A lot of new affiliate marketers believe offering a wide variety and deep assortment of products is the best way to attract a large audience. The logic is that casting a broad net will attract more fish. Unfortunately, this thinking often backfires, as it is difficult to brand yourself in a way that makes it clear to targeted prospects what your business is about.
The following is a look at challenges in promoting too many products, along with benefits achieved when you avoid this mistake so you can optimize success within a core marketplace.
Challenges of tackling too many products
Establishing a clear company identity and brand is just one of the challenges with trying to promote too many products as an affiliate marketer. Additional hurdles include:
- Risk of website clutter – A clean, low-clutter scheme is a common strategy to an optimized website experience for your users. The more products you promote, the more difficult it gets to maintain a high-quality UX because you need tabs and pages to promote each item.
- Inventory control – Whether you are directly involved in distribution or rely on merchants to manage that, you still have some increased inventory challenges when selling a lot of products. Each merchant has different rules for distribution and communication during order fulfillment. The more places you source inventory from, the harder it is for you to keep up with everything and keep your customers informed.
- Product knowledge – Demonstrating product experience is a great way to attract and retain customers as an affiliate marketer. Your customers learn to trust your input and opinions on products that you offer. Trying to learn, hundreds or thousands of products is much more complex than getting familiar with a concentrated number of categories or items.
Benefits of a more niche approach
We have previously discussed the pros and cons of a more niche approach to affiliate marketing. With this business strategy, you develop expertise in core product categories and target a precise marketplace that has interest in the specific items you offer. In addition to offsetting the challenges already noted, benefits of limiting your product offers include:
- Opportunities to test products – One of the reasons limited offerings enables you to enhance product knowledge is because you can practically test what you sell. Your value to customers is significant when you have first-hand expertise and can describe all features, benefits and limitations of your inventory.
- More targeted marketing – Imagine a customer opening an email with dozens of arbitrary product pitches. The likelihood of getting a second glance, let alone a sale, or minimal. By concentrating, you can target very precise demographic, geographic and firmographic prospects with resources, content, and products that are of optimal interest based their needs. You’ll generate a better response and avoid wasteful expenditures.
Conclusion
It may take some time to figure out which products work best for your business and your audience. However, the “kitchen sink” approach is rarely a good strategy for affiliate marketers. Only sell as many products as you can comfortably get to know, so that you can align your brand and offerings with the needs of a specific audience. Start with a relatively small inventory, and expand as you feel capable.
Get your affiliate payments easily with Payoneer