5 Common Affiliate Marketing Struggles and How to Overcome Them

by
Stefan V.

Affiliate Marketing Has Its Struggles

While product owners often have successful sales strategies in place like using armies of affiliate to sell for them, affiliate marketers themselves often reap little, if any, rewards. Why? There are many main issues that affiliate marketers struggle with while trying to promote their affiliate products and land sales. Several main issues are listed below, in no particular order of preference. Then after the list of issues, discover how to overcome them quickly and easily.

5 Common Affiliate Marketing Struggles

Here are five common affiliate marketing struggles.

1. Lack of tech skills for Internet marketing can cause many an affiliate marketer to stumble. Many affiliate marketers lack much needed tech skills in today’s web-based world. They struggle with setting up leads capture pages, aka squeeze pages, setting up autoresponders, blogs, social media channels and other Internet marketing methods.
2. Affiliate commissions can be very small and can take months to reach the marketer, long after promotional expenses are used for all the hard work of generating leads, clicks and sales.
3. Communication can break down. Language barriers can be a problem. Consider the Tower of Babel and it doesn’t take much to imagine how difficult it is to really get a point across in another language that you wish to market in.
   And too many affiliates try to market something that they have either never purchased and even used before. They are trying to sell something that are not experienced with. A fine example is an affiliate who is new to working from home, yet wants to promote a get-rich-fast, work-from home scheme. If the affiliate has made it work, yes, by all means he should promote it. However, if the affiliate has never even earned any money from it, it’s not wise for him to promote the program until financial results are solid.
4. Know what you are trying to market, who your target audience is and what you are trying to get them to do (i.e. you need sales experience, too). Go back to #2 above where the affiliate marketer needs to thoroughly understand the product in order to discuss its features and benefits. Focusing on a dynamic two-step offer of a main feature and benefit plus a call to action at the end of each marketing piece is key with affiliate marketing promotions. The more specific the content and call to action, the better. In other words if you want someone to click and subscribe to your online form, tell them to do just that – and tell them why they should (i.e. tell them what’s in it for them.)
5. Support from the product owner / main seller is important. Too many affiliate marketers are left in the dark with regards to product support and affiliate marketing tools. All too often an affiliate marketer may get a coded link and a banner or other 1-time marketing piece, and that’s it. Then they are left on their own to figure out the best ways to market the product, how to make their own banners, squeeze pages and so on, to attract leads, clicks, and sales.

How to Overcome Them

If you want to overcome these struggles, keep these 7 points in mind.

1. focus on what you know
2. only market products you’ve used and understand well
3. start with something that will be highly attractive to your audience
4. choose a product that easy to communicate to readers in any language
5. have a clear call to action
6. put your offer where people can find it easily
7. let that first affiliate product start earning before you try a second one

Keep your eyes on offering value to your audience and making it easy to buy from you and you’ll find your affiliate experience goes more smoothly.