…Isn’t it fair to say that this is probably at play?

Affiliate Marketing  - A Better Way

Alright, so I may not be the king of affiliate marketing but one thing’s for sure my odds look a lot better because I’m building a list.  Put it like this…My primary offer has been the profits theme and since I’ve put the offer up on my site which has probably been around four months I’ve probably gotten close to ten affiliate transactions to hit my paypal account.

Again, not breaking the bank but pay attention though…here’s what I’m getting at.  I haven’t worked as hard as the person with the ads on their site to generate those transactions.

Landing Pages

I’ve got a couple of landing pages on my site that talk about the benefits of using the profits theme – which by the way the Profits Theme makes it super easy to put these sorts of sales pages together…(I set this up before I really understood sales funnels, guys…) and I’ve got my affiliate link at the end of my landing pages (or sales pages) with a sign up form to my email list.

The cool thing about having the sign up form at the end is that even if my visitors don’t buy from me today, they’re in my sales funnel.  Meaning that they’ll be getting periodic to regular emails from me talking about the benefits of the Profits Theme or XYZ product.  So chances are that at some point they’ll end up buying something from me.

Mailing Lists

If on the other hand, I was just relying on someone to click a banner to get paid…even if I did get them to my site to see the banner, once they leave I have no way of trying to sell them again.  Whereas with the sales page and sales funnel method I’ll get plenty chances to go to the free throw line.

One final word before I wrap this one up…ok, actually two

This was part two of my Affiliate Marketing Basics for Beginners Series.  For Part Three (Traffic Generation for Affiliate Marketing Beginners) stay tuned.

Yeah baby!  That’s how we do round’ these parts…

Otherwise Happy New Year!  May 2012 bring more peace, joy, and prosperity into your life than ever! I’m out!