Quote:
Originally Posted by phamilton
Can you do just as well by joining a lot of forums?
|
My friends who do affiliate marketing for a living tell me that the answer's a big, firm "no".
The problem is that however many forums you join with your affiliate-links in your signature-file, where that's allowed, (or, for article marketers, however many articles you write with your affiliate-links in the author's resource-box), all that people who click on it are seeing is the vendor's sales-page, whereas your competitors are mostly sending their traffic first to a "pre-selling page" - whether it's a "web site", "blog", "review" or whatever, and the people who subsequently click from that to the vendor's sales-page are the real buyers rather than just the browsers. So however much traffic you get, you're severely limited in the proportion of it that you can convert, because you're not doing anything to "qualify the traffic".
The other huge disadvantage of not having your own site/blog/review is that without your own opt-in (which would be there) and without building your own list, you're possibly making sales only to people who buy immediately. Most people don't. I hear that the average number of follow-ups before a sale is 7(!), and you really need to be building your own list, as an affiliate, and using an autoresponder to follow up your potential customers, in order to make any real money.
So, without your own site (of whatever kind) you're only getting a very small percentage of what you could be getting.