In my last email I mentioned I wanted to send you a gift and, while it's well past the time I intended, I hope that you'll find something useful below - inspiration, ideas, tips, and motivation to keep on plugging away to make this a profitable and successful New Year.
I answer a lot of emails with questions from people who built sites following blueprints they found online, strategies they found in ebooks, and methods they’re following from my own ebooks.
This gives me an overwhelming amount of information about what works, what doesn’t work and what growing affiliate marketers do that puts them just on the wrong side of seeing success.
Is this you? You've been trying for years without seeing a dime or you've reached an earnings plateau and just can't climb to that next level? If so, you're not alone.
We all learn a lot from doing
things the wrong way. Mistakes are like the mirrors in a carnival attraction. It looks like you’re going the right way, you bounce off the mirror and then you head in a different direction. Eventually you find your way out (or follow someone who seems to be making it through).
Listed below are the top 5 things I’ve seen really trip up many affiliate marketers. My hope is that you’ll recognize if you’re falling into one of these traps and use the information to change your course this year.
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#1 Mistake - Forgetting the Customer
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I’ve lost count of the number of emails that come to me and start with “I’ve got these keywords I’m targeting….”. The email usually contains additional questions like:
- How
do I make sure I’ve used my keyword enough?
- Do I write 5 posts all about the same keyword?
- Can I put 5 keywords all in one post?
Oh, keywords! They’re a necessary evil but its easy to place too much importance on them.
Keywords are a bridge. You’re REAL target is the audience on the other end of that bridge – the people who are entering those words into Google in order to find something.
If you’re too focused on keywords and not asking yourself if the content you’re writing for any keyword is going to be helpful and of value to the site visitor who lands on the page you’re creating then you’re missing something – something VERY important!
If you use keyword research to guide your writing the process should be: - Find the keyword and make sure there’s interest in that subject (the search volume)
- Figure out what people want to find when they’re searching for material on that keyword
- Look at what’s already online for that keyword and where those other resources are lacking in information and detail
- Make an outline that will cover everything you think is important for the searcher looking up that keyword
- Write the best content you can come up with for that keyword
Make sure that you have some balance between keyword focus and CUSTOMER focus.
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#2 Mistake - Relying too Heavily on Outsourcers
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I’m not knocking outsourcers at all. They can provide a valuable service – if used correctly. However, if your routine is 1) find keyword, 2) outsource article, and 3) publish article then you are missing some steps. (See the #1 issue above….)
An outsourcer is an employee. They’re a resource to help you do more in less time but if you’re relying on them to guide the content of the article then you’re handing over control of your site quality and visitor experience.
You should be deciding what needs to be in the article, you need to be involved in the research to make sure the right points are covered, you need to make sure that the article is absolutely unique and offers something different than articles that already exist on the subject, and you need to carefully check any outsourced work to make sure it’s not spun or scraped content.
This is especially an issue if your instructions to an outsourcer do nothing more than provide the writer a keyword and ask for an article of X words in length for that keyword.
When it comes to outsourcing articles you very much get what you pay for. Someone who writes 500 words for $5 a piece could maybe make $50 a day if they spent an hour per article and worked 10 hours a day. In the US, that wouldn’t even be minimum wage.
There’s a person on Fiverr right now who offers 500 word articles for $5, has over 150 jobs in the queue and has an average delivery time of 3 days. That person must be putting out over 50 articles a day in order to meet those numbers. If he’s working 10 hours a day it works out to about 10 minutes spent on one 500 word article.
Is that what you want to deliver to your customers? A 10 minute, 500 word, rushed article? Really, how valuable is that content going to be to your site visitor? There is no way that the writer could have the time to know your site, or the niche, or the needs of the target audience in that amount of time. They’re writing what amounts to fluff or filler for your
site.
If you're going to outsource, choose wisely and take control of the outcome. Give thorough instructions, guide the content, find a writer who can deliver the quality your visitors deserve and if you can't do that then you might be better off writing the content yourself and then spend a few
bucks to just have someone edit and clean up your writing.
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#3 Mistake - Believing Amazon Ratings
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There are some icky things happening on Amazon these days! I don’t know if they’ve always been there and I’m just seeing more of it lately or if the number of these instances is growing but I’m finding lots of products that are not worth of the ratings they have on Amazon.
