Monday, September 28, 2009

Affiliate Mistakes to Avoid and Increase Your Sales

By Lewis Johnson

Affiliate Marketing is one of the most profitable ways to make money from home and affiliate programs provide everyone who has internet access a chance to make a living on the internet. Affiliate programs are usually free or very cheap to join, easy to get started and usually pay commissions on a routine basis, so more and more people are turning to affiliate marketing as a means to start a home based business.

Nonetheless, there are a few mistakes affiliate marketers tend to make that hurts their business tremendously. Avoiding some of these frequent mistakes made by affiliate marketers should quickly and easily boost your chances of making sales and increase your affiliate commissions. Here are five of the top aberrations made by affiliate marketers:

1) Not researching the affiliate program before your commence promoting it

It really is awesome just how many affiliates snatch the first affiliate program that comes there way or signup simply because it has a high commission rate or promote it just because it's popular and every other marketer is promoting it.

If the program does not compliment the overall theme of landing page, you will find it difficult to convince your visitors and subscribers to purchase the product. Why would they want it if it does not have anything to do with the visitors you are targeting?

2) Not using your signature file correctly

Many affiliates add a signature file to all of their out-going email messages and forum posts but they do not do it correctly. Twenty lines of text full of links to a bunch of affiliate products is not considered a good signature file! Main Entry: actually, it can very easily be considered spam. Try keeping your signature file under five lines with an attention grabbing or compelling first line and don't overdo it on the product links.

3) Not writing your own ad copy

It's a really bad thing to see when you open your email and the advertisement is the same as from ten different marketers: or the same advertisement is on their websites. How much real value will your message have when it arrives and the reader is seeing it for the tenth time?

Take the time to fine-tune the ad to suit your target audience and subscribers before sending it out. Individualize it to make the ad your own so it doesn't even seem like an advertisement anymore.

4) Buy your own domain name and hosting account Even newbie internet users can tell a free hosted site when they see one. This would be very unprofessional and suggests to your visitors that you haven't made any money online and probably don't know what you're doing.

If you haven't even taken the small step towards setting up your on line business properly then how can your visitors have confidence in you? Less than $10 a year for a domain name at Go Daddy.com and maybe $5 per month for a small hosting account won't break your bank account. In fact, it will apparently to add to your account in the long run.

5) Not gathering your leads before you send your prospects on to the affiliate product site can be a costly mistake. If you spend your time and money marketing to get someone to click on one of your affiliate links then they leave the product site without purchasing, what have you gained? Nothing!

You have just lost all the money and effort it took to get that one click-through in the first place. Set up a landing page so you can seize your lead's email address before you send them on to the product site. That way if they don't buy anything you can follow up with them later and try again (and again and again and again).

This can be costly! Now that you know these 5 affiliate mistakes to avoid you should be able to make more sales and increase your affiliate revenue by a large amount. So get out there and become the super

Internet marketer you always knew you could be! - 16890

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