One Vital Truth About Affliliate Marketing
October 8, 2009
Wikipedia does an excellent job of explaining what affiliate marketing is, but I will sum it up, let me explain. You build a website or blog and get commissions for driving traffic to buy the product or service you are offering on your site. You can offer as many products or services as you wish and duplicate your efforts buy building more websites or blogs and offering the same or other products.
IF only it was that simple. Build it and they will come? Don't think so. You have to write relevant content to attract the traffic, and traffic is your prospect, potential buyer, bottom line traffic = customer. The last thing a customer wants is to be sold, especially on the internet. Information highway wasn't just some cute phrase coined by VP Al Gore.
People come to the internet for relevant information on the subject they are searching for at that moment. If your website is just designed only to sell, your customer will click away faster then a heart beat. If your site is designed to offer relevant information on the subject that is being searched and targeted, by answering questions and finding possible solutions, you have a better then average chance for the customer clicking on a product or service you are offering. As you are offering a solution to the issues they need to have solved at that moment and giving them the information they seek.
So you build a site, have plenty of content that is relevant and solutions that may solve the customers issue. Okay great. Let's even take that a step further and say you have done all the SEO stuff to get ranked on the 1st pages of Google, Yahoo!, Bing and every other search engine in existence. SEO is an entirely different blog post!
Life is good and you are making a nice income off your little site, let's say $3,000 a month. But then the product or service you are promoting changes or goes out of business or changes their affiliate rules or anything they want to do because it is their product or service, not yours. You are just the promoter getting a commissions. There lays one of the problems with being an affiliate marketer. You have no control over the product or service, not even the quality of the product or service. Does this happen with affiliate marketing? Yes. And your income drops while you scramble to resolve your issue by finding another vendor.
Now I am not bashing affiliate marketing many people do it I do it and you can make a decent income for just having a site that is answering questions and providing information with your content and providing solutions. The point is, don't have all our eggs in one basket when it comes to your income streams.
IF only it was that simple. Build it and they will come? Don't think so. You have to write relevant content to attract the traffic, and traffic is your prospect, potential buyer, bottom line traffic = customer. The last thing a customer wants is to be sold, especially on the internet. Information highway wasn't just some cute phrase coined by VP Al Gore.
People come to the internet for relevant information on the subject they are searching for at that moment. If your website is just designed only to sell, your customer will click away faster then a heart beat. If your site is designed to offer relevant information on the subject that is being searched and targeted, by answering questions and finding possible solutions, you have a better then average chance for the customer clicking on a product or service you are offering. As you are offering a solution to the issues they need to have solved at that moment and giving them the information they seek.
So you build a site, have plenty of content that is relevant and solutions that may solve the customers issue. Okay great. Let's even take that a step further and say you have done all the SEO stuff to get ranked on the 1st pages of Google, Yahoo!, Bing and every other search engine in existence. SEO is an entirely different blog post!
Life is good and you are making a nice income off your little site, let's say $3,000 a month. But then the product or service you are promoting changes or goes out of business or changes their affiliate rules or anything they want to do because it is their product or service, not yours. You are just the promoter getting a commissions. There lays one of the problems with being an affiliate marketer. You have no control over the product or service, not even the quality of the product or service. Does this happen with affiliate marketing? Yes. And your income drops while you scramble to resolve your issue by finding another vendor.
Now I am not bashing affiliate marketing many people do it I do it and you can make a decent income for just having a site that is answering questions and providing information with your content and providing solutions. The point is, don't have all our eggs in one basket when it comes to your income streams.
Posted by Desiree. Posted In : Affliate Marketing