If you’ve kept up with the news the past couple of years, Amazon has made some steps to sue companies who offer a service that will fake reviews on Amazon. One would think that would lead to a decrease in false reviews. Instead, I’m seeing MORE of them.
This is especially true of products being sold by third parties.
If you write a review of a product or recommend a product where the ratings have been earned through unethical
means you’re doing a disservice to your site visitor.
Knowing how to spot these things takes practice but here are some things to look for: - Product title on Amazon is keyword stuffed. Brand name retailers don’t put 30 words in their product title and Amazon doesn’t do that, either. If the seller on Amazon is trying to rank their phrase by making the product title field a giant list of keywords then they’re probably following some internet marketing strategy. If they’re following a strategy to use that field the chances are good they’re using other kinds of strategies to make their
product look better than it is. This is just a clue that you might look a little deeper into the product.
- READ THE REVIEWS – does the product have a bunch of ratings that all showed up at the same time and all are really short? That could be a sign of an issue. Are all the reviews done in poor English or look like spun versions of
each other? That’s a problem.
- Look at the ratings – Is there an obvious disparity between low ratings from verified purchasers and really high ratings from unverified purchasers? Not that verified purchase ratings can’t be bought, too, but it could be a signal of an issue if people who really bought it absolutely call a product a
piece of junk while all these unverified purchasers are giving a product 5 stars and writing “Great product!”.
- Look at the history of the review writer – If you click on the username for any rating given in Amazon you’ll find that person’s ratings history. Did they jump in, write a number of reviews all on the same day and then haven’t
been back to Amazon since? Do you see any patterns where the review writers for one product also all wrote reviews for the same other products?
Now, this isn't happening to all products sold by 3rd parties and not even to most of them but it's happening enough that you should learn to spot products where the reviews have signals
they may be untrustworthy.
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#4 Mistake - Ignoring the Importance of Data
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I’m sure I’ve said this before but it’s worth repeating. If you have access to traffic reports, Google Webmaster Tool (Search Console) reports, Google Analytics reports, and Amazon reports but don’t know how to make use of them you will have a hard time figuring out why you’re site isn’t working or you will miss out on opportunities for
improvements that could help you make more sales in a really short period of time.
At the very least, get to know these reports:
- Google Webmaster Tools/Search Traffic/Search Analytics – this tells you which phrases were looked up in Google in the past month where a URL for your site was presented in search results, the number of times (impressions) your site came up in search results for that phrase, the # of clicks you got from the impressions earned for that phrase, the click through rate you had for that phrase, and the average position in Google search results (your
ranking) for that phrase.
- Google Analytics/Audience/Users Flow – this tells you (by country) what your visitors are doing when they land on your site. If most users land on your home page and then leave without exploring any other pages then you may have a problem with the appearance of your site. The visitor
isn’t either seeing your navigation menu, the navigation tab items aren’t helpful in their quest, they think the site doesn’t look professional, they don’t trust the site or maybe you’re just getting bot traffic. You can use the other reports and filters inside Google Analytics to isolate your reports down to real users and weed out the bots to help make this information more useful. Google Analytics provides training for their reports. Take some time to go through
it.
If you've struggled with reports and have put this off - make this the year you turn that all around.
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#5 Mistake - Reading not Doing
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You're a wealth of information, you've been reading internet marketing forums for years, you've bought your share of ebooks and tools...but you haven't done anything with them.
Reading won't make you money (unless you're some sort of paid proofreader!). Only by actually doing something can you make any change in your life. If you want it bad enough, this is the year you'll put all that reading into action.
Find a method you want to try and start following the steps. Even if you follow them badly you'll be learning something you wouldn't have learned from any book - what works for you, what you like, what you can and can't do and how all the
pieces really work together to build something successful.
You're going to make mistakes. We all do! Count on it and don't be afraid of them. The only mistake you
might make that could really hurt your ability to move forward is to break the terms of service for some tool you're using. So, read the terms of service for everything you sign up to use and make sure to follow them. Other than that it's a pretty big, blue sky we're all looking at and it's your turn to reach up and grab a chunk of it!
All of the above boils down to a few, important things:
- TRY!
- Focus on your site visitor
- Give them a good experience by controlling and providing great
content
- Know your data and use it to your advantage
Really think about which of the above five mistakes might apply to you, decide you're going to make a change and DO IT.
You'll be glad you did!
Sincerely,
Erica Stone erica@extremereviewer.com
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