1. Lack of focus
2. No Long-term orientation
Taking the first, where affiliate marketers fail is that they don't keep to one approach. They are constantly seeking and finding very lucrative, but narrow/shallow approaches. The products they offer are mostly of the same ilk - get rich quick, or these 30-page ebooks for $15 which are just one-off products.
The failure here is to keep looking for new things instead of really building up around a central, valuable theme.
This leads us to the second point. Affiliate marketers fail - or just continue struggling to succeed (same difference) as they don't consistently provide incredible value in a given niche. The knuckleheads I've dealt with along this line consistently bring me new products through my email portal, all of which are glowingly represented as being a "new way to make money!" or tell with lengthy lists of testimonials about how this new ebook or product will... But the products are all over the place - hair products, diet products, forex manuals, you name it.
What these marketers fail to do is to develop a line of products which services a single, narrow niche completely. The worst of the lot are the people selling marketing products to marketers. Because they are simply feeding this addictive, attention deficit problem. Most all of these new marketing approaches are the same, just tacked on and glossed up with new terminology.
Real successful marketers find a problem area they have a solution for and then sell variations and expansions of that system to those same customers and gradually expand that narrow niche slightly wider - or pick up a related niche and bring their old clients over to this new one.
This is having and building a "sales funnel" of a consistent line of goods. Any accomplished sales organization does this. These are called "department stores". And you can do the same online as in the brick and mortars.
But the Internet also allows people to shallowly sell a wide variety of products and not have to build any base to actually get recurring customers.
And this route ensures that you are constantly looking for new stuff to sell and ways to sell it. And you are also always looking for new customers and clients.
The solution:
Build a base. Means you can actually drop all these various products into a blog or an ecommerce engine (and now you can host blogs inside ecommerce engines - they are built on the same code, basically).
That blog or ecommerce site then has all the data a person would need about a given product - and they could find, by category or search, what they were actually looking for. And then would come back to find other stuff they were needing.
The affiliate salesperson, would then keep looking for bargains and drop them into this base. Sure, they keep building stand-alone sales pages and mini-webs, but these then point to the ecommerce base or blog page where that person could then contact the affiliate sales line.
Essentially, they need an online catalog of all the various items they are selling. And when they send out emails, it's "look what I just found for you!" "Come see my site to see what the latest is!" It's not "here's what I dug up that you can buy now."
That's where I simply opt out of that person's mail list.
But people who do have some great content - really helpful stuff - I keep coming back to them, their blog, their ecommerce site. Because they've done the research so I know that what they offer is good stuff, or at least is amusing.
Solution Steps:
- Know what you really like to do and how you like to help people.
- Find stuff that will help people and offer it to them in return for something they want to give you. (Like a decent price, or an email address that works.)
- Set up a base so that people can find out more about you and your products on their own.
- Promote that base along with any product you are offering.
- Keep building onto that base with every new product you find.
- Streamline what you are doing and dropping old products that no longer sell, or drive customers away.
- Turn long-term clients into working as affiliate sales people for you.
Luck and Good Hunting!
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