Why So Many People Fail In Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing seems like an simple option to those who want to create 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 need to have a web site. The task of the affiliate is to encourage people to click through to the suppliers’ sales pages. It sounds so simple.

More and more people are giving it a go every day. However, most of those will end up being disappointed. The fact is that affiliate marketing is definitely not as simple as it appears and some firms employ subtle techniques and provisos to make certain that most web masters do not get 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 strategy. You make a web site which has details about places in Thailand and you add creatives concerning Thailand. This is a huge step further in the right direction than the previous scenario. But, you are still not there.

So, you have a web site concerning Thailand with affiliate advertising creatives offering vacations in Thailand and maybe a couple of Thai items as well, but do you have any visitors? Almost certainly 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 make 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 work out 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 get 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 piece? Do not think that affiliate marketing is going to replace your day career unless you have a heavy stream of visitors.

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