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5 Common Affiliate Marketing Struggles and How to Overcome Them

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Stefan V.

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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.

Author’s Bio:

Stefan V. is in Germany a financial expert and he combines the power of his knowledge into the online marketing business. He has done some trial and error until he found the best products, informations, strategies and monetizations. Be in touch and find more here Seven Figure Society

How SWOT Analysis Creates a Culture and Strategy of Fear or Opportunity

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Creating Opportunity

What SWOT is NOT

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I started writing about strategic deep thinking — the importance of finding more than one solution to any problem and realistically advancing by leveraging opportunity for years here at Successful-Blog.

As part of my research and discussion on the topic of strategy, it’s not unusual for me to ask someone their definition of strategy. Recently a conversation like that reminded me of a bad experience with the misuse of SWOT Analysis.

“SWOT Analysis is a powerful technique for understanding your Strengths and Weaknesses, and for looking at the Opportunities and Threats you face.” says James Manktelow

STRENGTHS
WEAKNESSES
OPPORTUNITIES
THREATS

SWOT IS a powerful tool for analysis.
Unfortunately, some folks who use SWOT dropped the word Analysis. They think of SWOT as strategy.

SWOT is not strategy. It’s analysis.

The Difference Between Strategy and Analysis

SWOT is first reconnaissance then analysis. Analysis is not strategy.

A SWOT analysis is the examination and interpretation of the elements that make up a tactical position in business. Analysis reviews and reports a single moment’s position.

Analysis underpins strategy.

Strategy is a realistic plan to leverage opportunity and strength (avoiding weakness and threats) to advance forward over time. Strategy changes as that position changes.

Some folks treat SWOT as what it’s not. They do the analysis and believe they’ve got a strategy. They identify strengths and weaknesses. They list threats and opportunities. Then they go off to execute on tactics to reach their goals, totally leaving out the strategy step. The thinking never went to the strategy level — because they thought they were there already.

Instead their corporate thought was stuck in the abyss of analysis with only passing thought to what came after that.

How SWOT Analysis Creates a Strategy of Fear or Opportunity

Most folks do move onto something more strategic. They write the notes from the white board and circulate them. They give their analysis have room to breathe. They apply the deep thinking required to make informed choices after the analysis.

Where we focus that thinking is critical to our culture and the strategy that comes from it. The same SWOT chart with the wrong thinking can create a culture that is defending against failure rather than achieving success.

If we focus on the threats and weaknesses, the strategy we build will be a defense — focused on protecting ground, not gaining it. It will center around the strengths and moves of the competition. The “Plan B” we build will be one that is a lesser achievement than our “Plan A,” because it will be what happens if a weakness or a threat overcomes us. In that way, our company will be building a culture and strategy based on fear.

If we focus on the opportunities and strengths, the strategy we build will be and offense — focused on gaining ground, not protecting it. It will center around our own strengths and unique openings in the competitive field we can leverage to our own advantage. The “Plan B” we build will be a detour — another route to the same strong achievement as the “Plan A,” because it will be what happens when we engage our strength and find new openings. In that way, our company will be building a culture and strategy of opportunity.

Next time you do a SWOT analysis, rather than building shields around your weaknesses and threats, consider how to turn them into strengths and opportunities. The way we build our defense or offense can affect our entire culture.

How to you build strategy achieving toward opportunity rather than defending against threats?

Building opportunity is irresistible.
Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

Buy the ebook. Learn the art of online conversation.

Why Work? Don’t Just Labor, Labor for Love

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Focusing on the Work Won’t Work

Change the World!

The biggest mistake I made in my working life was that I thought work was about working and life was about life. My view artificial in much the same way that school was about getting homework done so that I could get on with with life.

I would focus on the work and making it outstanding, a cut above. I suspect I thought I’d leave a legacy — that the work would be changed, different, and dare I say better, because I had been a part. I lost sight of, maybe I never truly saw, the people I relied upon. At best, I left a shallow, crumbling legacy — easy surpassed, and best forgotten, fueled by transactions more than relationships.

No one changes the world focusing on the work.

Why Work?

We can’t separate the work we do from our lives. It’s not a case of balance — we can’t separate out the time that we work from the time we’re alive. I won’t give up my right to breathe and be on the planet for my right to work. Work fills my need to be fully safe and human, but I is not my life.

Why work? Maslow described how our human needs are met by work. Despite limitations of the hierarchy it makes a nice framework for building a world-changing team..

  1. Work for life. We work because we have needs. We expend energy to sustain life with food, clothing, shelter, and sex, which will ensure the existence of the species.
  2. Work for security and safety. We do things to alleviate our fear of loss from real and imagined dangers.
  3. Work for social interaction. We find our place in society by building things with others. by feeling we fit as part of our group.
  4. Work for a sense of personal value – respect for ourselves and respect from others. We build out our confidence, competence, self esteem, and sense of status from the recognition, reputation, and appreciation of others as well.
  5. Work to reach our potential. In other words, we expend energy to accomplish things so that we can use what we’ve got, become what we could be, change the world for the better.

