Many affiliate marketers make the mistake of posting their banner ads on forums. While forums can be a great way to promote your affiliate programs and your website, posting banners in forum scan be considered spamming and may easily upset forum administrators.
Always do your research before promoting your affiliate program to a potential customer. Do not offer affiliate programs to visitors who are not at all interested in the products associated with the program. This is a futile endeavor.
If you promote affiliate programs offered by other merchants, be sure that you develop your own advertising copy. Many websites make the mistake of using the same advertising copy as used by the merchant themselves.
Avoid copyright infringement in all cases. Always use original content or ask permission to use graphic images or text found on other websites.
Do not submit your programs to free websites. These may be free but your programs would hardly ever be noticed, especially by search engines. To top it off, your ranking in the search engines can be lowered if you submit your affiliate programs to such websites.
Avoid using ALL CAPS on your web pages and in your email ads. Using all caps is symbolic to shouting, which never goes well with potential customers. A few words may be written in capital text to give certain words additional EMPHASIS, however the use of al caps should be very limited
Always respond to all queries sent by visitors as soon as possible. A delay in your response could easily result in loss of a potential client as they may view it as your lack of interest in their business.
Don't use pop-up ads on you web pages. Most visitors are likely to close their browser if they come across pop-ups since, among other things, pop-ups have been used by malicious webmasters to implant malware on a surfer's computer. Today, most people even use programs that block pop-ups so it usually is not a good idea to use pop-up to communicate important messages and especially should never be used for displaying newsletter sign-up forms.
Never host your website on a free hosting account or use free email accounts. This gives a negative impression to visitors and the downtime you will experience will most likely be detrimental to your sales. Using free hosts and email accounts looks cheesy to most people and will make your visitor quickly lose interest as it damages your credibility as a business.
Many websites do not have an opt-in list. Create an opt-in and opt-out list for your visitors. Without these, there is no way of tracking potential customers. Visitors should be allowed to opt-in at any time as well as opt-out at any time. Not allowing your customers to easily opt-out at any time they please will make you look like a spammer. This is not a good thing as it ruins your credibility and may also cause you to lose your hosting account and even your domain name.
Most sites have a poor tracking mechanism. It is essential that you track all business activities. Accurate record keeping is crucial. There are many software tools (discussed earlier in this chapter) that can automate your record keeping process with minimal error.
A 'mall' site is best used as a central hub to send visitors to your other domains. As a main or only site, unfocused mall sites don't get traffic from the engines, and they don't convert well to sales. Conversely, highly focused theme sites do attract traffic and convert to sales.
Offline advertising may not be effective. A lot of money and effort should not be wasted on offline advertising. Most people rarely check websites that are advertised in local magazines or newspapers.
Avoid using animated banner ads on your website. These can use up significant bandwidth, thus making web pages load slower.
While advertising do not degrade other competitors. It is recommended that you highlight own your products’ uniqueness and superiority but never mortify other products. Focusing on the weakness of you competition's products will most likely make you look unprofessional in the eyes of your prospective customers and therefore could cost you sales. Not to mention that such practice could also prove to cause legal problems for you in the future.
Banners or text links that expire are guaranteed to eventually send your visitor to a broken link or show a broken graphic on your page. Time sensitive advertising is best used only in email advertising campaigns since emails are often read and then discarded immediately.
In most cases, putting affiliate links on your home page is not a good idea. Doing so is like to asking your visitors to leave your site immediately. Give your visitors a chance to browse your site, sign up for your newsletter, and decide that they'd like to come back before introducing them to your affiliate links that will take them away from your site.
