List of bad advice from affiliate marketers

[Isaiah]

I've become increasingly frustrated and annoyed by the amount of bad advice given by other affiliate marketers. I've tried alot of it and almost none of them proved to be effective. The list are as follows:

* "Promote your content by giving valuable comments on social platforms" - I've gotten no positive responses from doing this. Almost all of my comments have been deleted and i've been banned from groups in social networking sites. The people running the sites aren't stupid enough to know that you're trying to promote your online business and they frown on it.

* "Use email marketing to sell your affiliate products" - I'm in the Amazon Affiliates program and posting any affiliate links via. email is a policy violation which will result in you banned permanently.

* "Create high-quality high-ranking SEO content for your blog" - This seems pretty vague to me as there's a difference between buyer's keywords and non-buyer keywords. I've had tons of traffic to my posts and still almost no sales from any of them.

That being said, what do you think is a good approach to making significant income from affiliate marketing and drawing traffic to your content? Do you agree or disagree with what i just said? If so, feel free to explain why.

 

[T J Tutor]

You don't have a clear picture of what we do and how we do it.

For example, you said "Promote your content by giving valuable comments on social platforms". This is still valid for content sites. Promoting content that is excerpted from your content sites will generally not get you banned anywhere, as long as it is relevant to the place you post it. However, if you make any sales pitches in that content, then it really isn't content at all, just a part of a funnel and that will usually get you banned.

Another example you gave, "Create high-quality high-ranking SEO content for your blog". You say this is vague. It is not, it is very clear to anyone that knows about running true content sites.

Again, "Use email marketing to sell your affiliate products" - I'm in the Amazon Affiliates program and posting any affiliate links via. email is a policy violation which will result in you banned permanently. So don't use amazon links to promote with email. Instead, join some networks and look for offers that permit email marketing.

*what do you think is a good approach to making significant income from affiliate marketing and drawing traffic to your content?

These are two separate questions and can be, they don't have to be, but they can be mutually exclusive.

A good approach to making significant income from affiliate marketing is the result of becoming a master of tracking, researching your target audiences, becoming a killer copywriter, engineering awesome angles and triggers, testing at least five offers a day, networking in the industry, and I can go on all day long with this list.

As for drawing traffic to your content, well, I think you may need to take a step back and re-evaluate what you are doing. If you are using Amazon affiliate program, and you say you are a content marketer, then I can say for certain that you are not blending the best of opportunities. It doesn't surprise me that you are not getting results. Content marketing and Amazon Associates will not make a great pairing unless you have the very best of content and an incredible well thought out site. I suspect that while you want to be a content marketer, you have not realized what that truly means. A true content marketer is going to have a highly specialized site with a focus on a very specific area of a demographic. This is what makes content sites work.

What type of sites do you have?

What tracker are you using?

Why are you not monetizing the site with CPA offers from some networks that have offers related to the sites demographic?

What specific data do you have from research about your demographics?

Why are you not using paid traffic? Paid traffic is the only primary traffic source for what we do.

Who develops your content?

How often is the content updated?

 

[Mike Martin]

I've found Amazon to be very tough, as the cookie has a very short lifespan, and many people don't purchase on their initial click to a product.

I've also tried marketing using sites like Craigslist, but there are typically tons of ads there, and getting noticed has been a challenge.

The best way to get clicks to your affiliate products is to have a very engaging blog or site (or newsletter), and continue to build up your traffic to your own material, not specifically to the products. The sad reality is that clicks to products is happening at such an extremely low rate that many traditional digital publishers are making it almost impossible to read content without having to go through video ads, annoying pop-ups and other ads that slow down the page load and make for a terrible reading experience.

Perhaps you may want to try looking for appropriate social media channels such as LinkedIn, and write content about how you use the product to [name your benefit]. That may get you some clicks.

- Mike