What is your single biggest problem to overcome as an affiliate marketer?

I've been promoting CPA / affiliate offers for over 16 years.

I would suspect for most that it's generating cost effective traffic / leads.

Keep in mind that there is a big world outside of MMO and even selling products / services.

I can tell you what has worked for me, just so you have an alternate view.

I heavily promote PPL (pay per lead...lead generation) offers. This is because there is no credit card / purchase required to complete an offer. All a user has to do is fill out a form, so conversion rates are typically much higher compared to offers that require a sale to be made.

I favor offers that have a make, get or save money benefit to them, as they have overall worked the best. They also tend to have the greatest mass appeal (will be of interest to a large general audience), so the potential exists to produce high volume and they are fairly easy to cross promote on the back-end.

Some of the verticals (niches) I have done extremely well with are: education, insurance, loans, debt, credit, mortgage, assistance, discount offers, homeowner offers, etc...

The bulk of the offers that I promote pay $20-$40 per lead, but I also promote offers that pay more and less. You don't want to get too caught up on what an offer pays because how well it converts is just as important. For example, if you have an offer that pays $9, but if it converts at 2X or more of a $20 offer, then it will perform about the same or possibly better. At the same time, if you have an offer that pays $90 and it converts poorly, it may not even be worth promoting.

Bottom line: it's far easier to get someone fill out a short form than to get them to pull out their credit card and make a purchase. So why struggle with trying to sell this or that, when you can provide free information that users want/need and get paid well doing it.

I drive traffic by acquiring 3rd party email data, which is data that the users have shown an interest in a specific vertical(niche) and have given permission to receive messages from third parties. You get the opt-in record for every user and it's 100% can-spam compliant.

By acquiring data, I'm building assets that I then own and can market to over and over at very low cost. So I control and can drive traffic on-demand to the offers I'm promoting. Which is key to CPA / affiliate marketing success.

However, 3rd party data will rarely be as responsive as a high-quality opt-in list you build yourself. But it really doesn't matter because it is much cheaper and highly scalable compared to convention list building.

So the initial data that is acquired isn't the most import part of the process. The real key to making it work is to always be collecting your opens / clickers, segmenting, and removing unresponsive users. That way over time you are building smaller, but more responsive lists that you should eventually be able to send less and make more with each mailing. Essentially you are converting the data from quantity to quality.

In the end, I have consistently been able to produce leads / clicks at a fraction of the price of mainstream list building / marketing. Which is why so many fail...they can't generate cost effective traffic.

Basically, I monetize the data using PPL offers because they offer the path of least resistance to generating conversions / $$$ and converting the data into cash producing assets.

Obviously, there is far more to it, but done right it can be extremely profitable. Everyone that I know that is in the business and knows what they are doing, for the most part, does 6-7 figures. While that's a huge range, much comes down to one's ability to scale and effectively build / manage the infrastructure needed to scale.

Something to think about.

I think one of the biggest problems people face is sticking to one idea long enough before quitting.

Another problem is over complicating things. People are trying to focus on too many moving parts instead of keeping things simple.

I think the fact that it's an ever changing world.
Traffic sources change, trends change, offers change, everything changes. You always need to be on your toes and constantly learning, adapting and trying new things.

A workable system(there are so many related elements in the workable system:good offer,targeted traffic,good content,good copywriting,good sales funnel,....even good timing,good luck...),that is why mmo is not easy:you have to make every element in the workable system good and correct...don't get misled,the biggest problem is a workable system

I completely agree with that not sticking to one thing is a huge problem. Sometimes it takes awhile to see results, and the temptation to jump to something else, especially if it promises fast and easy results, is hard to resist. Once you find a good system, stick with it.

The greatest challenge for me was to truly believe it is simple and it is not a great challenge to make good money with affiliate marketing.

Once you have the belief right the rest will flow.

You will get clear on your goals and get a strong self-discipline to do the necessary.

Success is 80% mindset and 20% hard work.

Remember that.

Hope this helps!

Cheers!

When I started, my biggest problem was not knowing enough. Then, the Phoenix Formula came along.

