The biggest mistake of all is launching an affiliate marketing program without knowing perception from reality.

THE PERCEPTION is that you’ve been running your affiliate program earnestly and professionally. That’s why you have lots of affiliates. You don’t feel you’ve got to be very aggressive with your marketing because all the affiliates already know about you.

THE REALITY is that very few of your own affiliates know about your business. Even if you’ve been in the same business for five years, if you assume your affiliates know what you sell and why it’s terrific, you’re making a major misjudgment.

THE PERCEPTION is that you can’t treat your affiliates any better than you do right now. Each one of them is happy and delighted with the rewards of their service. You don’t have to improve your affiliate program.

THE REALITY is that your affiliate base represents a teeny tiny percentage of the potential market. Treat them like royalty but start to focus upon those affiliates who are proving to be above the rest. Zero-in on finding more just like them. Need I tell you that all affiliates aren’t created equal?

THE PERCEPTION is that all of your business is repeat business and that you’re doing everything right. Your focus is 100 percent on your existing affiliates.

THE REALITY is that if you’re not growing, you’re on the way to going out of business. No business can rely solely on its existing affiliates.

THE PERCEPTION is that you get a great deal of your business strictly by the energy and resourcefulness of your affiliates, so you don’t have to invest in real marketing.

THE REALITY is that when you invest in affiliate support materials in all shapes and forms, then provide them to your best affiliates, you’ll realize that those tools are some of the best marketing investments you’ll ever make – and you really don’t have to invest much money.

As a marketing phenomenon, Internet affiliate marketing is one of the new kids on the block. Whenever marketers flock to a new marketing medium, they seem to repeat the same mistakes.

A big mistake made with Internet affiliate programs is failing to consistently market the program and the products to the affiliates. These are not ordinary people. These are the extraordinary ones who made a conscious decision to participate in your program. Somehow, you conveyed a vision to them, and they saw themselves in that beautiful picture. You showed them how to be an important part of it. They paid rapt attention. They signed up to carry your banner forward into the fray.

And suddenly a monster of a mistake was made. Nothing happened.

You told your story once but once was not, is not, never is enough. Your affiliates have to see that vision again and again to incorporate it into their essence. Unless you consistently stay in touch with them – email, telephone, online chats, snail mail, regional meetings – they are not going to be the evangelists that the best of them can be with the proper care and feeding.

Of all the people who sign up for your program, only a very few will be true Rolls Royce affiliates. Your biggest job is to learn who they are, then treat them the way deities deserve to be treated. Forget the 80/20 rule. In Internet affiliate marketing, you need to remember instead the 95/5 rule. You’ll get 95 percent of your program profits through the efforts of only 5 percent of your affiliates.

It’s a mistake of the highest order to treat all your affiliates the same. Guerrillas are very adept at playing favorites. Your affiliate marketing program has a better chance of coming through for you if you understand what affiliate marketing really is and also exactly what it is not.

Guerrillas know that affiliate marketing is just a fancy phrase for helping people earn money by selling your offering, then treating those people exceptionally well.

It is more common sense and patience than anything else. But too many people make the boneheaded mistake of thinking that affiliate marketing is also a bunch of things it isn’t, such as:

  1. Affiliate marketing is not email. Some companies think they can get all the affiliate support they need with email. A microscopic number of those companies are right. Most businesses need a plethora of other marketing weapons in order for their email campaigns to succeed. If you are doing email only, you’re no guerrilla.
  2. Affiliate marketing is not telemarketing. For business-to-business marketing, few weapons succeed as well as telemarketing. And telemarketing response rates can be improved by augmenting it with advertising, yes, advertising, and email, even snail mail. But marketing is not just telemarketing.
  3. Affiliate marketing is not having a Web site. Sure, you’ve got to have a Web site to provide information, answer questions, reassure, take prospects to the next level and deepen the relationship between their lives and your company. But you must remember that a Web site only helps with the job. It does not do the job. Not hardly.
  4. Affiliate marketing is not producing brochures. Many companies rush to produce a brochure about the benefits they offer, then pat themselves on the back for the quality in the brochure. Is that brochure marketing? It is a very important part when mixed with 10 or 15 other very important parts – but all by itself? Forget it.
  5. Affiliate marketing is not show business. There’s no business like show business, and that includes marketing. Think of affiliate marketing as help-to-sell business, create-a-desire business, inspire-a-vision business, expand-a-company business, generate-motivation business. But don’t think of yourself as being in the entertainment business because affiliate marketing is not supposed to entertain your customers.
  6. Affiliate marketing is not an invitation to be clever. If you fall into the cleverness trap it’s because, unlike the guerrilla, you don’t realize that people remember the most clever part of the marketing even though it’s your enticing offer they should remember. Cleverness is a marketing vampire, sucking attention away from your primary offer.
  7. Affiliate marketing is not complicated. It becomes complicated for people who fail to grasp the pure simplicity of marketing, but affiliate marketing is user-friendly to guerrillas. They begin with a seven-sentence guerrilla affiliate marketing plan, create a marketing calendar and select from 100 weapons, over half of them free. Not too complicated. The full list appears online at www.GuerrillaMarketingAssociation.com.
  8. Affiliate marketing is not a miracle worker. More money has been wasted due to marketers expecting miracles than to any other misconception of marketing. Affiliate marketing can be the best investment you’ll ever make – if you do it right, and doing it right requires knowledge, commitment, patience and planning.