Why work? If we look at it right, work — not just earnings — but the act of work can offer us a better life.

Don’t Just Labor, Labor for Love

We all know that we work for life, security and safety, social interaction and respect. Leaders realize the potential we could reach if we channel that energy in the same positive direction, if we put labor into a labor of love to raise up the people who help us thrive.

By supporting those same human needs in all of the people who build our businesses — employees, vendors, managers, partners, customers, families, friends — we can make our work better our lives. The very act of our work can satisfy our human needs, our soulful yearning, and our deep and immediate need to offer a legacy to those who come behind.

All we have to do is be and allow it.
Be a person who lives life and who lets others live life too.
Be a person who knows security and who lets others be secure too.
Be a person who decides to belong and who lets others know they belong too.
Be a person who respects yourself and others and who lets others know that same round respect too.
Be a person who lives up to your potential and lets others see and live up their own.

In other words, don’t just labor, labor for love.
We can change the world, just like that.

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

Thanks to Week 359 SOBs

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Successful and Outstanding Bloggers

Let me introduce the bloggers
who have earned this official badge of achievement,

Purple SOB Button Original SOB Button Red SOB Button Purple and Blue SOB Button
and the right to call themselves
Successful Blog SOBs.

I invite them to take a badge home to display on their blogs.

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They take the conversation to their readers,
contribute great ideas, challenge us, make us better, and make our businesses stronger.

I thank all of our SOBs for thinking what we say is worth passing on.
Good conversation shared can only improve the blogging community.

Should anyone question this SOB button’s validity, send him or her to me. Thie award carries a “Liz said so” guarantee, is endorsed by Kings of the Hemispheres, Martin and Michael, and is backed by my brothers, Angelo and Pasquale.

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Want to become an SOB?

If you’re an SO-Wanna-B, you can see the whole list of SOBs and learn how to be one by visiting the SOB Hall of Fame– A-Z Directory . Click the link or visit the What IS an SOB?! page in the sidebar.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

What to Know Before You Meet to Negotiate A Strategic Partnership

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Strategic Partnership Series

What Is a Strategic Partnership?

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When two business parties agree to build something they can build better together than they can build alone, you have a strategic partnership. The advantage of strategic partnerships is that partners can do more with fewer resources. Knowing ahead of time that you’re building the same basic product together means that some parts of it will serve both parties and won’t have be built twice.

Let’s say you are in Fashion and I’m in Fitness. We both have a core audience of recently graduated college students. We might decide to take the place where our Venn Diagram overlaps — Fitness Fashion — to offer a clothing line through your distribution and mine.

That shared “We” on the diagram points to the areas where we can lower costs and increase resources by working in partnership. With two teams working one clothing line or one fashion-fitness event, we’ll enjoy:

  • the ability to split costs and spread the work
  • a wider resource of experience and fresh ideas from another industry
  • a better chance to focus on what we’re good at — if you’re good at staging events and I’m great at marketing, we can specialize and give our best to the team.

A strategic partnership can be formed between any two parties who can align their goals to work together for mutual benefit. How to Identify the Highest Potential Strategic Partnerships tells what I’ve learned about how to identify the right partners. For the strongest partnerships, look for partners who share your values and philosophy of business but have different strengths and skill sets.

Don’t overlook partnerships with the folks in other departments, with your vendors, with potential customers and sponsors. Anyone whose goals align with yours can be a strategic partner. Small partnerships offer the same advantages a big ones and are sometimes easier to manage.

Once you’ve decided a strategic partnership is a good idea.
Do a little preparation before you try to negotiate one.

What Is Negotiation?

Let’s be clear on the question, What is negotiation?. The goal I set for initial strategic partnership meetings is a viable answer:

Negotiation is two parties to agree to a workable and positive outcome.

When you first meet with a potential strategic partner, you should know how you can help each other, but they may not even know you. Even if you do know the folks you’re meeting with, the idea of a partnership may be alien to their usual way of doing business. That means a discussion — a meeting. Few folks have longer than about an hour or so. That’s not much time for negotiating first impressions, new ideas, deals and relationships.

On my trip to London, I had to introduce myself and our business. I needed to make business deals and wanted to establish long-term business relationships. Most importantly, I hoped to start an international network — a collaborative effort — publishers working together to build our businesses in a way that no one publisher could have achieved alone.

What to Know Before You Negotiate Any Strategic Partnership

The best first impression and the best first meeting reflect and demonstrate how you the strategic partnership will work. If you want an open, honest, equal partnership based on mutual growth, structure a meeting that offers the best possibility of that outcome.

