Seven Sins of Affiliate Marketing - LinkTrackr

Death of an Affiliate The Seven Sins of Affiliate Marketing By Gobala Krishnan @ LinkTrackr.com Affiliate marketing is sexy. Promoting someone else’s products online, anonymously, no face‐to‐face communication, no high pressure sales methods, and still earning a huge commission is mind‐blowing to most people. . Other great benefits‐‐ you don’t have to worry about customer support, replying to emails, or delivery of the product. In addition, you’re free to make money promoting any type of product in any niche market. Yes, affiliate marketing is awesome! However, in the heat of the excitement, caught up in the hype, most new affiliates commit some grave mistakes that will come back to haunt them time and again. This report reveals the deadliest “affiliate marketing sins” that all affiliates commit at one point or another. You may be committing some, or all of them, without even realizing it. If you’re not committing any of them, to any extent, you’re lying ☺ This is not a report that tells you what to do. It tells you what NOT to do, and explains why. The Seven sins of affiliate marketing are: Sin #1: Promoting Too Many Products ....................................................................... 2 Sin #2: Falling in Love with the Product ...................................................................... 6 Sin #3: Not Doing More of What Works ..................................................................... 7 Sin #4: Putting All Your Eggs in Google’s Basket ......................................................... 7 Sin #5: Not Leveraging on Free Social Traffic ............................................................ 13 Sin #6: Wasting Time on Non‐Profitable Tasks ......................................................... 17 Copyright 2010 LinkTrackr.com | 1

Sin #1: Promoting Too Many Products Our instincts tell us that the more products we promote, the more money we’ll make. It’s common sense, right? Well actually, you couldn’t be more wrong. Promoting too many affiliate products at a time will result in you making less money, not more. Here’s why: Only a handful of affiliate products really sell. The rest are just a waste of your time. Let’s say you decide to start a blog about losing weight, and you want to monetize your traffic by promoting a digital product from ClickBank. A quick look at the ClickBank marketplace (http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm) from just the “Health and Fitness” category reveals numerous options to choose from:

Copyright 2010 LinkTrackr.com | 2

Here’s the problem: Do you know how to determine which products are profitable? To try and promote all of them is a big waste of time; especially when ClickBank already tells you which products perform the best. They actually tell you which ones you should promote, if you know what to look for. There are two important numbers you should focus on, which are:


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Total $/sale – This tells you the average commission per sale, which is how much you earn when you make a sale of the product. This includes the initial commission and recurring commissions, if any.

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Grav – “Gravity” tells you the number of unique affiliates who earned a commission by promoting a particular product over the past 12 weeks. This tells you that a lot of affiliates make money by promoting it, and you probably will too. Products with a Gravity of more than 100 are guaranteed to sell. You can ignore the rest when you’re just getting started with affiliate marketing.

The average commission per sale (Avg. $/sale) for products can be misleading and should not be a factor in choosing products to promote. Here’s why: Just because a product pays you 75% commission doesn’t mean that you’re going to make more money from it. If the product does not sell, 75% of zero is still zero. At the end of the day, it’s how much commission you actually earn, not the commission percentage that matters. As you can see, it’s easy for you to tell which ClickBank products to promote. The same goes for Commission Junction (www.cj.com). Browsing through the “Financial Services” category you can see the total “Network Earnings” for individual products:


Commission Junction doesn’t publish the exact formula, but generally speaking the more green bars a product has, the higher the number of affiliates who have made money promoting it. Again, this tells you which products you should focus on. Seems easy, doesn’t it? Here’s the catch: Since these stats are readily available, chances are high that everyone else is promoting the same products. In other words, you’re competing with thousands of other affiliates who are also looking to promote only the best known products. You’ll have a tougher time getting SEO traffic, or buying PPC (Pay Per Click) ads. The way out of this is to find an affiliate program that is not part of any network.


This is what we call a “standalone” affiliate program ‐ where the affiliate tracking system, marketing resources and payouts are handled directly by the product owner. In this case, there will not be much in the way of stats published by the product owner. You have no reference to the profitability of the products and must find out for yourself. This is when you need to track your affiliate promotions and come up with your own stats. This is what separates the Super Affiliates from the newbies. Here’s why: Discovering profitable affiliate programs that aren’t part of affiliate networks is tough, especially if you don’t have the right tools to do it. However, the payoff can be incredible – it can even make you rich. If you’re just getting started, you need the right tools for the job. If you don’t have them, just stick to the same programs that everyone else is promoting. You won’t get rich, but you will make your first commission for sure!

