Why So Many People Fail In Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing seems to be an simple option to people who want to make earnings from the Internet. After all, there is no requirement to pay for or even to control stock and in some cases there is not even a need 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 easy.

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 aspect later. Let’s assume for the moment that affiliate marketers are treated fairly. So an affiliate marketer builds 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 concerning Thailand with affiliate promotional creatives offering holidays in Thailand and perhaps a few Thai things as well, but do you have any visitors? Almost certainly not many. It is a fact 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 get $1 a click or sale. You will require at least 1,000 visitors a day to earn $25-$50. OK, that may sound okay to you, but it is not actually, considering all the marketing you will have to do in order to get 1,000 visitors. And what about your overheads?

The real killer for me is that the big firms like Clickbank and Commission Junction put restrictions on paying you out too. Clickbank will charge you for not earning 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 article? Do not think that affiliate marketing is going to replace your day career unless you have a heavy stream of visitors.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on many subjects, but is now involved with the SEO Content. If you would like to know more, please visit our website at PLR pieces