The digital landscape changes every year in order to make life harder for affiliates of digital and physical products. With that in mind, let's share some tips and care you need to avoid being cheated by producers and services.
Being an affiliate is getting more and more complicated. In these 5 years in the market, I noticed producers decreasing their commissions more and more and even stealing commissions, not to mention the growing competition from products and affiliates of the same niche.
I don't know what I'm doing here
Did you happen to enter this page without knowing what an affiliate is? Did you fall here by parachute? This article is recommended for those who already work or are starting to work on the internet as an affiliate.
Affiliates are people who advertise a specific digital or physical product in exchange for commissions. Have you ever noticed the thousands of advertisements on social networks and people sharing ways to make money over the internet? Always trying to sell something?
Unfortunately, this is the current scenario of digital marketing, with people making crazy ads just to sell a course and earn a commission. If you are interested in working as an affiliate in the right way, the tips in this article will help, but if you have no idea what it means to be an affiliate, read our other article on how to work on the internet.
Alternative payment methods
There are producers who offer alternative forms of payment for buyers outside the hotmart. Some offer direct payment to the bank account, installment slips and alternatives to facilitate customer purchase.
They often use this outside of Hotmart or Monetizze to avoid paying the 10% fee to the company and the affiliate commission. I have already faced this, luckily my producer is nice and pays an additional commission based on the percentage of people who buy through alternative methods.
Nobody is being a villain for using alternative forms of payment. Unfortunately not everyone has a friendship with the producer, or the audacity to charge for sales made outside the affiliate platform. So, it is always good to check that your main product does not offer these alternative payment options.
Hotleads that deactivate themselves
Selling products without hotlead is very dangerous. The person may end up buying the product without your cookie and you lose your commission. For this reason, you are always affiliated with products that use hotleads, a tool that always updates your cookie when the customer opens the producer link.
Still, you must be careful, because many producers have hotleads active, it appears that the hotlink is with hotleads, but even so the hotlead is having a problem and does not generate leads for the affiliate.
Always check the page link by adding "?hotleads=true" at the end of the link. If the hotlead is really active, you will see a message saying — HOTLEADS 2.0 INSTALLED —.
Don't put faith in just one product
Some niches are tiny and have few products to monetize the site. Sometimes you believe that this is the perfect product for your website, but don't put too much faith in it, always try to find and present an alternative to your visitors.
Even if you advertise similar products, visitors may like one and dislike the other. Some sympathize more with one teacher than another. There are tastes of all kinds, so never rely on just one product, you will lose sales.
Not to mention that a certain producer may end up deactivating this product, reducing commission or even ending affiliations. Always think about the possibility of having your own product instead of being a dependent affiliate.
Beware of mini sites
One thing that kills affiliates totally, are the competitors that use black hat SEO techniques with mini sites that have the product name in the domain, to steal the first positions of well written articles on Google.
I already had a beautiful article on my website about a product that generated great conversions, then a mini site came out of nowhere and stole my position using these black hat techniques.
To prevent this from happening, affiliate yourself only with products that prohibit this practice or that do not leave the affiliation completely open. Many affiliates use spam practices and other dishonest means to steal sales.
Even producers need to be aware. A producer canceled the affiliation of those who used this practice, then the human created a gigantic article to criticize the product because he was no longer affiliated with it. This article was for years in the third position of Google.
Do not depend on a course
Everyone who starts working online without experience in digital marketing turns to some type of course, such as the Online Business Formula by Alex Vargas. These courses promise to help you earn various digits working as an affiliate.
I firmly believe that these courses are good enough to get people from scratch to have full knowledge of the digital market and how to work properly as an affiliate. Only the affiliate cannot depend only on the course.
The market is very competitive, people need to adapt, innovate on their own and focus a lot on the content. If the person tries to focus only on following the course step by step, he may not achieve good results, or temporary results.
I recommend online courses for those who have no experience with the internet and who have no idea how to get started. There are thousands of courses online, so choose wisely, because there are those that are just talkative.
Even if a course teaches you some technique that will give you great results in the beginning, the market is always changing, so try to establish an audience and a content channel where you will always be able to get results.
Don't spend money on services
For those who make millions, spending money on expensive email marketing tools and landing pages costs nothing. Only for the affiliates that are starting, this investment can be heavy and not profitable.
Most email marketing tools limit the number of contacts on the list or emails sent monthly. Have you ever considered using your own email marketing tool as a mautic? One that you install in your hosting without any limit for free?
Why pay a monthly fee for a social media automation tool when you can buy one on codecanyon like midrub and install it on your own server and maybe even profit from it?
If you are an affiliate who does not want to spend and throw money away, always look for alternatives to the options presented in the market. I'm sure you will find cheaper, one-time and unlimited payment options.
have original CONTENT
Many affiliates work only with Facebook ADS or social networks like Instagram. Sometimes it can be very profitable, but it is always good to have an original content channel outside of social networks.
Have you ensured that you have your own website in a niche you like? Focus on writing on it and generating organic traffic through SEO techniques. You can take advantage of good cloud hosting like Digital Ocean to run marketing tools.
You may want to write about something you want to learn, especially if you are a procrastinator. That's how I created all my sites, with the aim of gaining knowledge while generating my own income.
As already mentioned, you cannot depend on producers and products. Have your own audience that trusts you! Deliver content they want, whether with a youtube channel or a website.
I hope these tips have been enough for this article. If you liked it don't forget to share and leave your comments.