5 Problems That Beginners Face With Affiliate Marketing

By Jon Allo  

Affiliate marketing for beginners can sometimes be a bit too much to handle. Affiliate marketing is essentially being like a commission paid salesperson where you sell products and services online for other businesses. Your job is to drive customer traffic to the business' sales page and encourage them to buy the products or services on offer. The procedure is fairly simple but there are a number of factors to consider when you begin.

1. Finding The Best Niche

There are affiliate marketing programs in practically every niche you can think of. Although this is good from a choice perspective, if you want to be successful with affiliate marketing you have to select a niche that you have an understanding of, has a large and straightforward way to reach the target market and has top quality products and services that the target audience will want to buy. The top 3 niches for affiliate marketing programs are wealth, health and relationships.

2. Choosing The Best Programs

You need to choose the programs that genuinely deliver top quality both via commissions, and by way of being a high value, high demand product for your customer. The best affiliate marketing programs will have a range of products and services that deliver several revenue channels, such as income from basic one-off direct sales, recurring income and, if possible, high ticket income products.

3. Choosing The Best Products

A skilled affiliate marketer understands his or her market and can pick products to promote that they know will sell well. This aspect of affiliate marketing for beginners is not so simple. If you're selling physical products have a look at websites like Amazon (Best Sellers area), or pulse.eBay.com to quickly determine what is currently in demand. If you're selling digital products, take a look at cbtrends.com to see the performance history of any product listed in the ClickBank Marketplace.

4. Promoting The Ideal Amount Of Products

As a basic general guideline, you should promote no more than 10 affiliate products within each niche that you are working in. Don't just promote one or two low value products with no add-ons or up-sells. If you do, your customers are not given enough alternatives to pick from and if a client does buy, you won't make much money. On the flip side, if you promote too many products your customers (as well as you) will get too confused to make any decision.

5. Traffic, Traffic, Traffic

As an affiliate your success will be influenced by the volume of customer traffic you drive towards your website and sales pages. It's a primary skill which you need to develop on an ongoing basis. Affiliate marketing involves using paid (which can be very expensive if not done correctly and non paid methods to bring in customer traffic. Never stop learning about new traffic generation techniques and strategies.

Regardless of your age, education or technical skills there are no specific requirements for being successful with affiliate marketing. However you will be more successful with a solid business model to work from, clear direction, training and support.

Article Source:   Ezine Articles expert Jon Allo