How many affiliate marketers are too many?

Conventional wisdom says that no solid product, eBook or service, will lack for new customers. With the right pitch and the right price point, you can pretty much sell anything. But what happens if you and I, and the person next door, and hundreds of other people are all trying to sell the same product, will we run out buyers?

For any single individual product, maybe. If nothing else, even the best eBook is going to be outdated at some point. But the most successful affiliate marketers don’t stick to one product. Whether or not you are selling your own product, the resell rights, or just pitching someone else’s eBook, the best diversify their portfolio so that no one single product makes or break their profit potential.

Still, I think it is fair to say that it is not easy competing in the affiliate world. It is our own fault really; affiliates have long perpetuated the myth that affiliate marketing is easy money. That customers come and buy and there are no returns and little fraud - and all you have to do is just start and you will be successful. That very notion was the reason I got into the affiliate game.

Maybe at one time, it was easier to compete, but now there is some very real competition that you have to contend with to be a successful affiliate.

Pay Per Click Advertising

Even if you know what you’re doing, beating the competition in pay per click advertising is a gamble and a lot of work. You have to identify highly targeted keywords. You have to write ad text that compels your prospective customers to click with the intent to buy. Then you have to have a landing page that either converts sales, or collects e-mail addresses - and if you are promoting someone else’s product, you have no control over that at all (except not to promote it.) And then you have to position your ad with a pay per click advertising program so prospective customers can find it.

That is a lot of factors, without even addressing the costs of advertising and your competition. Beating your competition in pay per click advertising means pricing yourself over the top of them, bidding on obscure keywords - which for practical purposes, there is no such thing anymore - or promoting a niche product targeting a specific interest group which may very well mean a limited demand.

Website Marketing

A lot of people, rather than promote others’ products directly, send everyone to their own website and promote from there, or through auto responders. This is deceptively simple idea. There is no competition because the site is wholly yours, and you can saturate the page with advertising.

The problem, of course, two fold. One problem is generating traffic to your site. If you do it organically, it can take months to be at the top of search engines, and you have to continually add new content. And though the current model rewards you for inbound links from other highly ranked sites, gaining any is rarely a fluid process. The upside is that your costs are limited to purchasing the domain and paying for hosting. The downside is that you may never see a single targeted visitor for weeks while other established marketers are selling the same product that whole time. And furthermore, you always have to be thinking about what you are offering your visitors that is both unique and persuasive to buy.

The other problem is web users are banner blind, and banner blockers are as common as pop-up blockers now. There are programs that will wholesale block any ad script from loading in a user’s browser, which effectively means 90% of your advertising is for nothing.

One of the unfortunate trends that doesn’t make competing by having your own website any easier is the prevalence of websites that aggregate content. You promote your presence on ezine or other article submission sites, and a website aggregator picks up the first paragraph and targets the ezine article, not your own homepage. Not only are these aggregators not really effectively promoting your article, they are not linking back to your webpage. Furthermore, their own sites are just garbage because there is no original content and not even full length articles. So you are competing not just with legitimate websites but also with aggregator sites.

Product Development

Can you develop your own product that is a truly unique offering? It is simple enough to copy the gist of another eBook and just call it your own, but people are pretty skeptical about the quality of eBooks. And the last thing that will endear you to your affiliates (and for that matter, Clickbank) is to have a product that produces a lot of returns.

On the other hand, developing a quality product requires that you have an area of specialization, whether in a niche market or a broader market, and some intangible benefit to distinguish your product from the rest. Well, if that’s all it takes, right?

Fortunately, even with the competition, there is success out their for affiliate marketers. It’s not easy money, and there are a lot of people trying to do the exact same thing you are. But even for all the obstacles, just know that your success or failure won’t hinge on what the competition is doing.

Being an affiliate requires an investment of time to start and maintain a successful campaign. You can save yourself some wasted energy by conducting your research and planning upfront. Armed with a product to sell, your objective in hand, you now need to tackle these essential tasks before you launch your campaign: research keywords, writing the pitch, and getting the word out.

Research keywords

There’s no excuse to not to do the proper keyword research for your product. First, you need a list of potential keywords, which you can generate from the product’s sales page. You can also use the keyword tool provided by Adwords to find a collection of related terms. Once you have a larger list of potential keywords, you need to narrow down the list to viable keywords.

Here’s a simple way to start: type in a prospective keyword for your product and look at the ads that show up on the results page. Are the ads promoting the same product that you are? More to the point, do the ads seem to be promoting only one product, or a number of products on a number of topics?

Whenever you do keyword research, you need to keep in mind what you are looking for. How targeted is the keyword? That is, how likely is the person searching for the keyword also searching for, and willing to purchase, your product? How much competition does the keyword have for your product, or similar products? How frequently is the keyword searched for at all?

Both Yahoo! and Google have keyword tools that will give you detailed information on each keyword so that you can reduce your trial and error before you ever start your campaign.

Writing the Pitch

Depending on your campaign, your pitch can be either ad text or an article.

Regarding ads, as much as possible, your keyword should be appear somewhere within the ad, either as part of the headline or display url. If you have a lot of keywords that don’t appear within the ad at all, think carefully about how targeted those words truly are. Remember, people searching for a particular keyword should be prepared to either come across your product, or even better, prepared to purchase your product. If they are searching for something else entirely, then you have the wrong keywords. On the flipside, if your keywords are highly targeted but not contained within the text of your ad, you should think about rewriting your ads.

Regarding articles, whether your article is intended as a sales pitch, or informational, it is important to watch your keyword density. Density is really the number of times a particular word or term appears on a webpage, but it’s good practice to pay attention to the density of the keywords for your product.

Getting the Word Out

You need to plan how you will spread the word about your product. Every method has its pros and cons and it is useful to do some research about each before you launch your campaign. At best, it will save you some wasted time and effort, possibly even some money, rather than learning through trial and error.

For example, right now Google Adwords is the definitive company to run ads on keyword search results. But being the best means a lot of your competitors are using it too, and the service isn’t free. Even if you can get your cost per click down to pennies, that is still money you have to spend first before you have even made a dime.

As another example, an article submission site (like Ezine) is a great way to start advertising your product because spiders index new articles from those sites quickly. However, by submitting your article, you are giving permission to have your article republished almost anywhere on the internet. In addition to legitimate reuse of your article, bots sometimes steal partial text from your article and republish it with some words replaced or altered. The result is that your article is butchered and unreadable. Though this practice violates the rules of submission, it is generally difficult to track them all down and the best you can hope for is an intact link back to your article.

In order to be a successful affiliate, it’s essential to plan ahead before you start your campaign. A little planning and research can go a long way to ensuring your time is spent wisely.