Sin #2: Falling in Love with the Product Every once in a while, you come across a product that is “exactly what you’ve been looking for all this time”. It is high‐quality, works great, has a thousand features, and does everything you want it to do. This is when most affiliates go into “evangelist” mode. They fall in love with the product. They get emotional about the product, which in most cases they have used and are extremely satisfied. They are convinced that this product is heaven‐sent and everyone should buy it. They then set out on a crusade to convince everyone else to buy it. They create product reviews, video tutorials, landing pages, and optimized ad campaigns to sell the product. Nevertheless, after weeks, they still haven’t sold a single copy. But, that doesn’t deter them. Instead, they keep thinking that maybe it’s their fault. “I can improve my copywriting. I can find more targeted buyers...” they keep telling themselves. When you fall in love with a product, you’re irrational. You forget to look at the numbers, even though they are staring you in the face. You get frustrated. The truth is, not all great products sell well. A product may be the best in the market, but if the product owner does a poor job at marketing it, it will not sell. Ask yourself: Are you promoting affiliate products right now that haven’t made you any money in the past three months? If you are, it’s time to get real. Copyright 2010 LinkTrackr.com | 6

Sin #3: Not Doing More of What Works If something works, do more of it. I know, again it sounds like plain old common sense, right? However, here’s the truth: Most affiliates do the exact opposite. They do more of what is not proven to work, instead of doing more of what already works for them. Consider this scenario... You sign up for an affiliate program, and immediately set out to promote it. You talk about it on FaceBook. You Tweet your affiliate link to your followers. You write a product review on your blog. You submit an article to free article sites. After an exhausting day, you login to your affiliate account to find that you’ve made one sale. Yahoo!! You’re excited and pumped up to do more the next day. However, here’s the question: Where did that sale come from? Did it come from FaceBook, or Twitter? Did it come from your blog, or from the free article you submitted? Unless you can answer this question, it’s better for you not to do anything at all. You will most probably end up doing more of what didn’t work, instead of what made that one sale. The secret of all Super Affiliates is that they know exactly where their sales come from. They have sophisticated in‐house tracking systems and make extensive use of campaigns, sub campaigns, Google Analytics and other types of tracking software. They are able to pinpoint the source of a sale, which allows them to divert their money and energy to that source, thus allowing them to triple their affiliate commissions without any additional effort or money.

Sin #4: Putting All Your Eggs in Google’s Basket Google is the largest source of web traffic on the planet, or at least it used to be (I’ll get to that in a while), and there’s no denying that you can make a lot of money in affiliate marketing from both the free and paid traffic from Google. Most new affiliates tend to spend way too much time, and place way too much trust in Google, especially in Google’s AdWords (http://adwords.google.com) PPC program. Copyright 2010 LinkTrackr.com | 7

When it was first launched in 2002, Google AdWords was a godsend. It was easy to sign up for AdWords and create your first affiliate ad. In less than 15 minutes, your ads could be seen by anyone, anywhere in the world when they did a highly targeted search in Google. Instantly, you could send targeted traffic to the merchant and make a decent commission. Since almost all except the highly competitive keywords in Google AdWords cost you a minimum of $0.05 a click, you could easily make a profit. In addition, as long as you had some copywriting skills and the right know‐ how, you can easily pay much less by optimizing your ads to generate higher CTRs. Simply put, any fool could have made money from affiliate marketing in 2002, thanks to Google Adwords. However, things started to change rapidly since 2004. AdWords became mainstream, and Google went public. That attracted even more Fortune 500 companies, and thousands of ad agencies, to Google AdWords. Once these big companies got on board, they were calling the shots. It was about that same time that Google got arrogant. They forgot all about the little people who helped them build Adwords into what it is today. They started focusing only on the big dogs. Adwords became more complex, and the price of keyword bids skyrocketed. Google changed their terms of service, tweaked their algorithm, and introduced more barriers to entry for the average Joe like you and me. Even if you do manage to follow everything Google says to the teeth, how would they reward you? They probably rewarded you by: 1. Giving you a Google slap (like in 2008) or 2. Banning your account for life with no warning whatsoever. In 2009, I was shocked and suspicious when I received an email from the Google Adwords Team informing me that my account had been banned for life.


They didn’t bother to explain exactly why, and there was no opportunity to ask questions or give feedback. My account was active for over 5 years, and I never had any problems with it. No warnings, no temporary bans, nothing. Emails to their support received the same canned messages repeatedly. Then, I realized I was not alone. A quick search online revealed that a lot of other affiliate marketers had received the boot from Google, with no warning whatsoever. Additionally,, just like me, they were banned for life. Here are some online posts related to Google bans, including some very well‐known affiliates and marketers:


Source: http://zacjohnson.com/my‐google‐adwords‐account‐was‐banned/


Source: http://www.warriorforum.com

Source: http://www.jonasblog.com/2008/01/suspended‐from‐google‐adwords.html


Source: http://www.dotcult.com/adwords‐account‐banned‐for‐keyword‐research You may assume that since you’re paying Google money to use their advertising platform, you’re their “partner” in some way. In fact, you would expect at least some sort of professionalism and courtesy. You’re wrong. Here’s the fact: Affiliate marketers are low life scum in Google’s world. They will terminate you whenever they want to, and you cannot do a thing about it. Google Adwords is now too expensive for most affiliate marketers anyway. The cost per click for almost any profitable search term (keyword) is too expensive, and Google has made Adwords way too complicated for the average Joe.