Strategic partnerships are relationships not transactions. A first meeting is more than just selling or “going fishing.” Relationships are established by building solid foundations.

Have a Goal, Have a Vision, and Articulate the Fit

  • Set a Realistic First Steps Goal. Great relationships take place in stages. A test case of a process establishes whether the communication has been effective. The first steps goal should be small, set in time, and easily measured.

    Time was tight. Urgency was high. The first goal was to identify, license, and bring back existing products that we could version and get to market quickly.

    In the example of fashion and fitness, it might be that I might ask you to put some of your fitness fashion in my fitness centers for distribution.

  • Have a Vision for the Relationship. Great partnerships collaborate to grow both businesses over a longer term. It’s important to know what the next stage will be.

    When I went to London, the ideal partnership would be with companies from whom we would first buy, and then collaboratively partner on products in the areas where we served similar customers (in non-competitive venues).

    In the fashion-fitness example, the future might be that we collaborate on an exclusive fashion line that is only offered in my fitness centers.

  • Articulate Why the Partnership Is a Good Fit. No partner wants to get the impression that you’re working with them by accident. It’s important to articulate why it’s them not just anyone. It’s important that potential partners in business (as in romance) know that we’re making an informed and conscious decision.

    On my London trip, I could point to products that fit the values of my audiences and how easily I could promote them with over 900,000 color catalogues to my market.

    In the fashion-fitness example, I might point to how our customer groups were the same people, how our companies shared the same values, and how well our skill sets complimented each others’ skill sets.

Preparation was a foundation to solid success of those 8 or 9 days of meetings and the resulting strategic partnerships. Having a goal, having a vision for the relationship and being able to articulate why this partner and not just anyone made it easier to keep the tables even when I walked in the door to discuss strategic partnerships with that would grow both of our businesses.

It started a chain of irresistible events.

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

Watch for more on negotiating strategic partnerships.

Online Reputation: Fostering Relationships With Influential Bloggers

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h4> by
Alex Summers

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Relationships with the Right Bloggers

A blogger can make or break your business. With a few strokes of a keyboard, a blogger can either catapult your brand into the worldwide realm or sink it into oblivion. Having a relationship with the right blogger is key to keeping your business at the forefront of the positive chatter on the Web.

While many people tout the many benefits of search engine optimization when it comes to Internet marketing, not as much is discussed about managing your online reputation. Monitoring what is said online about your company by bloggers, commenters and forum posters is critical to your business success. All it takes is one negative review from a blogger to send your company’s good name spiraling down the path of no return.

Information moves at the speed of light on the web. By the time an event has aired on network television, the top bloggers have already picked up the story, dissected it, given their personal take on it and opened it up to comments. These bloggers can be your best friends if you manage your resources well and develop a good rapport with the key players in the blogosphere.

Online Reputation: Fostering Relationships With Influential Bloggers

Linking up with the right bloggers is a bit of a challenge. As you can imagine, everyone wants to be friends with the tastemakers of the web. That automatically puts them at an advantage over the myriad of small businesses that want to take advantage of their popularity.

If your business offers a service or product that is complementary to their niche, offer to place their ads on your site for free.

Subscribe to their blogs and add them to your social media sites. The key here is to show them what you can do for them before you ask what they can do for you.

In order to stay in good graces with the bloggers, you must remain a credible resource. Keep your website updated with fresh and relevant content that is useful to your readers. Regularly update your photographs and provide links to related products, services or information. Offer a free e-book or newsletter that your readers will find helpful. Bear in mind that a blogger will only want to endorse your company if you are a genuinely helpful resource.

When you have developed a good working relationship with the key bloggers, work hard to maintain that relationship, even when you’re not looking for favors. By staying in their good graces, you will be in a better position to ask them to endorse your product or service when the time comes.

Sometimes you will receive a bad review on a blog, forum, or consumer website. There may be bad news surrounding your company or personal life. In instances like these, reputation management is key. The first step is to find out what is being said and take steps to mitigate it. If your product is being trashed by a disgruntled customer, handle that customer’s issue before they cause more damage. If it is a competitor, you may have to work harder to erase negative information about your brand online. A good reputation management company can handle these reputation challenges, and their team of experts will work tirelessly to restore your good name on the web.

Most influential bloggers are experts at reputation management — it’s integral to their influence. Most good reputation management companies have great relationships with influential bloggers for that reason.

The relationship between bloggers and businesses is a delicate balancing act of objectivity and loyalty. Your business will benefit greatly from a good working relationship with bloggers who can sing your company’s praises. Foster good relationships with key players and reap the benefits of free advertising. Maintain those relationships and you will find your company’s bottom line grow with each blog post.

How do you foster authentic relationships with influential bloggers?

Author’s Bio:
Alex is a blogger, freelance writer and recent college graduate. She currently performs market research for an online marketing firm when she is not contributing her own thoughts and observations to the online community.