The Challenge of Getting Started on Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a real challenge. Lots of first timers that give it a try usually give up quickly as learning the secrets of the trade takes time. Reading up on one Taiwan based blogger sharing his affiliate frustrations (and again here), I started writing a comment on his blog, but after realizing this is going to be a bit long and might help others, then I figured I better post this here.

So, following are some of my quick thoughts and suggestions on making first steps on online affiliate marketing.

I can understand the frustration, but ofcourse you already know that an affiliate business is tough to get started on. I had a look at one of the sample sites you set up and there are quite a few things you can improve on. One of the basic rules of the affiliate business is that the landing page should be as simple and clear as possible with a single visible clickable action. There are endless examples out there on how to set one up, but clearly you need to strip down the landing page and make some major changes in how you approach it. The affiliate site that you set up is more like a niche/brand blog rather than a call for action. Too many places to run around, too much text, too many confusing messages to the visitor, it's easy to get lost and give up.

Next thing you might want to consider, and I can't emphasize this enough, is tracking visitors on-site actions and performing ongoing A/B testing. You need to know what your visitors are doing on the affiliate landing page and what might improve conversion rates to get them to perform the needed action. Get your hands dirty with A/B testing to experiment with different colors, fonts, designs and you'll see immediate results in conversation rates and increased sales. It might be difficult to believe but simple things like the size, the title and the location of your "call for action button" could bring up conversion rates by huge numbers. One interesting case I can recall had to do with a friend using Hebrew changing the phrasing from a single gender male implied structure to plural gender-less call for action.

Driving quality traffic is difficult, but it usually involves some sort of investment in bringing in the already interested audiences through means of Adwords, Facebook and the likes. That does mean putting in money in order to generate money and finding out the usually long tail keywords that would cost you less but would bring you more sales. That's an art, and this is where the big players outperform newbies and win the competition over the lucrative niches. I suggest getting close to someone that knows the trade and getting a more personal insights on what this process looks like.

It is a challenge and I hope that helps a little with giving you direction on what to look for. It takes time and commitment to get past the frustrating stage. Good luck.