Escaping Affiliate Marketing Traps

The lure of affiliate marketing is so appealing. Imagine, you don't need to stock on products, you don't need to handle the online payment, you don't even have to deliver the product to paying customers, and yet you still earn a commission. How easy can that be, right?

And that, unfortunately, is where a lot of newcomers fall into the trap of affiliate marketing.

Here are some referral marketing pitfalls you can avoid and sometimes even leap over.

1. Is the merchant building a list?

Usually, if you refer people to a salespage, they'll read the sales letter and then eventually buy the product. In such cases, you earn a commission.

But what if the merchant is building a list? What if the online salespage can only be seen after people sign-up for some kind of mailing list or tutorial series delivered by some email autoresponder? Are you, as an affiliate marketer, helping the merchant sell products? Or are you helping them build their mailing lists?

Remember, you will earn commissions only from actual referred sales. You don't usually earn anything from mailing list subscribers. If the merchant someday decides to send a broadcast to all those subscribers and ends up promoting another product, then guess what? That's right, you will not earn any commissions.

2. Is the merchant just doing a market test?

Perhaps the product isn't really selling well. Or you might even notice that the merchant is testing different kinds of salesletter headlines. You must ask yourself again if you are helping the merchant sell the product, or if you are sending a flood of traffic for some marketing test.

How can you tell? Visit the salespage from time to time, and see if you can detect any changes: font color, headlines used, different wording in the P.S. section, the use of index1.html, index2.html or other sequential files. If you see more than 4 variations, that merchant is most likely conducting a major market test.

These multi-version split tests require a lot of traffic, so visitors sent to the salespage by affiliate marketers are helping that merchant gain more data. That's free traffic, in the eyes of the merchant, because you will not get paid for sending traffic.

3. Is the merchant telling you the truth?

Some merchants will employ tactics similar to the ones listed earlier, and will simply keep quiet about it. Others may even go to the extent of telling you how well their squeeze page tactics help increase the number of sales...

...but will keep quiet about the benefit they derive from your free listbuilding assistance.

True, their efforts may help you earn higher commissions, but they should at least be more transparent about the larger benefit that they (online merchants) derive from such tactics.

Afterall, you (as affiliate marketer) can build your own list first before you send your visitors to some merchant's salespage. With this system, you can continue to keep in touch with those visitors months after they've signed up for your list. You can even let them know about other offers down the road.

You can even conduct your own marketing experiments and gain extremely valuable insight on what works online. That kind of info is priceless, and the merchants know this. And that's why those that sugar-coat their Squeeze Page strategies with "this is for the benefit of the affiliate" speech are merchants you need to be wary of.

4. Is the merchant cutting you out of back-end sales?

If you're promoting an ebook, go ahead and read it. Look for links that lead to the merchant's other products, or even to those where the merchant uses his or her own affiliate link. Count those links, visit those salespages, and assess if you will earn anything from those.

If the merchant stands to earn commissions from links found inside the ebook, then you're most likely not going to earn anything. In other words, you were cut out of those back-end sales transactions. And the best way to get a feel for this is to actually read the PDF file and test the links.

So, how can you escape or even leap over these potential affiliate marketing traps? Build your list on your own first, and send traffic preferably to a non-listbuilding salespage of a product that does not contain too many affiliate links. That way, you get maximum benefit from your online promotional efforts.

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Manuel Viloria is your friendly multimedia internet publishing coach who helps you gain more traffic for your web sites. Whether it's through blogging, podcasting, article marketing, videoblogging, email listbuilding, or even through Web 2.0 or social network marketing, you can increase your website visitors today. For more information, please visit Make Money Online | ManuelViloria.com.

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Posted by Manuel Viloria | Filed in: Affiliate Marketing

Tags: make money online

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