Value Proposition

With the many affiliate offerings out there, why would anyone want to align himself or herself under your banner? The answer is: your value proposition. You must structure your referral fees with a fair percentage to make it worth their while. It should be generous to make them sense that they are, indeed, earning a passive income.

And it must be simple to make their lives easy. You must offer them the tools of today’s technology: auto-responders, hyperlinks, team-building techniques, incentive programs, contests, sweepstakes, and training materials.

Affiliate marketing is an opportunity so new and unlike what your daddy did that it intimidates many business owners, who then steer clear of it. For guerrillas, affiliate marketing is a ticket to ride first class, avoiding the potholes, on the road toward financial well-being.

But even as you avoid the potholes, you’ll still see affiliate road kill littering the landscape. That’s because it’s so easy to make a mistake with a new concept such as Internet affiliate marketing. Our pioneers made t

heir share as they settled our nation. Why should it be any different among pioneers in marketing? Mistakes are part of the deal, but if you know them ahead of time, perhaps you can sit out that hand.

As all affiliates are not equal, neither are all stupid affiliate marketing mistakes. Stupid mistakes in horrid abundance have been made by otherwise bright companies when testing the affiliate marketing waters. Because guerrillas can learn from these blunders, it’s worth your time to know the most notable:

  • Failure to attract attention during the announcement of a program dooms many brilliant affiliate efforts before they have a chance to shine. Opening lines, email subject lines and first impressions are the gates to your offer. Open them wide.
  • Not facing the reality of an affiliate marketing explosion relegates your attempt to the ordinary, which means the ignored. Guerrillas say things to rise above the din, to be noticed and desired in a sea of affiliate marketers. If you were the only game in town that would be a different story, but there are many games. Act and market accordingly.
  • Focusing your message on yourself instead of your affiliate will usually send your effort to oblivion. Affiliates do not think of themselves as affiliates. They think of themselves as people, husbands, wives, brothers, parents, sports fans, business owners, professionals, consultants. They care far more about themselves than they care about you. So talk to them about themselves ” and help them to see themselves as affiliates. Expect magic if you can do this.
  • Not knowing precisely who your market is will send your affiliates off in the wrong direction. Research into pinpointing that market will be some of the most valuable time you devote to your affiliate marketing campaign. Those hard-working affiliates of yours need all the help they can get. Guerrillas are helpers supreme.
  • Marketing to other than honest prospects wastes your affiliates’ time. If you make your offer to people who don’t really have a need for your offering, it will be an incredibly tough sale. As in all direct marketing – and make no mistake, affiliate marketing is direct marketing – the target market is the most important factor, followed by the offer and then by the way that offer is presented.
  • Initiating affiliate marketing programs without specific objectives gives you too hazy a target for bull’s-eyes. Begin by setting the goals you wish to attain, then the steps you’ll take to reach those goals – and the benchmarks you’ll use to measure your progress. Without benchmarks, you’ll be affiliate marketing in the dark.
  • Featuring the benefits of your product or service to your affiliates first is telling them what they don’t want to know yet. First, your job is to make them see how they can gain financially. Then, they’ll pay rapt attention to the vehicle that will convey them to that promised land. To a hungry man, the most important benefit is the promise of a good meal. To a business, it’s profits. To an affiliate, it’s financial independence.
  • Failing to test all that can be tested is a goof-off of the highest order. Test your commission structure, price points, benefits to stress, contact times and mailing lists to know the real winners. Test various marketing weapons with your affiliates so you can provide them with the most lethal. Guerrillas test everything they can, constantly subjecting the results to the litmus test of profits.

There. Now you can never say that you weren’t warned. You can never plead ignorance when you commit a monumental boo-boo. On the other hand, perhaps you can take a deep breath of relaxation knowing that others have made the really moronic errors for you and that there are no more to be made.

Guerrillas giggle at that idea. When it comes to Internet affiliate marketing, as new as it is, they operate according to a single mantra: “Don’t make the same mistake once.”

JAY CONRAD LEVINSON is the author of the Guerrilla Marketing series of books, the most popular marketing series in history with 14 million sold in 39 languages. He also publishes the Web site GuerrillaMarketingAssociation.com.