By Don Ridgeway | Date Submitted July - 05 -2009

Keywords: affiliate business, MLM, Affiliate Marketing, Online Marketing
More Details about:  RCMG Marketing corner here
Summary:  small outline of some of the problems that affiliate marketers face and why they earn little or no money.

Why do the majority of affiliates never ever make a single check? Because... they are either doing it wrong, or not doing it at all. Yes, it's true that a small number of affiliates (super-affiliates) are making some very large incomes ($150,000+ per year). And a larger minority, roughly the top 2-3%, do earn lower-but-still-substantial amounts.

But the truth remains... the vast majority of affiliates fail to earn anything at all.

So What's The Problem?

Most affiliates fail due to one or more of the following four or more problems. All are avoidable/beatable, with the appropriate strategies and tools. Let's review

Problem #1 -- Failure to PrepareBy failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail, build your business before you start. Maybe you think that it’s "unproductive" to prepare and set up a system... But it's how the successful succeed.

The solution? Upfront thinking and planning... Put your business together and figure our what you need before you start.

Problem #2 -- No Website or Poor Website  (#1 credibility killer)   

You don’t need a great looking website, looks and feel are one thing functionality is another, make sure that your website is functional  this is the most important thing. If you have no idea about HTML codes (Hyper Text Makeup Language), it’s difficult to compete. After all it is expensive to hire a developer and graphic designer. And if you can code a website yourself almost everyone makes more than one of the following mistakes...

• host at a free Web hosting service (credibility killer#2)
• design a bad quality site, in looks and feel
• create poor content that does not hold a visitor's attention
• poor website structure and organization
• low content gateway or doorway pages
• failure to master the Search Engines.

All of these eat you up as an affiliate, and most never even figure out why! But the list goes on…

The solution? Go to www.templatemonster.com/ download free of charge a content management template. Coupled with that which you already know, turn it into a Theme-Based Content Site. Attract highly targeted, interested "PRE-customers", which you can in turn send to your affiliate merchants and vendors.

Problem #3 -- Little or No Traffic
Build traffic and your customers will come. One of your greatest challenges will be to drive traffic to the vendors website, but first you have to drive traffic to yours. This is one of the essential strategies that you must use when engaged in affiliate or online marketing, and one of the best ways to do this is trough social networking where you are in contact with not one but many niches. If you fail to do this you will be making a grave mistake because people choose to go to Web sites. They click on links or type in URLs. They make the decision. They have the power.

Not only through the conventional ways i.e.(Adwords/Adsense),drive traffic to your site through many different types of programs which are available to you such as, article publishing sites, or sites where you can advertise free, main thing, get traffic coming to your site. Always remember two things-Web Traffic and Relative Quality Content, if these two elements are DOMINANT, then you are on your way to a successful online business.

The solution? If you know how,            

• make the content of your web pages "attractive" to Search Engines
• track how each page performs on the major Search Engines, submission, spidering, indexing and finally Alexa and Page ranks
• develop more than one way to drive traffic to your site
• follow key traffic stats from a good log file analyzer
• assemble or created a wide variety of tools.  

Do these solutions sound out of reach for you? They used to be, not any more...

Problem #4 – No Buyers ListTo be successful or to be a failure, one does not necessarily out weigh the other, you have a 50-50 chance of success it’s all up to you. But how do you get potential customers to come to our site? This is where your bread and butter will come from, and many marketers will tell right off the bat that the money is in the LIST, this is true, but not only in the list, by having a LIST will not insure that you sell your products or services. You can have a large list of potential buyers, but how many will actually click on that buy now link to make a purchase.

The solution? Successful affiliates create not only a list, but a list of buyers.  

Recent Survey:
Question-Have you ever used Google Adwords to drive traffic to your website?
No 69.47%
Yes 31.53%

Question-Do you currently use Google Adwords to drive traffic to your site?
No 83.04%
Yes 16.96%

Conclusion:

** Almost 1 out of 3 marketers never used Adwords to market online.
And of those that DID try it, 50% of them stopped using the most powerful tool on the Internet. **

According to other surveys 25% of all affiliate marketers are new to the game, at least 20% are having trouble and about 5% can´t even surf the net. So what does all this tell you? Let me tie this all together for you. If you are a beginner marketer please do yourself the favour and familiarize yourself with the most basic things that you will need to know to be a successful marketer-and that is to prepare yourself before you take on the task of earning money with affiliate marketing.

Remember:

By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.

About The Author

Don Ridgeway CEO-RCMG Marketing Group help steer beginning marketers, entrepreneurs and start-up business owners in the right direction to help enhance the experience and profitability of their online business, by teaching them the value of recognizing and removing the 4 MAIN HURDLES which are keeping them from online success.