Top Affiliate Marketing Mistakes

Do you want to earn from affiliate marketing? If the answer is yes, then you should be careful about the mistakes could be happening while you in affiliate marketing. Now I am going to demonstrate some common affiliate marketing mistakes you could make and you should void those mistakes to happen.

1. Promoting Products without Using Them

The biggest mistake that you could make as a rookie affiliate marketer is promoting a product that you haven’t used yourself.

This might not seem important, but without using the product yourself takes away the “personal touch” from your content and it seems like a product description that describes the various features rather than explaining the usefulness of the product. 

If you are striving to be an affiliate marketer and you need to promote a product try to use the product yourself first!

This will give you a valuable insight into what it has to offer, its pros and cons, what is the best feature, you will also be able to explain its value for money.

Moreover, it will add your personal touch to the content featuring a product from your client. 

2. Promoting a Product with Poor Quality 

One the biggest affiliate marketing mistakes that you should avoid is promoting a product with inferior quality.

If you are aware that a particular product does not have the quality for the price they charge, then you shouldn’t work hard on promoting it. 

Nothing will make you lose customers than promoting a product that does not offer high quality.

The best way to keep your customers happy is to give them a product that offers good value for money.

Choose products that are reliable and they must come from established brands otherwise you risk losing your clientele.

3. Too Many Products to Promote

When choosing affiliate products for your collection, you may be tempted to select too many of them. Being ambitious and over-enthusiastic is the default approach for most newbies.

But then, you’ll be less enthusiastic when you get distracted because you have too many things on your mind and you can’t even figure out what to do with your hands.

So that makes selling too many products at once the second common affiliate marketing mistake. It’ll eat up your time and decrease its value so that you might bring in fewer affiliate sales.

Smart people bet on quality, not quantity, so start small.

Pick a handful of excellent products and make sure to focus all your enthusiasm on them.

Commit more time to a single product; it’s easier to turn your endorsements and reviews into desired actions – meaning affiliate sales.

And remember, you can always expand product by product and grow your business over time. Make sure that you give each campaign the individual attention it needs to succeed.

4. Designing A Poor Quality Website

A low-quality website is always a bad idea.

Low standards will quickly translate into a low sales volume, so make this one a priority and approach the project professionally.

Of course, no one is telling you to build a perfectly user-friendly site from scratch when you aren’t even an experienced web designer. But you don’t have to.

There are lots of platforms, such as wordpress.org, that let you create your site for free.

Bad user experiences – such as slow page speed, too many ads, or a messy template will discourage visitors from your website and often frighten them away from your website, and that’s it. They won’t come back because your site won’t be associated with anything positive anymore (even when you improve it later on).

It’s like regular shopping. People prefer a nice shopping environment and experience, so much so that they’re even more likely to spend more. Shoppers prefer a clean and friendly grocery with cheerful and helpful staff members rather than going to an overcrowded mall where they get lost among all the shelves, not knowing where anything is.

When you’re in the process of building your site, bear all these things in mind.

Consider all the websites you like and try to identify why. Think of the actions you expect from your visitors to take on your site and make sure you implement them.

Answer these questions:

  • Is my site easy to navigate?
  • Are all sections easy to find?
  • Does the design highlight the on-site elements?
  • Do I have clear calls to action?
  • Does a single page call for one single action?
  • Is my website’s design as simple as it gets?
  • Is my website responsive?

Your site doesn’t need to be anything special – you don’t have to make it super interactive – but it has to be super simple. It’s a pattern that works for everybody.

Anyway, starting a new site is a massive project, so make sure you keep this in mind to help you get into it.

4. Prioritizing Selling Over Helping

It’s easy to develop the mindset that getting conversions/sales is your number one priority as an online marketer.

Unfortunately, this mindset is what results in mediocre content and poor results.

Instead, you should focus on creating high-value content above all else. Focus your writing around the reader’s intent, putting them first. Instead of explaining features, focus on benefits to the user.

