As an affiliate marketer, there is a tendency to want to maximize conversions and profits, and it’s sometimes difficult to see the forest through the trees and easy to lose perspective of the greater goal of growing your business and expanding its scale.
Ultimately affiliates overcome five challenges to bring their business to the next level:
1) Master Plan and Consistent Action:
Having a list of goals/resolutions at the start of the year is pretty useless… unless you put in the action to back that up. Consistent, focused action, and refusing to get sidetracked by small, more interesting projects is what separates serious affiliates from those who have a myriad of “interesting” hobby affiliate sites.
2) A Systems-based Business Architecture:
As your marketing campaigns, with their components involving research, set up, tracking, analytics and optimization, become more sophisticated, so too will the need to document the processes and have step-by-step procedures to not only increase the probability of success when launching new campaigns, but it will also reduce the time taken to set them up.
Sitting down once a month to map out your business processes will give you a clear blueprint and help you identify your strengths which have led to successful campaigns.
Building on these strengths will likewise build your business. Checklists, flowcharts and procedures can aid in this process.
3) Business Leverage:
No matter how superhuman your resolve and physical endurance, you’re still limited to 24 hours a day. Looking at options like hiring employees, automating repetitive elements of your business by developing software or scripts to reduce manual labor, and outsourcing tasks outside of your expertise to experts can increase your effectiveness and efficiency.
This will free you to focus on high value activities like sourcing for new offers, as well as negotiating for better terms from merchants and networks.
4) Joint Ventures/Collaborations:
Partnerships are one of the best, and sometimes worst, ways to grow your business. In some cases, the partnership will not work out because each side had different expectations from the project and the reality doesn’t match up to it.
However, if the partnership works out, particularly if your partner complements your strength, this could be a classic case of 1 + 1 = 3.
5) Building a Long-term, Brand-based Business
Affiliate marketing is growing up. Thin affiliate sites created with appropriate About Us, Contact, and Privacy information pages to meet Google AdWords requirements are still out there, but the writing is on the wall. As the industry matures, users will look for full fledged destination/portal sites that they’ll be returning to for repeat purchases.
Success will be measured not just in conversions, but ultimately in repeat purchases.
Long term affiliate success will lie in rolling with the five forces that will help you shift your game to a higher level.
Andrew Wee blogs about blogging, affiliate marketing, and social media at http://WhoIsAndrewWee.com.
Download the entire FeedFront issue 5 here – http://feedfront.com/feedfront-issue5.pdf
FeedFront issue 5 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/article00category/issue-5
