Why So Many People Fail In Affiliate Marketing

Written by Owen Jones Sunday, 24 July 2011 07:49

Affiliate marketing seems like an simple option to those who would like to make an income from the Net. After all, there is no requirement to pay for or even to control stock and in some cases there is not even a requirement to have a web site. The job of the affiliate is to encourage surfers to click through to the suppliers' sales pages. It sounds so simple.

Affiliate marketing seems like an simple option to those who would like to make an income from the Net. After all, there is no requirement to pay for or even to control stock and in some cases there is not even a requirement to have a web site. The job of the affiliate is to encourage surfers to click through to the suppliers' sales pages. It sounds so simple.

More and more people are giving it a whirl each day. However, most of those will end up being disappointed. The fact is that affiliate marketing is definitely not as easy as it looks and some businesses employ subtle techniques and provisos to make sure that most people are notbe paid out.

However, we will come back to that part later. Let's assume for the moment that affiliate marketers are treated well. So an affiliate marketer creates a web site and then puts some creatives (adverts) on it in the hope of earning some money.

That approach will not work, because the tactic has to be to find out what people need or would like and then offer it. So, you find out that people are looking for holidays to Thailand and you know that you can satisfy some of that need.

OK, now you have a plan. You create a web site which has details of places in Thailand and you add creatives about Thailand. This is a huge step further in the right direction than the previous situation. But, you are still not there.

So, you have a web site about Thailand with affiliate marketing creatives offering holidays in Thailand and maybe a couple of Thai things as well, but do you have any visitors? Probably not many. It is true that the search engines will find you eventually, but how long are you willing to wait and where will you be in the search engine rankings? Page one or page six?

If you are not on page one of Google for your keywords, then you will not earn much money. Sorry, that is a fact. So, the next thing to do is attract visitors - loads of them, because not all visitors click ads. You can estimate your click-through-rate (CTR), but let's assume that it is around 2.5%, let's say 5%, but that is rather high. How much do you earn per click or per sale?

Let's say that you earn $1 a click or sale. You will need at least 1,000 visitors a day to earn $25-$50. OK, that may sound fine to you, but it is not really, considering all the marketing you will have to do in order to attract 1,000 visitors. And what about your overheads?

The real killer for me is that the big businesses like Clickbank and Commission Junction put restrictions on paying you out as well. Clickbank will charge you for not making enough money, so that even if you do sell something, they will claw money back if you do not meet their sales targets.

The message of this piece? Do not think that affiliate marketing is going to replace your day career unless you have a heavy stream of visitors.