Avoid user friction wherever possible. Banner ads have a time and place, but are they worth frustrating your visitors to the point of no return? Will your pop-ups be deemed as intrusive content in the eyes of Google?

Every outbound sales tactic, whether it’s a banner ad or a notification request, comes with consequences. It’s up to you to decide whether the user friction is worth it.

5. Publishing low-quality content

Whether you like it or not, your content is your product as an affiliate marketer.

Clicks are simply a result of great content that readers deem valuable and credible. Above all else, affiliate marketers should strive to produce high-quality content. Far too many affiliates think that 10 mediocre posts will outperform one great post. This isn’t the case.

When it comes to producing high-quality blog posts, there are a few steps to keep in mind when attempting to outrank the competition in the SERPs. The first is to identify a topic that is feasible to rank for, aka the “low hanging fruit.”

Once you’ve identified the topic, you’ll need to do keyword research to uncover what it will take to outrank the competition.

Ask yourself the following:

How many root domain backlinks do they have? Use a tool like the MozBar to uncover how many backlinks the competition has.

What’s the word-count of the top-ranking posts? The average first-page result is 1,890 words. Keep this length in mind as a general benchmark when writing your own content.

Does your post include an image? Studies show that a post with at least one image ranks higher than those that don’t have any. How’s the readability of the post?

Once you’ve uncovered these details, you’ll have the framework you need to write a top-ranking piece of content.

From there, put as much time into promoting that newly published article as it took to write it:

  • Share your new guide on social media
  • Send it out to your email list
  • Do link building outreach to relevant bloggers to encourage them to link back to your guide

6. Ignoring SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to how well you’re able to draw visitors into your site by organic means. Having great content is only part of the battle – you need to format it correctly to win top billet on search engines such as Google.

If you have very comprehensive content, but it’s not optimized for search, there is almost no point to it. SEO isn’t something that can be slapped on as an afterthought but needs to be planned for even before you craft your articles.

Make sure to carry out your SEO research before planning your article list – this way, you have a guideline as to what content and formats would be of maximum value.

7. Unrealistic Income Expectations

If the sole reason why you are getting into affiliate marketing is because of the money, you might be in for a shock. As newbies dive in, many people are hearing stories of affiliate marketers pulling in huge monthly commissions.

While that might be true in some cases, the reality is that to reach that stage involves an awful lot of commitment – in time, effort, and sometimes actual cash. Think about the time you’ll need to research, craft, and optimize even one article, then multiply that by a hundred.

Meanwhile, you’ll need to continually revise all the other articles, while paying for and maintaining your web hosting account. It gets even worse if you’re doing this while trying to hold down a full-time job since your free hours are even more limited.

Building up the momentum towards owning a successful affiliate marketing website takes time – don’t expect to earn too much in your first year or so.

8. Not Tracking And Testing

The way to know if your marketing strategies are working is to track your affiliate links and regularly monitor them.

As I’ve mentioned, it’s possible to be scammed by unscrupulous affiliate programs and managers, and you’ll need to track your links to avoid being scammed.

More importantly, tracking your links helps you figure out what’s going on in your business.

When you make a sale, you want to know which page that click came from, so you can study that page or article and have an idea of what works for your target audience.

On the other hand, when you aren’t making sales, you want to know which pages don’t have any clicks so you’ll recognize what doesn’t work for your audience.

When you do implement changes from the information you get from your tracking efforts, you need to do A/B testing before you make permanent changes to your website, content, or marketing strategies. You can always follow your intuition, but I wouldn’t recommend it because anything that isn’t based on data isn’t likely to work.

Have solid tracking tools and software in place and test changes you want to implement on your website before making them permanent.

9. Not Evolving

Once you think that you know everything, that’s when you stop growing.

This is especially true of internet-based businesses.

Bear this in mind whenever you do research on a marketing technique or tools to improve your SEO or keyword research. What was trending a few years back may not work today.

