So you’ve decided to become an affiliate marketer. Well, Cuzin’, while I make things sound so simple in my videos, truth be told even I had my own anthills to climb when I was starting out. A lot of other affiliate marketers will tell you that there are a lot of challenges that people like us will eventually face and need to overcome before calling ourselves successful entrepreneurs.
I’ve come up with a short list of common challenges that every affiliate marketer is bound to face at one time of their career or another. This section is just filled with little nuggets of wisdom that I want to share with everyone, so feel free to look through them and see if you can’t find a good piece of advice or two that might be of use to you someday:
1. Finding your niche – This is usually the first hurdle any affiliate marketer needs to face, especially when they’re starting out. I’ve seen some newbies take on more than they can chew just because they couldn’t zero in on a particular market that they wanted to corner. For instance, if you plan on becoming a supplier in the industrial materials business, it’s going to be tough to compete against all of the long-time, established suppliers out there. In this case, instead of trying cater to the entire industry you can always focus on a particular niche inside it, such as cornering the market for wiring supplies or a specific building material. Once you’ve conquered that particular niche, you can always expand your business and move on to bigger things.
2. Establishing clear goals for your business – What’s important here is that you try to be realistic with both the short term and long term goals that you want to achieve for your business. There’s no point in looking into expanding your business if you still haven’t cornered the small piece of market that you initially started in and stabilized your business. Likewise, making use of short term gimmicks to raise your traffic without any foresight as to how it could affect your site in the long run will end up hurting your business in the end. Try to lay out your plans as realistically as possible and try your best to achieve your goals one step at a time.
3. Drawing traffic to your site – Another common problem even veteran online marketers face sometimes, this isn’t something that can’t be easily solved in a short period of time. Even if you’re able to implement some good SEO practices to buoy your flagging traffic, it will still take a few weeks to see any real results come out of your efforts. What’s important though is that you’re able to implement some good organic methods to draw traffic into your site like obtaining good quality backlinks and creating a strong community of followers that will keep visiting your site.
4. Targeting the right keywords – This is actually comparable to the first challenge, but relies on you being a little more savvy on the technical aspect of your business, specifically keyword analysis. Similar to what I explained earlier, you’ll want to be a little specific when it comes to choosing the right keywords that will best describe your business. Try to focus on a specific niche within your industry that a lot of other competitors haven’t cornered quite yet. You can easily check these keywords through numerous tools like Google Ad Words or Market Samurai so you can see what kind of approach you’ll want to take in terms of getting the best keywords for your business.
Finally, three words to wrap up this discussion: don’t give up. Even I will admit that affiliate marketing is a tough business to get into, especially when you’re starting out. However, if you have the drive to overcome these challenges, you’ll be sure to succeed where others have decided to throw in the towel and just call it quits.
If you have any stories you want to share about how you overcame your own affiliate marketing challenges, feel free to tell us all about it in the comments section below.
Until then,
Andy Jenkins
No comments:
Post a Comment