There is one big pitfall to affiliate marketing and all other pitfalls begin with this one big pitfall. I saw it myself recently when a local woman asked me for advice. I agreed to drop over and visit her and see what I could do to help her.
Well, she says, the guy who signed me up makes thousands every month and only works at this in the evening. I have the whole day to concentrate on it. But I’ve been at this a month and the only sale I made was to my sister.
She went on to explain that she had been laid off work and their only child had gone off to university and she had lots of free time. She did not want to have to go back to work but university was expensive so she was in a big hurry to make money and only had six more weeks before her savings ran out. What she wanted me to tell her was which affiliate program she should try next because she had obviously made a mistake choosing this one.
So? This is fine and dandy. But where’s the pitfall? It sounds like a reasonable question you say because this is just what always happens to you. You sign up and pay your fees and then wait for the money to come in.
The big pitfall that underlies all other pitfalls in affiliate marketing is not having a plan. You need to set up your affiliate program and then begin working your marketing plan and wait for the business to build slowly but steadily.
She had been in the affiliate marketing program for a month and expected to see money rolling in immediately. She actually said that she had anticipated making $1,000 her first month and she had made nothing other than the percentage on the sale to her sister. And she would not even get that until she sold more because the payout only came when she reached a commission figure of $100.
But what had she done to tell the world about the wonderful product she was selling? Just about nothing. She had business cards printed up and she emailed her friends and asked them to tell their friends about it. Oh, and she had posted on a forum about how she knew about this great product but no one replied to her. Lately she had been doing research to find a better affiliate program.
Trickling out of this pitfall is the other main pitfall which is wasting time doing the wrong thing which leads to spending time looking for another better affiliate program without learning what went wrong with the first program. Focus on the process, not the program and you will make a killing in any good affiliate program you can find.
You can run a dozen affiliate programs at the same time but you need to build up your target market list and create some traffic to your affiliate site. If you had the best affiliate program in the world and relied on emailing your friends about it, how much do you think you would make?
If you spend six hours a day reading about affiliate programs and searching the internet for a better affiliate program while waiting passively for your poor neglected first affiliate program to bring in the bucks, you are not working. You are wasting time. That is like putting a pot of water on the stove and not turning the stove on and then grumbling because the water is not hot and wondering if you used a different pot if it would help.
