Are you frustrated that your affiliate marketing efforts are not producing the results you want? You’re not alone. Many people have tried affiliate marketing and made no money… A few make a little money, but never enough for them to quit their jobs. 
In this article, I’ll share 5 reasons most people fail at earning a full-time income as an affiliate marketer. If you’re an affiliate marketer who is struggling to generate a reliable income by promoting affiliate offers, this post will help you identify the problem.
It’s not always easy to pinpoint the cause of our struggles, but I will make it as clear as possible for you. If one or more of these apply to you, then don’t worry – there’s hope!
Read on to find out how you can change your strategy so you can achieve the success that you desire and deserve.
The list we’d go through may seem commonsense, that’s why many marketers ignore them and unfortunately, it hampers their progress and income. If there’s one thing I hope you take away from reading this article, is that if an individual affiliate marketer has failed to earn a full-time income, it’s not because affiliate marketing is ineffective – it’s most likely because they’re ignoring one or more of the five critical ingredients to running a successful affiliate marketing business.
1. You Don’t Know The Product You’re Selling
The first reason affiliate marketers fail to earn a full-time income is because they don’t know the product well enough. The affiliate marketer may have studied marketing in college, and maybe they’ve worked as a direct salesperson in their professional lives… They’d do a poor job trying to market the product based on just sales skills and proven marketing principles–without first knowing the product they’re selling.
This is because affiliate marketers do not yet know how best to sell the product they’re promoting – either that or they don’t know the product well enough to communicate its features and benefits in a way that’ll help you decide to make a purchase.
If affiliate marketers really knew their product well, they’d be able to write an engaging review that would win your trust and convince you to invest in the product. Therefore, if you want to become a high-earning affiliate marketer, do not underestimate the importance of knowing your product inside out. This applies whether you’re selling affiliate products or you’re selling your own products.
*Let me be clear, I’m not saying affiliate marketers should blindly promote any product they come across just because they know how to communicate its benefits…
There are many affiliate marketing scams online and as an affiliate marketer, you should care about what product you sell to your audience, to ensure it’s beneficial and not detrimental to them.
You should know the product’s pros and cons of the products you decide to promote. If as an affiliate marketer, you experience poor conversions on your conversion pages and hence cannot earn a sufficient income, the solution is simple.
You need to learn more about the product you’re promoting, so you can communicate its features and benefits persuasively. Without a thorough understanding of the product you’re selling, it’ll be difficult for you to convince someone else to buy the product!
2. You Don’t Have a ‘REASON WHY’ For Choosing to Sell The Product you’re promoting
A lot of affiliate marketers fail because they don’t have a “REASON WHY” for selling the product. If you know what you’re selling, and can communicate its advantages well; people will want to buy it.
As an affiliate, the first questions you need to answer before you choose a product to sell are:
- What are you selling (what is your product)?
- What are you offering and what major benefit is it offering your prospect?
- How will buying your product improve their lives?
- How will it change the way they see things?
The questions above are great for helping you choose products to promote which will have a high chance of success.
However, there’s another critical question that often gets overlooked. And this question helps guarantee your long-term success as an affiliate marketer.
- Why become an affiliate marketer?
- And why promote the product you’re about to promote?
Unless you have a genuine passion for the products you sell, affiliate marketing is not for you. It’s definitely not about sales and money-making all the time.
As an affiliate marketer, you should sell products that you’re convinced will help people. When you know the product you’re promoting will help people, help them make more money or even save their lives…
- You’d be inspired to put in the extra work to be well informed about the product.
- You’ll go the extra mile to understand the problems your target audience is experiencing.
- And you’ll know what your target audience wants, and how they want the solution communicated and delivered to them. It’s as simple as that.
Imagine how devastating it will feel if a product you’re promoting hurts your buyers instead of helping them? Imagine that someone bought the product you’re selling, and it didn’t help them. Can you imagine what they would say to their friends and family about you?
So if you’re considering affiliate marketing only for the money you could earn… And if you have no concern for the prospects who will consume the products you promote, then you’re most likely going to have a short-lived career. And you will never be able to earn huge incomes you hear about consistently.
