South West eCommerce

So our last post was maybe a little bleak, it wasn’t supposed to be, but really, the truth is, we are all going to make mistakes.

Today as an antidote to my own yesterday's attitude, I thought I’d consider mistakes we’ve already made, and the same ones the internet squillionaires make, and suggest what to do about them.

Buying into everything.  It’s a common theme.  Time after time I listen to a promotion or discussion with someone who’s winning at this game, and they consistently say “I bought into this product, that product and the other course, looking for the way to crack this internet marketing thing.”  Without buying into Commission Blueprint though, we’d have never made a start toward making a real living out of affiliate marketing.  Our prescription for this is to hang back for a while and decide what you want to do, make a few decisions about who you trust, and then follow one product or area until it either works for you or you know it’s bogus. 

Wandering off.  We saw some stats last year that said 95% of affiliate marketers are making less than $500 per month.  I can’t find them again but I believe it’s true.  Basically, the process of building a site and putting affiliate links on it is only the start, then you have to get traffic coming through your site.  This is slow, dull work and most affiliates lose heart and just stop before they make significant progress.  They might leave the site up and go the rest of their lives making $20 per month, but there’s no living in that.  Our recommendation is to be ready for the drudgery of the process and work steadily.  We’re way past that mark now (which makes us easily in the top 5% of affiliate marketers), and we’ve found that there is an awful lot to do, so treat it as a job, with the knowledge that you can, over time, get to where the business makes the money, not you for your labour.

Choosing the wrong products.  We’re running two products that look similar, one costs easily 12 times the cost of the other.  It’s the expensive one that sells.  Our commission on the good product is more than the purchase price of the poor product.  This is because the psychology of the net requires people to be sure of what they’re buying, they can’t hold it in their hands.  Trust is a big issue and we need to figure how we can put offers out there that meet the clients’ needs.  Clearly you need to find a product that’ll appeal to people and that will make a reasonable sum for each sale you make. 

Never getting seen.  There are forty seven gazillion pages of information on the internet, and 67.41% of it is worthless.  8 gazillion sites will stay on the internet and never be seen by a human outside the web author’s family, for their entire existence.  I made that all up, but really, once you’ve got the product and the offer, the trick has to be to ensure it gets seen by the correct punters.  We’d recommend social networking via twitter, saying something genuinely useful to the human race, submitting articles (with a link back to your site) to article sites, and a range of other Search Engine Optimisation techniques.

Spending a lot to get your traffic.  Pay per click is a fast way of generating traffic, but if every sale you make costs $15 and you’re making $12 a sale, you’re never going to get ahead.  Remedy this by finding less expensive keywords, and generating free traffic through Search Engine Optimisation and article marketing.  Analysing every keyword and finding which ones are selling is important and shows the technical side of the game, where good training and tools can help.

Being afraid to scale.  What if you’ve found a way to make $100 from your site every month.  There will be a limit to the amount the offering will make, but with a little understanding you can probably do twice the amount of promotion and make twice the profit.  It could be that you could do 100 times the promotion and make 100 times the profit.  That’d be handy.  Tools will give you a good idea whether you can scale up like that, but remember the internet’s a very big place and it is quite likely to support more than you try the first time.  If you’re not ready to spend money on tools, make a marginal increase every month until it doesn’t work anymore.

So that’ll just about do it.  Read a lot, get started, and when you are doing your best, watch out for the big mistakes.  Then as you go, fix them and you WILL see real profit from internet marketing.