As someone that has helped countless affiliates make a killing in affiliate marketing, I have had the fortune of witnessing all of the common patterns that you might run into.
While there are an infinite amount of issues you can deal with in business, not all problems are created equal. Some problems affect your bottom-line more than others.
The list I have compiled for you is designed to be super-potent and give you an amazing return on your reading time. This is because I have included only the issues I have found to produce the most return on your investment when you work to handle them.
And if you’re an affiliate marketer, today is your lucky day as I’m going to share both the list of issues as well as the solutions to fix each and every one of them.
Lack of consistency
Look, I know that you’ve heard all the mantras about consistency. You might even know all those sayings like “consistency beats intensity”. And all of those things are true, in both business in general as well as life in general.
However, when it comes to affiliate marketing consistency is even more important. This is for several reasons, but the main one is email marketing.
As you might know, all the best affiliates produce most of their profits by utilizing email marketing. And when it comes to email marketing, engagement is king. That is, keeping up the engagement with your subscribers and not letting it falter or fall.
One of the most crucial things you can master to have a high engagement with your email marketing is to be consistent.
Shiny toy syndrome
One of the most-effective self-sabotage techniques that I witness amongst affiliates is the desire to chase the latest and shiniest toy in digital marketing.
Now, don’t get me wrong, staying ahead of the curve means that you have to stay ahead of the competition. However, you also have to realize that new technologies tend to go through a “beta” stage of sorts where their use and utility isn’t fully ironed out.
If you jump on a fancy new cutting-edge feature you are basically paying your provider to beta test this experimental feature. It almost always ends badly if you do this. It’s kind of similar to how people get burned when they jump onto new marketing channels too soon.
I advise that you see our super-popular article “Why Email Marketing is More Important Than Ever”. You will learn about some marketing horror stories which serve as a great lesson on what to avoid.
Now, back to cutting-edge features. To be a smart and effective marketer you need to wait for a technology to have a proven track record before you jump on the bandwagon. However, if you wait too long, your competitors might crush you.
So how do you strike the right balance. Well, fortunately there is an easy solution. It is called Emercury. We pride ourselves on the fact that we wait until a new marketing technology is established, before we hoist it upon our users. In fact we watch, we analyze, and we release at just the right time.
Even if you’re not an Emercury user (though you should be), you can watch our list of features. This will let you know if it’s safe to start using a new feature as an affiliate marketer.
Difficulty choosing a niche
If you’re like most affiliate articles you’re probably tired of hearing about finding the right niche. Well, here’s a secret, that advice is only half-correct. Yes, which niche you target will have a big bearing on how you do as an affiliate marketer.
The mistake most people make is getting too hung up on it. You don’t have to find “the perfect niche” to get started. And this is for several reasons that we reveal in our super popular guide – the best niches for affiliate marketing in 2021.
In short, if you get good at segmentation and cross-selling, it won’t matter what your initial niche is. In fact, you can treat the niche that you have them sign up with as merely an “entry point”. Once they are subscribers you use automation to automatically segment them based on their other interest. And over time, you might just move them to another related niche.
In other words, you’re not stuck with “a niche” forever. If you think in terms of looking at niches as “groups of niches”, you can move your subscribers around the group. And you can settle on investing more or less in one niche over time. All the while you’re selling products to the subscribers that you’re learning with and from. But to learn more about this idea, just check out our guide on picking the best niche for email marketing.
Failing to utilize automation properly, or at all
Do you want to save a ton of time, make your life as a marketer easier and boost profits manyfold? That’s easy, just start utilizing marketing automation.
Now, if you’re like most marketers, you probably already know about the power that automation can bring to your endeavors. However, you are most likely either underutilizing it, or not utilizing it properly. Or you might even be putting it off for later. Let’s tackle each of these issues all at once. They actually all stems from the same source – lack of proper guidance.
If you are feeling overwhelmed about the prospect of utilizing automation, it’s not your fault. Most people promoting automation will throw everything but the kitchen sink at you. They will just bombard you with information about automation, and it’s not easy to know where to start. There is no clear guide in terms of prioritization.
The fact is that most automation examples are not practical for a small business
And unless you have a full office of staff to set them up for you, it would take too much time to implement. That is, most of the automation examples you will see taught or talked about, are really things that are appropriate for a fortune 500 company.
The reason everyone discusses these automation examples is not because they are useful, but because they sound impressive. However, again, implementing them would take you too much time if you don’t have a full staff of people to handle the intricacies.
That’s why we do the opposite. When we discuss automation we always discuss the lowest, simplest examples that give you the best bang for your buck. And this is where you want to start. You can always make automation more complicated and intricate later on.
Start easy, get results today
Every automation that you can implement is an automation that saves you time and money. So it’s a good idea to start automating sooner rather than later. However, in order to do that you need to know what to automate.
There are 2 ways to get an answer to this. You can go ahead and read some of our guides on email automation. For example, in the guide to automating conversion we show you how to start off really simple, and only get more intricate over time.
Or, you can go fetch yourself an Emercury plan and enjoy access to a super-helpful team which will answer all of your automation questions. If you aren’t sure when to automate, what to automate, and how to get started, we are here to help.
And if you want to get a sense for our super-helpful attitude, feel free to book a demo with our team (while we still have spots for these). This will give you a sense for what it’s like to be with Emercury and no longer worry about challenges like these.