3. You Don’t Know who your target audience
Affiliate marketers are always looking for ways to earn more money. One of the best ways affiliate marketers can make more is by knowing who their target audience is and tailoring online marketing strategies accordingly.
Unfortunately, unsophisticated affiliate marketers rarely know who their target audience is or how many people they need to reach in order to generate a substantial income online.
This lack of knowledge makes affiliate marketers focus on online marketing strategies that are far less effective. This then results in affiliate marketers making minimal or no money at all.
For example:
If you don’t know the gender of your target audience, you may decide to publish a blog post focused on women’s issues, such as weight loss and menopause.
While your best audience may well be men.
In this scenario, you will have difficulty converting those men because your message is targeting and speaking only to women, and therefore alienating the men–who are actually your ideal prospects.
However, if you know your target audience, then you would focus on communicating only what appeals to that specific audience.
Another common error is when affiliates don’t know the age, sentiments, or psychographic information of their target audience’s age group. The psychographic info gives you clues and insights into how your audience thinks.
For example:
Imagine you wanted to sell your prime pork meat, and because you don’t know the sentiments of your audience, you started talking about how your pork is celebrated by meat-lovers for its juicy, lean, and succulent cuts. But, unfortunately, your audience was Islamic or vegan… Your conversions will suffer, because they’d not find your marketing appealing, instead, they’d view it with contempt because vegans don’t eat meat and Muslims abhor pork.
While some affiliates are quick to talk about their past successes in selling products online… If they don’t at least take advantage of their analytics tools (such as Google Analytics) to see how their audience is responding to their marketing, they’re more likely to fail than succeed.
But if you monitor your analytics you’d be able to identify what’s working and what’s not. And with this knowledge you’d have a better idea as to what’s resonating with your audience, so you can do more of that and less of what they’re ignoring and not responding favorably to.
Your analytics will guide you into creating content your audience will love. It will give you a competitive advantage over other marketers who don’t track and analyze their data.
4. You Don’t know the right way to approach people in your target market
If you don’t know how to open a dialogue and establish rapport with people of diverse personality types… You’d be wasting your time delivering a sales pitch because you don’t know what works for the kind of person.
A lot of affiliate marketers make the mistake of approaching people with the assumption their customers are just like themselves. They forget that different people have different personalities and motivations, which means they need to tailor their message accordingly.
If you want to be successful at affiliate marketing, then it’s important for you to remember that there are many ways in which an affiliate product could appeal to someone else as well as yourself.
Affiliate marketing isn’t about knowing what appeals to you.
Affiliate marketing is about understanding and reaching your ideal customer. It’s about looking beyond your own interests and finding out what your prospect is looking for – then giving it to them.
As an affiliate marketer, a niche is your target market, not you.
Don’t try to sell your affiliate products to yourself, sell to your ideal prospects.
Think about it, publishing a blog post about succeeding in affiliate marketing is a waste of time if you’re trying to sell postnatal health supplements to nursing mothers.
Novice affiliate marketers think succeeding in affiliate marketing comes down to posting their affiliate links on their blog and in as many places as possible.
Sure, affiliate links are important, but affiliate marketing is more than just affiliate links.
The first thing to bear in mind is, the product you’re promoting is not about you, it’s about the prospect in your target market. And there are several ways to reach your prospect and promote your products and online businesses–other than just posting links and a few review posts.
You could use videos, images, paid social media ads, guest posting or email marketing. You can use all the above to promote affiliate products and online businesses. The most important thing is knowing how your prospect prefers to be communicated with.
If they prefer to read text, then write informative blog posts and let them read it.
If they prefer videos, then create engaging videos about the product you’re promoting and they’ll enjoy it. And if they prefer listening, then do your utmost to get featured on the podcasts and channels they listen to.
And finally, if they love images and memes, shower them with an avalanche of the best memes that will communicate all the key benefits of your product.
5. You Don’t Know How To Close the sale
A common thread I’ve identified among affiliate marketers who struggle to earn at least $100 per day online is… They’re all horrible or mediocre at closing the sale.
