Flushing Cash Down the Toilet: Mistakes Made & Lessons Learned in Affiliate Marketing
Flushing Cash Down the Toilet: Mistakes Made & Lessons Learned in Affiliate Marketing
Below I will discuss some of the mistakes I have made and the lessons I have learned when beginning from scratch in affiliate marketing.
I had been making money online blogging and selling advertising for awhile and while I was pleased with the results I found that I had to work harder and harder to increase my earnings and I very quickly saw a plateau where it would be difficult to make the kind of full time money I wanted to through blogging alone. I kept hearing about Affiliate Marketing but I really had no idea what it was.
I went through the typical research phases reading every Affiliate Marketing blog available out there to gain as much information as possible. The overwhelming message is that Affiliate Marketing is hard and you really just have to learn in the school of hard knocks making mistakes and learning from them along the way.
I told myself I was willing to take a chance and so I did. The first step however proved very frustrating. I applied to every major Affiliate Network I could. I was accepted in Cj.com, ClickBank, HydraNetwork, Pepperjam Network, NeverblueAds, and eventually AzoogleAds. The rest of them flat out rejected me for some reason and I found it difficult to have my calls returned.
Mistake #1: I tried electronic products with the highest payouts first. I quickly flushed a large amount of money down the toilet trying electronic products with high payouts. The problem is that many of these are not quality products and the conversion rate is so low that I had 0 conversions after 500 clicks or more.
What I Learned: Unless electronic products are highly targeted and the company very well known it can be difficult to profit from this. You also need to anticipate a very low conversion rate like 2% to .02%.
Mistake #2: I then asked my affiliate managers for advice and blindly followed it without evaluating the offers for myself. This led me to quickly blow what I consider a large amount of money in MSN, Yahoo, and Google pay per click. Again I got 0 conversions.
What I Learned: Unfortunately your Affiliate Managers are not always going to give you the best advice. The only real way to evaluate an offer is to look at the network performance and then try out the offer for yourself on a smaller scale.
Mistake #3: Not tracking my individual keywords. After loosing money on many many offers I finally found one that converted. The problem was that I did not know which of my keywords were converting because I had not setup tracking on individual keywords. I still lost money on this offer and I wasted time determining what keywords actually converted.
What I Learned: Always setup keyword tracking as soon as you determine an offer is converting on an individual keyword basis. This will take your campaign into the profitable black area instead of just loosing money.
I made a ton more mistakes and learned even more. The point is to make sure you are learning and to not give up if you want to be successful with Affiliate Marketing.
This article was written by WebSiteSB. You can read more on our Popular Posts section.