Why Most Af­fil­i­ate Mar­keters Fail

From Willie Craw­ford.

Many peo­ple com­ing on­line and de­cid­ing to sell af­fil­i­ate prod­ucts never sell a sin­gle prod­uct. The rea­son is glar­ingly ob­vi­ous, and it’s not the un­for­tu­nate af­fil­i­ate mar­keter’s fault.

Think about any job that you’ve ever held in the of­fline world. What hap­pened? You were hired and told when to re­port for work.

When you showed up for work you were en­tered into train­ing. De­pend­ing upon the job, you spent weeks, some­times even months, with a trainer guid­ing you and look­ing over your shoulder.

Com­pare that with your typ­i­cal af­fil­i­ate pro­gram that the com­plete new­bie can join.

You fill out an af­fil­i­ate reg­is­tra­tion form and are handed an af­fil­i­ate link. With some af­fil­i­ate pro­grams you are also di­rected to an af­fil­i­ate re­source center.

With a few of the bet­ter af­fil­i­ate pro­grams, you are also di­rected to some af­fil­i­ate train­ing videos. The af­fil­i­ate train­ing videos are the ex­cep­tion rather than the rule.

Af­fil­i­ate mar­keters are ba­si­cally left to fig­ure out what works all on their own.

It’s re­ally not much bet­ter for new peo­ple com­ing on­line who de­cide to launch their own product.

They come on­line and read over and over again that you re­ally need you own prod­uct. So they de­cide to cre­ate one, per­haps putting it on Click­bank, or a some­what bet­ter op­tion - de­cide to use the Rapid Ac­tion Prof­its script.

These new prod­uct own­ers un­der­stand that they need af­fil­i­ates, so they put a link to an af­fil­i­ate signup page some­where on their site. They of­ten stick this af­fil­i­ate pro­gram signup link in the worse pos­si­ble place - right on their salespage where it dis­tracts buy­ing customers. 

As a side-note, a bet­ter place to put your af­fil­i­ate signup in­vi­ta­tion is on your down­load page, or you can tell your new cus­tomers about your af­fil­i­ate pro­gram in a fol­low-up email. What bet­ter per­son to re­cruit as an af­fil­i­ate than a sat­is­fied cus­tomer who ac­tu­ally knows your product?

These new prod­uct own­ers sign up af­fil­i­ates, give them their af­fil­i­ate links (and a few tools) and then wait for the or­ders to come flood­ing in.

When the or­ders don’t come surg­ing in, the new prod­uct own won­ders what he did wrong, and con­cludes that af­fil­i­ate pro­grams re­ally don’t work.

The prob­lem in both of the above cases is sim­ply a lack of ad­e­quate train­ing for af­fil­i­ates in what works in pro­mot­ing af­fil­i­ate products.

The sad part is that there is lots of in­for­ma­tion avail­able on what has proven to work for top pro­duc­ing af­fil­i­ates. I, as a su­per af­fil­i­ate, have writ­ten over 1300 ar­ti­cle on the topic of ecom­merce. Many of those ar­ti­cles out­line tech­niques that work flaw­lessly for me.

For the prod­uct owner or af­fil­i­ate pro­gram op­er­a­tor, there are en­tire af­fil­i­ate train­ing pro­grams in a box. One that I looked at re­cently in­cluded 52 weekly au­tore­spon­der train­ing ses­sions. It even in­cluded video lessons to SHOW the strug­gling af­fil­i­ate how to do many things.

Each of the weekly lessons in that „af­fil­i­ate train­ing pro­gram in a box” taught a skill that the as­pir­ing af­fil­i­ate mar­keter needs to understand.

If you are an af­fil­i­ate pro­gram owner and wants to check out that „af­fil­i­ate train­ing pro­gram in a box” it’s at: https://WillieCrawford.com/TrainYourAffiliates/

Sea­soned mar­keters and copy­writ­ers un­der­stand that mar­ket­ing is not guess­ing. It’s test­ing un­til you dis­cover what works, and then USING those things proven to work.

Sea­soned mar­keters and copy­writ­ers un­der­stand that they are of­ten WRONG as far as what they think will work. Only the mar­ket de­cides what will work. That’s why they don’t ex­per­i­ment, but in­stead stick with the „tried and true.”

If you are a new (or un­suc­cess­ful) af­fil­i­ate mar­keter, your so­lu­tion is sim­ple - learn and stick with what’s al­ready proven to work.

If you are a prod­uct owner with an af­fil­i­ate pro­gram that’s NOT pro­duc­ing, your so­lu­tion is sim­ple - train your affiliates.

When you train your af­fil­i­ate, they will ex­pe­ri­ence suc­cess sell­ing your prod­ucts, and hav­ing fi­nally fig­ured it out, will dou­ble their ef­forts in pro­mot­ing your products.

Like any other pay­ing job in the world, af­fil­i­ate mar­ket­ing does re­quire train­ing. Make sure that you’re not over­look­ing this crit­i­cal el­e­ment of the on­line mar­ket­ing puzzle!

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Willie Craw­ford is a lead­ing In­ter­net mar­ket­ing and traf­fic gen­er­a­tion ex­pert. His fa­vorite method for gen­er­at­ing free web­site traf­fic is dis­trib­ut­ing videos, au­dios, ar­ti­cles and press re­leases us­ing the au­to­mated dis­tri­b­u­tion ser­vice at https://ibmm.com/epbt

To help you suc­ceed Willie has cre­ated The In­ter­net Mar­ket­ing In­ner Cir­cle, a mem­ber­ship site where he fre­quently brain­storms so­lu­tions to prob­lems such as those dis­cussed in this ar­ti­cle. Join that dis­cus­sion for your suc­cess at TheIn­ter­net­Mar­ketingIn­ner­cir­cle.