Are you wasting time in your affiliate business? If you’ve been an affiliate marketer for any length of time, and are still not getting the results you want, there’s probably a good reason for it. Once you can identify that reason, and change your behaviour, things can and will change. There’s an estimated $730 billion being spent online each year online. That number is perpetually growing. too. All you need is a slice of that to earn an income online from your business.
But if you’re spending all your time on actions which aren’t moving the “needle” on your business, you’re likely wasting much of it. There’s one specific thing all affiliates need which without, they will never see a dime from affiliate sales. That thing is traffic. But more specifically it’s traffic which seeks that which you’re selling! This is also known as targeted traffic.
Wasting Time In Your Affiliate Business?
There’s a tendency towards those activities which you feel good about. Those which you don’t like, you avoid. In the beginning you’re likely to take a course, build a blog and watch training videos. Perhaps you’ll set up your sales funnel and start writing some blog posts. All this takes time and it’s time which isn’t rewarded financially until you sell something.
Selling something online means finding a specific person and getting them to click your affiliate link, and buy. If they are very well targeted, they are actively seeking the answers which your product gives them! Targeting the wrong visitors, or having a bad product are going to cost you dearly, even if you get everything else right. But if you’re actively engaged in creating content, but haven’t thought about promoting it, you’re being a “busy fool”! It might feel productive, but unless people are finding your content and engaging with it, you’re not selling anything!
I’ve written several ebooks, built many websites and failed many times with affiliate marketing but the one thing which makes sales is getting someone on your email list and delivering a product which is of value to them.
Wasting Time In Your Affiliate Business? Got A List?
The email list is definitely one of your best assets as an affiliate marketer. Get one here for free. Without it, you must drive traffic either by working (usually very hard) for it through content creation and endless posting on social media and SEO, or you must pay for it using paid advertising.
But once you have an email list of subscribers you have much greater control over your traffic. Plus, you can build trust over a much longer time period than is possible otherwise.
The list is a major piece of the affiliate success jigsaw. It doesn’t solve every problem, but a lot of problems are solved by it.
Wasting Time In Your Affiliate Business – Your Customer Avatar
Obviously you need to drive traffic to build your email list up. Most affiliates will quit before they have even got 1000 subscribers on their email list too, so make sure you stick with it. Top affiliates have huge email lists. So a single email will be opened by thousands, if not tens of thousands of subscribers! With only a small list, and only a percentage opening them consistently, you’ll see far better results with a large list.
Despite affiliate marketing being a numbers game it’s also important to understand who you are attracting to your list. Attract the wrong people are your sales will suffer. So who exactly are the “right people” to attract to your email list?
The right people are aligned with your product. They are the kind who will buy and become life-long fans. If you’re selling subscription products, they will maintain their subscriptions because they understand the value of your product/s. Checkout my post on the customer avatar worksheet to learn about who you should be attracting through your marketing efforts.
Using Paid Traffic
I’ve definitely had the best results with affiliate marketing when I’ve been using paid traffic. But you need to tread carefully too. If you haven’t tried using paid traffic before, start with a low budget you can easily afford to lose and build up gently.
Expect to learn a lot before you start seeing immediate results. Most ad campaigns aren’t going to work straight away and you’ll need to do some experimentation. But if you start to work on understanding your customer avatar, and carefully align your product with the type of search query which is a good match, you should see sales coming in, or at least people opting in to your email list.
To optimise your landing page, find a good giveaway product which is a good match for your product. Don’t send paid traffic to a blog, since you’ll waste a lot of marketing budget. Far better to send it to a landing page to collect emails for your list.
Take An Inventory
To help you gain traction in your affiliate business, take an inventory of the time you spend on your online business. What actions are you performing? Ask yourself whether this course of activity is going to take your business to the level you want it to over 6 months or 5 years.
If the answer is no, you should start investigating new ideas you can implement. If you’re studying and have just started, you’re likely to be watching videos and learning. Make sure you don’t get “stuck” here in “learning mode”. As soon as you have some information to act on, make sure you act.
It’s worth trying new things even though you’ll likely see many of them as “failures”. But without failing at something new you’ll never learn it. So, for example if you haven’t ever done any paid advertising, make sure you set up a campaign and run it with minimal budget, just to get the ball rolling.
Paid marketing is a much more scalable marketing strategy for affiliates and remember that affiliate marketing is a numbers game – the more sales you make the more income you make. Without targeted traffic, in large numbers, you can’t grow your affiliate business.
Summary
Paid marketing is the fastest way to drive traffic. But you also need to make sure that traffic is very well targeted, or you’ll waste your ad budget. You must also make sure you’re using a high value product which is of huge value to your customer avatar. Unless you have chosen a good product to promote, no amount of advertising will help!
While blogging, creating ebooks and video content is rewarding, it doesn’t necessarily drive traffic very well. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet and more than 114 million YouTube channels. So the chance of your video finding a large audience is very small. Likewise with your blog posts.
Blogging can take months before you start to see large amounts of visitors and it’s the same with a YouTube channel. Paid advertising on the other hand delivers targeted traffic very quickly. You can rapidly see whether a campaign is working. But with organic (content) marketing, it can take months to discover that your strategy is flawed! After which you’ve already done a lot of work!