Top 5 Reasons You Are Not Making Money With Your Affiliate Program

There are a ton of people who claim they cannot make any money with their affiliate programs. While there are many people who are making a lot of money with affiliate programs (CPA programs in paticular), some people just can't seem to pull it together. In this blog post, I will cover some reasons why you may fail at affiliate programs. Hopefully in the end, you will find better ways to market your products and make a ltttle dough.

Poor Internet Marketing Skills- It took me nearly 4 years to start making money online! This was only after I had to dig deep and figure out what I was doing wrong. Some people ("experts) told me to invest in article marketing, yet they failed to say that writing one article and blasting it to a thousand article directories will not do you any good anymore, since Google has become stricter on duplicate content. Other 'adivce' received on the Internet was always just a small peice of the puzzle. These so called Internet marketer experts only tell you a small portion of the pie while they earn all of the money. In other words, they only tell you half of the story so they won't have any competition. This is why I would strongly suggest taking a free online Internet Marketing class (there are many available) before getting into making money online article marketing. There are many small steps to take before going full into affiliate marketing. Some people don't realize this and give up before they really get started.

Your Affiliate Program Sucks- In my belief- over 40% of affiliate programs shave about 25% or more from your true earnings. This would also explain why many of these affiliate program "stat counters" have been reported as inaccurate and useless. While I will agree that over 50% of affiliate programs scam their publishers, there are some that fair better than others. When looking for the right one, please don't just go by "blog reviews". In most cases, these reviews are nothing more than paid reviews and the advertiser always end up telling the blogger exactly what to say. Try to check forums or message boards for real testimonies on affiliate programs. This has save me a lot of times from getting with the wrong one. Try to see if you can get some earning stats from fellow bloggers or publishers online.

Your Site Is Not Getting Traffic- There are a thousand reasons why a site is not receiving any traffic. I will not get into all of these reasons, but it is safe to know what converts and what doesn't. Some affiliates are surprised to know that most banners don't convert well because people have gotten use to ignoring them. Also, their website can get banned from the search engines without them even knowing it. This is more of a penalty with Google; as the site will show up in the search engines, but the affiliate will not get any decent traffic from it.

Your Landing Page is horrible- Some publishers use landing pages to sell the product or to give the potential customer an extra push. This is a really good method as people who click on the website through the search egnines will already be somewhat interested in the product. Since blogs tend to get more traffic than other sites, it would be a good idea to keep your blog updated and to write about a product that which looks like a review. This will make the potential customer trust you and hear what you have to say.

Your Not Cloaking Your Links- This is probably the number one reason why people don't do well with affiliate selling. There are two major reasons why cloaking your link should be made; the search engines don't like affiliate links so you could never get any real traffic or page rank and also they look more professional, which will increase your sales and conversion rates. This cloaking can be done using a 301 direct, which can be shown in more detail with a simple Google search. Using url shorteners are a waste of time, as most article directories do not accept them and Google is already aware of the free url shorteners. Also, the link is still shown with url shorteners, exposing publishers to hijacking of earnings. This is when a scammer in the same affiliate program as you, takes your publisher id and redirect it to their own site, making them get more earnings. In other words, they are stealing your commission and guess what? The affiliate programs will do nothing to help you because they don't want to take the time to figure out who could have done such a thing. This is why cloaking is important and you will also make more sales.