Background
Challenges that beginners face in affiliate marketing are so many, one article won’t easily contain them all. So in this post, it’s not about the challenges of new affiliate marketers. Instead, it’s about those who have been doing affiliate marketing for some time now.
I came up with this post after seeing this question being asked on many platforms. And as an affiliate marketer with a good level of experience myself, I decided to point you in the right direction.
So in this post, I’ll be sharing with you that direction. Before we set out, in case you’re interested, here’s a training on how to make money online.
Now let’s begin!
The Direction
Ask most affiliate marketers who have been around for a while what their main challenges have been, and they will tell you something that concerns the “T-L-C marketing mix” i.e. Traffic – Leads – Conversion.
This is not a new thing. Even offline, most businesses struggle with these. That is why – for example – businesses make the effort to be located on busy streets – where there’s traffic. Without traffic, they will hardly get people coming around who are interested in their products/services (i.e. leads), and won’t eventually get sales (i.e. conversion) – which is their ultimate goal.
So you see it’s the very same challenge that exists offline. However, offline it tends to be easier to address because it’s all physical. You can see where the traffic is. So you only need to position your business in that location and the rest falls in place.
Online is a different environment. Although it’s the same challenge, this time around, you’ll need to introduce a number of complimentary elements to get things working properly.
Let’s do a lil’ review of the T-L-C mix for that purpose.
1. Traffic
Offline, businesses target busy streets and front spaces to get traffic. Online as well, they seek locations where there’s traffic: social media, forums, Q & A platforms, website, etc.
There’s even paid traffic that can put a business before many eyes. So in the T-L-C mix, traffic in itself is not much of an issue. It is – to a great extent – easy to get. Just position your business on a ‘busy street’ i.e. where you have many ‘people’ going and coming, and you’ll get traffic.
The issue is finding the right traffic for your offer! i.e. leads. That’s much harder to achieve.
2. Leads
Several years ago, traffic online could be approached almost the same as offline. You only needed to post links on social media – for example – to get people clicking and expressing interest in your offer. I know an affiliate marketer who created a website, uploaded less than fifty posts with affiliate links in them, went about ‘pointing people’ (from Facebook) to those articles, and got tons of referrals. And since then, they’ve done nothing else to promote their business. Strategies as easy as that were quite effective in the past. But there has been a lot of deception (scams) and so online traffic have adapted a more difficult attitude. They’ve become very skeptical of ‘offers’ – even when the offers are genuine.
Offline, people have the benefit of the physical. They can see and physically visit your business, touch the product, assess your level of sincerity, etc. So they tend to trust you/your brand faster than they do online. It’s because of the trust factor that marketing videos tend to do better than other forms of marketing content online. The audience build trust faster because they can see the marketer.
As there’s the problem of trust at this level, to get leads (i.e. those interested in your offer which is also referred to as “warm traffic”), that’s where the greatest challenge lies. You have to build trust with your audience which is where the real work lies. Building trust comes through consistent content production.
Whether it is on social media, a website or any other platform, regular content creation attracts those who are genuinely interested in your offer (i.e. the leads). And this sure takes time – something most marketers do not have the patience to do. This is where most would be marketers fail.
3. Conversion
Producing content regularly says to your audience that you are an authority in your niche, and that you mean business. Once this gets engraved in their minds, it is at that point that the conversion (i.e. your leads becoming actual customers) finally take place.
But as I mentioned, this doesn’t happen overnight.
You may have access to traffic easily – perhaps by paying for it. (Note: Paid traffic is not necessarily the right traffic and in many cases do not produce leads). But it’s your consistent content production that will really identify leads for your offer which – by the help of CTA – will convert over time.
This is the online sales process summarized. However, as indicated earlier, most affiliate marketers do not get the lead-building part correct. They may have traffic, but with the lead part not approached as it should, their traffic hardly or never converts into customers.
That is where the problem actually lies, resulting in most affiliate marketers not making any money online.
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