What do I ask affiliate marketers why they’re not doing well online, I usually hear something along these lines:
“I’m not getting enough traffic… If I can only get enough traffic to my conversion pages I’d be making money every day!”
Other times, I hear:
“If I could build a prettier web page or if I knew how to create a snazzy looking affiliate marketing sales funnel I’d be making more sales… blah blah blah!”
Excuses like these stem from the affiliates’ inability to close the sale. It’s sad, but true that a lot of marketers are earning a lot less than they could because they do not know how to close the affiliate sale.
Successful affiliate and online marketer knows that the key to financial freedom is in knowing how to close the sale. That’s why they get paid big affiliate commissions daily from their campaigns. They know how to close sales in smooth, non-threatening ways.
The good affiliate marketers (the ones who make at least $100 affiliate commissions on a daily basis) are really good in the affiliate marketing business because they know how to build and run promotions… But more importantly, they also know how to close sales too.
How do you become an affiliate marketer who can close affiliate sales consistently?
First, you must understand what affiliate marketing is about, and then you need to develop the marketing skills to promote effectively online. If you know how to select great products to promote but don’t know how to craft a campaign and promote effectively, you wouldn’t make any sales and therefore you will not earn any commissions.
Good news! Your marketing knowledge gap can be addressed quickly by going through a detailed affiliate marketing training program, like the one offered by John Thornhill.
How do I close affiliate sales so easily?
Second, focus your affiliate marketing efforts on affiliate products that you know people want.
Find affiliate products that are in demand and have a high conversion rate. This is important because if the products you’re promoting are not desired by your niche market, you’d struggle at making sales no matter how great your marketing skills are.
But once you select a great product, target the right niche market, build effective campaigns with clear calls-to-action (CTA), you’d have sales flowing in, consistently.
However, I must warn you, there’s nothing like an overnight super-affiliate.
Affiliate marketing takes time to master. You most likely wouldn’t become an affiliate marketing millionaire by next month, just because you wrote it on your vision board and visualized it. You’re going to have to practice by testing different campaigns strategies and affiliate offers. But if you stay consistent and follow the right system, you will become another success story.
Affiliate marketing is a powerful way to earn a full-time income online and even grow rich.
It takes time, patience, and know-how to close affiliate sales consistently.
If you’re tired of struggling with your affiliate marketing business, and you want to finally start earning consistent affiliate commissions, I’d recommend you check out John Thornhill’s Affiliate Training Program today!
This program will teach you how to become an elite affiliate marketer who can sell anything online by following five simple steps that anyone can learn: 1) Find out what people want 2) Market those things 3) Closer the sale 4) Repeat 5) Earn more money!
For more details about John Thornhill’s program, click on the links below:
Get The John Thornhill Affiliate Training Program
One more thing, the people who succeed in making the BIG bucks in affiliate marketing are the ones who approach it as a serious business. And if you’re going to build a serious affiliate business, you need to have the right tools.
You also don’t want to be paying hefty monthly subscription fees while you’re trying to get your affiliate business off the ground. So, that’s why I recommend all my buddies to jump on the Platinum Lifetime Deal Mike Filsaime is offering…
Mike is offering a one-time price for his all-in-one marketing and business building software suite of tools. Click the link below to find out more.
Grab Mike Filsaime’s Platinum Lifetime Deal Today
All the best!
Donald C. Obii
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hi, I’m Donald “Tha Prolific Chief” 😉 – an entrepreneur, conversion copywriter, and business growth specialist. Basketball, fight sports (boxing & MMA), and watching animals in nature are some of my greatest delights. BTW, have I mentioned I love marketing! I love guiding people, from being cold prospects to deciding on the best solutions/products for themselves… Even better, I love leveraging marketing automation tools and software, to help me and my clients work less. So, we can all spend more time with our loved ones, enjoy our leisure to our heart’s content and as a result, we’d have an even greater capacity to serve our clients better.https://sellmorewithgroove.com/
This is a guest post from Donald C. Obii, if you would like to be considered for a guest post please contact me.
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