Inability to keep subscribers for the long haul
Most of your profits from a subscriber will come in the long run. Novice affiliates put all their effort on the quick buck right after a person signs up. However, if this is how you think, you will never reach the kind of profits that you deserve.
You need to think just like a regular business and think in terms of “lifetime value” of an email subscriber. It takes time to build a relationship with the subscriber. And only after this relationship is built do you get to a level where you just dish out recommendations and they buy what you recommend.
Now, the main problem I see with affiliates is that they might be strong on the front-end and do ok in the first few weeks, but then, it all fizzles out. Their lists grow into a collection of email addresses for people who have no desire to open their emails.
There are 2 bits of good news here. You can learn how to keep subscribers engaged for longer, you just have to focus on learning more about engagement.
And then, even when subscribers do go cold, you can still re-engage them and revive them. All you have to do is is create some quality re-engagement campaigns. To learn how to do this, just check out our article on creating killer re-engagement campaigns to revive subscribers.
Not knowing how to maximize profit per subscriber
Even if you solve the previous problem and do start thinking long-term with your subscribers, that’s just one side of the coin. Yes, keeping them engaged and happy for longer will produce more profit on its own.
However, you can and you should go a step further. And you do this by learning and implementing the main things which increase the life-time value of your subscriber.
The main things you will want to learn about are proper segmentation as well as intelligent cross-selling and upselling. To learn more, check out these 7 segmentation hacks and see the beginner’s guide to up-selling and cross-selling.
An inability to produce valuable content
The most successful affiliate marketers all have one thing in common. They produce a ton of valuable content. This creates engagement, trust and loyalty with their subscribers. And that right there is the golden ticket to maximizing your affiliate marketing profits.
Nothing will ever come close to producing sales as giving a purchase recommendation to a person who trusts you. And while this can be a rather deep and wide subject, it can also be made simple.
All you have to do is produce a lot of valuable content on a subject and gain authority in that way. But how do you actually do this? Well, there is no quick and easy answer. It is actually a skill.
In fact, it is the core skill you will need to develop as an affiliate marketer. Fortunately, we have some great article to help you get good at this skill.
First, you might want to take a look at our article called: Sex, Lies & 19 Super Simple Hacks For Writing Better Emails. Then, you might want to check out this guide: Using Customer Psychology For Effective Email Marketing. And if you want to learn what to avoid, go ahead and have a look at this list here: 10 Content Mistakes That Can Damage Your Email Marketing Campaigns.
This will give you a good head start to start working on and improving your value-producing skill. But how do you know that you’re making progress? How do you measure this? Well, the good news is that there is a singular metric which tells you everything you need to know – it’s called engagement.
And all you have to do in order to track your engagement is to follow your open rates and click-through rates. This is quite easy to do if you’re an Emercury user. In fact, we even include it with free accounts. But hurry up and get your forever-free account if you haven’t already, we might remove the option at any time.
Not knowing what to prioritize, feeling overwhelmed
Do you ever feel overwhelmed trying to make affiliate marketing work for you? Perhaps you feel like there are too many things to master, and not enough time.
Well, a good chunk of that has to do with prioritization and quality information. Most digital marketing information out there is actually written by ghost-writers with no real-world experience in running a business. This is why they just randomly throw a bunch of information at you.
What you need is a prioritization system. You need to have a hierarchy of things that you need to master and implement, and then do those things in order.
Fortunately for you, we try to do that in every guide we release. We don’t just throw a bunch of information at you without order. That isn’t very helpful. We actually try to point out the hierarchy of the steps, and the order in which you might want to tackle them.
One good example of this is our guide on implementing email automation in your affiliate marketing. We go from the easiest and simplest “implement straight away” level, and then show you how to make it more complex over time. And we do this by presenting things in levels of complexity.
So, if you haven’t bookmarked this blog, do that. Or even better yet, fetch yourself a forever-free Emercury account while we’re still giving those away. Aside from getting the best free-plan on the planet, you’ll also get a spot on our newsletter where we send you our best secrets and guides about twice a month. And a lot of them (sometimes most of them) are about affiliate marketing.
A partner on your side – we love affiliate marketers
The biggest issue that you will run into as an affiliate marketer is that feeling of being all alone. It will feel like nobody is on your side, or even supports what you do. And I’m not talking about just your personal life.
I mean that a lot of online vendors will have an unfounded mistrust of affiliate marketers. In fact, this has been one of the main reasons for our success here at Emercury. At a time when other email providers were turning affiliates away, Emercury welcomed them with open arms.
Aside from that Emercury is made up of people who truly understand and breathe affiliate marketing. This is probably why most of our raving fans and loyal subscribers are affiliate marketers. They say that Emercury makes them feel welcome and like they are a part of a team.
And this is no accident. When you get an Emercury plan we see you as a business partner, not as a customer. We have this philosophy that if you succeed at affiliate marketing, you will need more of our services. So we are in this together with you.
If you want to get a sense for this magical Emercury experience, request your free demo over here (while we still have spots left on our calendars). Isn’t it about time that you were treated with respect as an affiliate marketer?
Give us a try for free with this free personal, hands-on, one-on-one demo, and see how you feel about the experience.
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