I'd like to share with you the 3 fatal affiliate marketing mistakes what you never should do!
1. Don�t send your prospects directly to an affiliate website
Don�t send your prospect directly to the website without offering any free benefit to the visitor because there is a possibility that the consumer will not like the product and close the website without even buying a single product. Now you have lost this consumer forever because it is obvious that the next time he will choose to visit another site.
If you want your visitors to visit the website again and again, offer them some kind of free benefit like free gifts, software or e-books. You can send them a free newsletter or weekly horoscope at their email address. If you are successful in grabbing their email address, then you can send them advertisements on their email address on a regular basis too.
2. Don�t Create a Website Full of affiliate links, flashy banners and Ads
If your website is full of affiliate links, lots of flashy banners and other advertisements then your visitor may become confused and he may simply leave your website. People like to see the clear and easy to understand websites. Just put an honest product review to get the visitor�s attention. Try to put text ads instead of flashy and graphical ads. Researches have proved that text links are more successful than flashy banners. People like to see what they want and not the fancy graphics. Also the load time of simple websites is much faster in comparison to full graphics, loaded websites. People like to visit the sites that opens in seconds. So be simple and be focused.
3. Commission theft
Commission theft is one of the biggest drawbacks in this field. Although, it is not possible to eliminate it completely, you can use some tricks to minimize it. Cloaking and redirecting of affiliate links are the options for you in this situation.
Usually the affiliate links contain the affiliate id of affiliates at the end of merchant website�s URL. An example is:
http://www.website.com?aff_id=your_affiliate_id
This is not a good style. Any person can easily drop your �aff_id� part from the above link and can visit the merchant website to make sales. In this case the sales are made but you are not credited. The solution of this problem is �cloaking�. After cloaking your affiliate link will be like:
http://www.website.com/affiliate_site
I hope it will help you avoid these mistakes and will you able to build a successful affiliate marketing business.
To your success,
Martin