Netalot

Internet marketing has been growing in leaps and bounds. Many new people are streaming onto the Internet in the hope of being able to make some money either to supplement an income or to establish a business that will allow them to work for themselves.

One of the easier business models to enter is the affiliate marketing platforms. Regrettably, as with all things where there are low barriers to entry, making money with an affiliate program is not that easy.

It seems an easy concept. Use somebody else’s product, market and sell it, make money and retire. It is especially attractive when so called online marketing gurus tell you all about how they set up their sites and go on holiday while this automated process continues to ring the cash register.

Add to this concept of selling somebody else’s product the idea that there are mega millions of customers online and that even the most remote interest group has thousands of followers, it is easy to understand that the internet marketer might think that there will be easy pickings to be had.

What could be easier than a product and a huge interested market? This is the question that many failed internet marketers ask themselves as they leave their computers behind wondering where all that time went they spent trying to make this work. Further wondering why this time gave them absolutely no return.

Probably one of the concepts about Internet marketing that is forgotten is that the shopping space is different. Many of us tend to think of the Internet as being similar to the real world.

We put up a table with our product, or somebody else’s product, at the Saturday market. People walk past, look at the goods and decide whether they want to buy or not. We put our best bits in the front to attract people, we have a huge smiling and welcoming face and we greet everybody who walks past.

If you have bigger dreams then you rent space in a shopping mall and feed off the traffic of shoppers as they walk through. It’s a reasonably easy concept to understand. However, the Internet is not an open space where people walk past to see your goods. Think of it as a shopping mall without lights on.

How will people find anything? How will they find your stall?

The basic principle of affiliate marketing is that you find the interested people for the products you are promoting. It is your efforts of generating traffic that is what your reward is for. But it is even more specifically relevant traffic that is the critical issue here.

It is pointless sending through thousands of people who are not interested in buying that particular widget. They want a different widget. No amount of promotion and sales pitch will induce them to buy or sign-up to a service.

For instance if you have signed up as an affiliate for a dating site you will not find happily married people or those in a happy partnership that would be interested in signing up. The same principle applies to all products you are hoping to sell. The clue is relevant traffic rather than sending through quantity of visitors.

Think of affiliate marketing and traffic as being joined at the hip. It’s not going to work for the Internet marketer if that concept is not top of mind at all times.