In fact, most new affiliate marketers fail because of Google Adwords. They either got duped into believing that Adwords will make them rich overnight (which was possible in 2002 right up to late 2005) and spend their hard earned savings buying a thousand clicks in a single day. Google Adwords is dead, at least for the average affiliate like you and me. If you put all your eggs in Google’s basket, you have no Plan B. When they kick you out, you have nothing left.

Sin #5: Not Leveraging on Free Social Traffic If you’ve had bad experiences with Google AdWords and SEO, it’s easy to think that you’re doomed. After all, those are the two most common affiliate marketing methods taught in eBooks and seminars. The solution: FaceBook, Twitter and other social media sites. FaceBook itself is now larger than Google (unique visitors) according to Compete.com, a trusted source of web analytics:

With so much traffic on the table, you simply cannot ignore social media. However, there’s a lot of misinformation about social media marketing. The gurus seem to tell you that you need a huge Twitter follower list, or a huge FaceBook friend base. In truth, you need neither. It will take you months to build a huge Twitter follower list, and months to add thousands of friends in FaceBook. You don’t need to do the hard work yourself, especially if others have already done it for you! Copyright 2010 LinkTrackr.com | 13

What am I talking about? I am talking about leverage: Use other people’s followers and friends to your advantage! There’s nothing unethical about using leverage. In fact, think of it as “word of mouth marketing” using the Internet. You don’t need a million friends personally to have word‐of‐mouth marketing for your business. All you need is a couple of friends, who have a couple of friends, who in turn also have a couple of friends. However, how do you capture the power of word‐of‐mouth marketing on the Internet? Ask yourself: How many times have you seen this in the past week: Or this: Or even this: It seems like everyone wants to share everything nowadays, doesn't it? People share photos, events, applications and even those annoying games on FaceBook. However, most importantly, they share websites! Here's a powerful thought: What if you could get them to share your affiliate link instead? Look at the picture below, from one of my own sites. FaceBook users have shared this single article 305 times. That means that a link to my site has been posted on 305 different profile pages on FaceBook.

305 shares do not equal 305 visitors or clicks to your site, because anything you share on FaceBook can be viewed by all your friends. What if a single person who shared that post had 200 friends in his profile and only 1% clicked on his shared link? 305 shares X 200 friends x 1% clicked = 610 clicks Of course, the average active FaceBook user has way more than 200 friends. In fact, most of my friends each have between 500 ‐ 800 friends on FaceBook. Copyright 2010 LinkTrackr.com | 14

Assuming your friends have an average of 500 friends each, and 1% of their friends click on your affiliate link, you get: 305 shares X 500 friends x 1% clicked = 1525 clicks Question: How much money would you have spent with a typical Google Adwords campaign, assuming you paid $0.50 per click? Answer: A shocking $626 of your hard earned cash! Here’s the truth: People want to share good websites they discover on the Internet. They have a place to share ‐ FaceBook and Twitter ‐ and they do so willingly. In fact, most Internet users are so addicted to sharing by now, that's its almost impossible to stop them from doing so. Additionally, just like word‐of‐mouth advertising, your potential customers hear about your product or service from their friends – someone they trust to some extent – and are more open about buying. You simply cannot get that kind of warm, engaged traffic from advertising on Google or anywhere else for that matter! Our LinkTrackr software makes it easy for affiliate marketers to leverage the power of personal recommendation and social media to get free, targeted traffic directly to their affiliate links, using our unique “Viral Bar” technology. Here’s what our Viral Bar looks like:

1. LinkTrackr completely cloaks your affiliate links with a “pretty link” Instead of something like http://gobala.cwswealth.hop.clickbank.net/ which clearly shows it’s an affiliate link, you can use an easier to remember and prettier link like http://gobala.linktrackr.com/consumerwealth


Your actual affiliate link is hidden in the browser. This prevents affiliate link theft, and makes your links more professional. In fact, you can use your own domain name to control your branding, for example http://www.gobalarecommends.com/consumerwealth 2. LinkTrackr allows people to share your cloaked affiliate link via social media. Our viral bar adds the most common (and popular) sharing tools like the Twitter “Retweet”, FaceBook “Like” and FaceBook “Share” ones you see in the screenshot. Whenever someone shares your cloaked link, they are in fact sharing your cloaked affiliate link. Anyone in his or her friend network or follower list who clicks on the shared link is actually clicking on your affiliate link. When any one of them buys the product, you get the commission, not the person who shared your link. It’s mind‐boggling, isn’t it? With almost no effort on your part, you can create a viral affiliate marketing system and leverage existing social media networks to drive unlimited, free traffic to your affiliate sites. Here’s the BIG question: Does it really work? While in beta testing, we opened up our software to several users, and the results were shocking. Here are the stats from my own account, after using it for about 2 weeks:


I admit I am not the most social person on FaceBook or Twitter. I don’t have a huge friend list of die‐hard followers. I’m just an average person, as far as social media is concerned. My results can be considered “typical” – but it’s still awesome considering I’ve only been using LinkTrackr for two weeks! Here are some shocking stats from another beta tester, who is fairly active in social media marketing:

As you can see, this user achieved amazing feedback and participation on FaceBook (he’s not active in Twitter), and his top link was shared 22 times and “Liked” by 103 people. He would have received hundreds (if not thousands) of visitors to his affiliate link from FaceBook alone. What’s more amazing is that he’s only been using LinkTrackr for one week. So forget about paying money to arrogant Google Almighty. Forget about building blogs and working on it like a dog for months hoping to get a top 10 ranking on Google. Forget about hard work. There’s always an easier, smarter way to make affiliate marketing work.

Sin #6: Wasting Time on NonProfitable Tasks This is so common, that even the super affiliates admit to doing it from time to time. The list of time wasting activities are too huge to list out here, but let’s address the most common ‐ meddling with scripts and free software that don’t work, or are just plain redundant. For some reason, new affiliate marketers seem to think that brand new affiliate marketing software capable of doing complex stuff will help them make more money online. It won’t. Copyright 2010 LinkTrackr.com | 17

Every time you install new software, there’s a learning curve involved. You need to understand how to install it, and how to make it work. Moreover, you probably also have to keep updating the software. Every time you install an updated version, something will break. Then you’ll have to spend even more time trying to figure out what went wrong, and how to fix it. All this derails you from what you should really be doing – getting more traffic to your affiliate links and making more sales. You don’t need complicated software, but you do need at least one effective affiliate marketing software. During my eight years experience promoting products and services as an affiliate, I have made many of the mistakes above time and time I’ve tried many different affiliate marketing software products, but all of them were either too difficult to use, or didn’t do what they were supposed to do. That’s why I decided to take things into my own hands, and build an effective affiliate marketing solution from the ground up. Our LinkTrackr (www.linktrackr.com) solution is poised to become one of the top affiliate marketing systems, and it’s so easy to use you’ll never need to read the “user guide”. Here’s how LinkTrackr can help your affiliate marketing efforts. 1. Cloak, Manage and Track Affiliate Links LinkTrackr helps you manage all your affiliate links in one place. You can easily see how many clicks you get each day for your affiliate links, and even create “on‐the‐fly” sub campaigns to track all your advertising campaigns. 2. Free Viral Traffic from FaceBook and Twitter Leverage on the need to share using social sites like FaceBook and Twitter. Let your friends share you affiliate links to their friends, and to the friend of their friends, all without any extra effort on your part. 3. Integrates Easily with WordPress Blogs Automatically convert keywords on your blog into your affiliate links, and double your affiliate commissions with almost no extra effort. You can use the same LinkTrackr account with an unlimited number of blogs. 4. Easy To Use, Hassle‐Free Software


LinkTrackr is 100% web‐based, which means that there are no scripts to install and no tedious upgrades to deal with. All you need to do is to login to your web interface. Since all updates and improvements are automatically served to your account, you will always be using the latest and greatest version of LinkTrackr. Here’s how my LinkTrackr dashboard looks:

At a glance, you can see your top affiliate links, and know exactly where all your traffic is coming from. This helps you make smart decisions on where to spend your time and money. Now you can put all your time and energy into productive tasks like generating traffic, finding better affiliate products to promote, and making more affiliate commissions!

Click Here to Create Your Account Now. or visit: www.linktrackr.com Copyright 2010 LinkTrackr.com | 19

Wait.. What happened to Sin# 7?


Ok, here it is... Sin #7 – Not Taking Action I’m not going to make a big deal out of this sin, because it’s the hardest to swallow, and not something that you want to hear. At the right time, you need to do the right thing. You need to take action. Not doing so is a bigger mistake than all the previous six sins combined. Think about this: What happens when you know exactly what you’re doing wrong, and yet you do nothing to correct it? You get nowhere. You achieve nothing. If you want to get your affiliate marketing back on track with the right tools for the job, I strongly recommend that you check out what LinkTrackr has to offer. You can signup and start using our software in under 5 minutes, and there are no huge upfront fees to deal with. You can cancel anytime, You can make it work with your WordPress blogs. We’ll be constantly improving and upgrading LinkTrackr based on your needs. It’s the right thing to do. So do it. Create your account here: www.linktrackr.com Wishing you all the best in your affiliate marketing efforts!