Hi John,

As an affiliate marketer you only need to understand two things i.e traffic & conversion. If you master these two you will be the king of affiliate marketing.

hey there

I sell the weight loss niches for years... in this niche getting

the best cost effective traffic source is the biggest problem to overcome

but i did it using both pay and free traffic

ok
talk soon
sam f

my biggest problem in affiliate marketing is to build an email list and a targeted traffic for my products links

@jeanniegiordano

PPL is huge. Online lead generation is a multi-billion dollar industry. Getting fresh leads is the life blood of so many companies.

The best part is there is absolutely nothing to sell. To make money, all anyone has to do is fill out a form.

Chasing money is probably the biggest affiliate problem out there John. Because chasing money causes marketers to chase specific products or tools, believing the affiliate product is the income generator. This is as silly an idea as believing that a hammer can drive a nail into a wall without human assistance

One of the most challenging issues that many affiliates face is refining their traffic sources to be able to run profitable campaigns. A new affiliate marketer can lose their shirt and pants running campaigns that targets the wrong category, not blacklisting widget ID's, and not utilizing all the optimization tools that networks provide. Even if they do it still takes a lot of time to dial in your traffic and you'll need to spend a large sum of money testing various platforms to figure out the type of offer that work best with them.

Well longevity... Ive made millions...so did a lot of my contemporary...they spent the money are cars and women...I reinvested into the business.

Does no matter what your niche is...be smart...Build a list..cultivate and reinvest into keeping you list ALIVE...

Then you can just stuff leads a relax

I would suspect for most that it's generating cost effective traffic / leads.

Keep in mind that there is a big world outside of MMO and even selling products / services.

I can tell you what has worked for me, just so you have an alternate view.

I heavily promote PPL (pay per lead...lead generation) offers. This is because there is no credit card / purchase required to complete an offer. All a user has to do is fill out a form, so conversion rates are typically much higher compared to offers that require a sale to be made.

I agree with Rory Singh. My start with slow, but after a few year I started averaging $50 a day with a number of affiliate programs.

As an affiliate marketer...I am a strong believer that email marketing is the way to go.

So the biggest challenge would be...

Building a well oiled sales funnel.

1. You will need good copywriting skills. From your lead capture page (to increase opt ins), to a good thank you page / confirmation page, so people would actually go check their emails and look for your email...and a good sales page if you are selling your own product to build your own buyer's list.

2. Mastering traffic generation. There are so many methods that being a master of all is almost impossible. Do it wrongly and it will cost you time and money.

3.Not understanding the lifetime value of a customer. Everybody wants to make that quick buck and do not focus on the backend where your list will be able to generate traffic to your websites and your buyers today will be repeated customers for life. A positive ROI is not generated through the front end but taking into account of all the earnings you will earn from that one advertising campaign.

My biggest problem is the fact that I live with social anxiety and several other insecurities and from what I've seen and studied, a critical part of success in A.M. is having to go public and expose yourself on camera and/or in person, which is something that's extremely hard for me. If only there was a way or method to be an effective marketer by working anonymously or through some sort of "avatar" I think I could make it in this business, I consider myself very tech savvy and smart, I just need to find something I feel confortable with.

It did not take me long to understand the principle behind affiliate marketing and the potential to generate a decent income.

My issue was always traffic. If i did manage to find traffic, it was never targeted. When i did finally achieve targeted traffic, i now faced a 2nd issue and that was the volume of the traffic. My traffic was targeted but there was just not enough of it.

This is what i found to be my biggest problems when being an affiliate for another product.

I would say that conversions are always the number one problem.

I was going to say "Traffic", but really, any of us could go out on Facebook and spend boatloads on clicks.

Getting those clicks to CONVERT, is the big problem.



So, number one problem, conversions.

Number two problem, traffic.

The biggest challenge is to build an audience that trusts you.

staying focused and learning to use all the software effectively has been my hardest problem.. so much to learn.. and you can't learn just by watching.. takes a lot of repetition then u have to learn even more :/

I think as start out is usually information over load. Suddenly you are open to so many opportunities and you read tons and tons of success stories from different money making online methods which let you easily lose focus. And you will start question yourself, is this method better or that method better.

In the end you accomplish nothing.

I think that the biggest obstacles are:
- not sticking to a one traffic source until mastery
- not testing enough (ads, landing pages, angles, offers)
- if dealing with a paid traffic source, not having a budget that lasts long enough to become successful