5 Myths About Affiliate Marketing

In this article, you’ll learn 5 common myths about affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing offers lots of benefits no doubt but there are also a lot of misconception about how it can make you rich overnight. Affiliate marketing is not a get-rich-quick scheme, it takes concerted effort and time to see the result. Many people have gone about it the wrong way hoping to replicate the success of established affiliates.

Here are 5 common myths about affiliate marketing and how you can avoid or leverage them to grow your business.

Myth #1 – Affiliate marketing is a get-rich-quick scheme

It may be easy to start affiliate marketing but it takes lots work and time to see a result. It’s not all about setting up a website and hopes that somehow people will come. It’s tough job and success will not come in a day. The strategy needed to survive is changing and only those who are dynamic and patience can stand the trends. One of the things that make affiliate marketing successful is finding the right product to promote and building a long-term partnership. That said, you have to find the balance between the kind of ads you display and your audience engagement to avoid distraction.

In the quest to sell more products, many publishers ignore the fact that too many ads are annoying. This disruptive and annoying ad experience will only put off your audience and lose you money in the long run. According to a study conducted by Hubspot about how users feel about online ads and why they installed ads blocker; over 64% of respondents said ads are intrusive and annoying, 54% said ads are disruptive, 39% said it create security concern, 36% said ads affect load time and bandwidth usage.

Given this statistic, it is crucial for every publisher and advertiser to take a second look at their ads strategy and the effect on user experience. As a publisher, there are steps you can take to improve your user experience and to better engage them without alienating them.

• Don’t inundate your audience with too many ads. Always have it mind that your audience comes first and not products you’re trying to sell to them. Make effort to cater for your audience need first, nourish them with good content and build trust. When your audience trusts your insight, it becomes easier to make recommend a product. Trust is the most undeniable aspect in a quest to attract more audience and loyal followers. Demonstrate that you really care about their well-being by providing them with useful content that will help them to make an informed decision.

• You don’t have to promote all products. You must filter the type of products you recommend to your audience. Before you promote any product you have to believe that it will help your audience. Try it before you review it. One of the mistakes most affiliates make is giving a blind review of products they know no nothing about. This can bring your credible to question if anything goes wrong. Be sure to give an honest review of every product you promote and be frank about what it does and doesn’t do.

• Stay in the mind of your audience. To stay fresh in the mind of your audience you have to continuously feed them with new content. Be a go-to source in your niche. People are hungry for information and if you don’t provide them, they will get it somewhere else. So be active and create more content to engage your audience. If you can’t publish content daily, fine but make sure you publish new content at least once a week. It will keep your audience engaged and refreshed.

Myth #2 – Affiliate marketing is dead because of SEO advancement

The old system of generating traffic might be outdated due to technological advancement. As search engine technology is getting sophisticated every day so also are marketers. Technology can get in the way if you keep doing things the old way. A dynamic marketer will always keep abreast on her industry. Yes, staying updated in an industry that changes constantly is challenging but following the trend as they occur will help to stay ahead of the curve.

Google and other search engines have up their game in an attempt to get rid of a low quality web page but you will do just fine so long you follow the new guideline. There has been a negative impact on many company’s web search ranking due to an update in search engine algorithms or manual review. So here are 4 ways not get penalized by search engines:

• Creating fresh content. Start by taking down low-quality content from your site. If you have a thin page or outdated content it may time to fix them. Search engines like fresh and original content. If you are consistent with your content strategy and publish at least once in a week, you will see your ranking shoot up in no time.
• Avoid link farms. Some publisher in an attempt to drive traffic to their site, engage in all kind of back-linking building malpractices like participating in link exchange program. Google frown at junk links. Before you agree to exchange links with anyone make sure you share similar niche and can be a good complement to one another. But the best solution is to create good content and if your content provides value, people will naturally link to you. There is no substitute for quality content, if you really want to rank high in the search engine and drive traffic to your site, you have to invest in your content strategy.
• Avoid Keyword Stuffing. In the good old days, keyword stuffing was common among publishers. But things have changed dramatically, search engines are smarter now. So make sure that your keyword doesn’t appear out of context. Keyword stuffing affects user experience and will hurt your ranking.
• Unique Content. Avoid duplicate content at all cost, it is a ranking killer. If your content appears in more than one place (URL) you have to it down. This is because search engine doesn’t know how to direct the link metrics or which version to rank for the query result. As a result, your content becomes irrelevant and loses ranking.

Myth #3: You can only make money in popular niche

The popular niche has lots of advantages no doubt but it is harder for beginner to compete because established brands have way too much resources to boost their content and marketing effort. The best approach when you’re starting out is to research the niches that most interest you. Narrow it down to something specific. For example, if your niche is in pet, you narrow your search down to dog, cat, or even pet food. Build authority in your niche and be a go-to platform for a specific need. And gradually, you become the leader in that niche. Of course, as your audience grow you can always expand and offer more products or services.

The problem most marketer face is how to find a profitable niche in over saturated market. If you’re stuck on how to find a profitable niche, here are few tips to get you started.

• Use keyword researcher tools like Wordtracker. Find keywords that average at least 1000 global search every month. You can also narrow your search down to local if your primary audience is located a particular region.

• Check your keyword for competition. Go to google.com to check what websites are ranking for that keyword. Visit their website to check what service they offer. That will help you gauge their performance and competitiveness so that you plan your strategy.

• Decide on your next step. By now, you have clear information about what your competitors are capable of. You need a strategy that will help stand out. First is your content. You must be willing to invest in your content strategy because that’s how you can separate yourself from competition.

Myth #4 – Having many affiliates will get you more business

This is another common misconception. You must define what you want in affiliate for it to work for you. It’s not how many affiliates you have but what bring the most results. If you have 50,000 affiliates and you depend on 2000 for your revenue that means you need to start taking a hard look on who you partner with measuring their influence and how they can produce a better result. Big or small the best affiliate is the ones who drive growth and conversion. Not thousands of affiliate that bring meager or no result at all.

Locating the right affiliate to partner with may be a daunting task but here are two tips to help weed out the bad from the good.

• Undo auto-approval application. You should manually approve all affiliates that will give you an idea of what their services are about. The good affiliate program will set a criterion that filter affiliates and ensure only those who meet the standard are admitted.
• Check the credibility of the affiliates. There few things you can do to help you gauge the credibility and the quality of affiliates. Some affiliates have privatized domain names that don’t allow you to see who is running the business. This should raise a red flag. You must do your due diligence by checking the legitimacy of your affiliates before admitting them. Transparency is key to finding the best affiliates that yield result.

Myth #5 – Affiliate marketing is over-saturated

There is always a space for new ideas, and companies whose ingenuity and innovation are bringing new products to the market will thrive in the 21 first century economy. You can always tweak the existing product and make it better. Yes, there are fierce competition from top brand and given that just 5% of affiliate make money in the first year, it deters the newbie from trying their hands on affiliate marketing. While the top brand may have the resource to build their SEO strategy and rank high in search engine, all hope is not lost for new entrepreneur who is resilient and passionate about her new venture.

You can always make a living with affiliate marketing. Regardless of the odd against you, you will make it only if you try. They say that a journey of a thousand mile begins with a step. If you are out there thinking to yourself about how saturated your niche is. It is time to take that first step and do what love.

In conclusion, affiliate marketing has a long way and the action taking place in the marketplace happens in a blink. To catch-up, you need to confront it head-on. Do not wait for some other time, this is the right time to start making that change for your business growth.