Always be on top of the latest trends in your niche, affiliate marketing, and the products you’re promoting. The most successful affiliate marketers are open to learning new things and are never satisfied with the way things are; they know they can be better and they can help people better.

Look for highly active forums and even Facebook groups in your niche or in affiliate marketing and engage with like-minded folks so you can all discuss the latest buzz. You can also try to find reputable, regularly updated websites and blogs touching on affiliate marketing.

However, being updated means nothing if you’re too scared to test them out. The whole point of knowing is to apply them to your affiliate marketing business to make it grow and be more profitable.

Don’t forget to test only one thing or technique at a time and track everything.

Keep an eye out on the latest trends and techniques in your niche and in affiliate marketing, and don’t be afraid to try new things.

10. Following The Herd

If you want to make extra sales, you have to distinguish yourself from other affiliates.

So many affiliates just do a Copy and Paste – don’t do that! Be an innovator – come up with an angle others have not.

Have you spotted a benefit that others have not? It might even only be a benefit for you and a few others, but add that benefit and chances someone else will see that as a benefit also.

Additionally – and this is very important, add your own STORY as to why you got involved with this product…

I recently read the success story of one mother who started online simply to make enough to pay for horse riding lessons for her daughter. This was of course targeting the Newbie Marketer and it also had that all important ‘feel good’ feeling.

Other things you can do…

For instance;

  • Add a special bonus for your readers
  • Offer a special discount code from product author
  • Get co-branded sales page from author

Successful Affiliates are innovators – always be looking to add value to the offer, in terms of either a special bonus or better still in my opinion – reveal an angle or a strategy that no one else is talking about…

11. Not Staying Focused on One Thing

Maximum newbies can’t rely on a specific direction and this could be one of the most major mistakes happens in the earlier affiliate career. It seems that most of the affiliates want to sell different products instead of any specific category hoping that they will make more revenue. But in maximum cases, they end up with a huge failure.

Maximum newcomers thought that the more products they can sale the more they can earn, this notion is not just for all the situation. Moreover, the blog audience wouldn’t trust you as you don’t have any specific product brand. The same thing happens for the platform, run your marketing on some specific renowned platforms. You shouldn’t switch yourself here and there

Therefore, for the newbies, my suggestion would be to stick on a specific category of products. Before taking a decision about choosing a category, make a proper study and stick around them. Then you could have probably the trusted audience. Always keep in your mind that you must not create any confusion among the audiences.

12. Only Relying on Organic Traffic

If you want to be a successful one, it shouldn’t be wise to completely dependable on a single thing. In affiliate marketing, products selling is the key to have more revenue to earn but the product selling depends on the traffic you generate to your website. There are lots of sources to generate traffic to your site and of course, traffic from the search engine isn’t the whole thing.

Though most of the marketers follow the search engine there are other’s opinions as well. You can try to rank on Google but Google may not rank, it can happen, but at this point, stop worrying about it and start concentrating on generating traffic from other sources like the referral, social media, direct, etc.

First of all, you need to be cool and patient enough. Next, start building your blog by making quality contents on a specific topic and publish it. Try to start an SEO campaign to tap different traffic sources. Write quality posts mainly targeting long tail competitive keywords and concentrate on it.

In 2020 the biggest difference I see is the increased use of voice search and mobile-friendly content being more important than ever before. If you have not incorporated voice or mobile into your affiliate marketing plans, you will pay the price and get left behind.

As the increasing use of Amazon Alexa, Cortana, and Siri grows, the affiliate industry will need to optimize more quality content for voice search. Voice search optimization needs to be handled a bit differently. What someone types into a Google search bar can be quite different than what they speak aloud when posing a question to Alexa. Voice. The search optimization will need to take natural speech patterns into consideration. People are more likely to ask a longer question than to type one. In addition, voice commands don’t allow for an autocomplete feature the way the Google search bar does. And that means that voice searches will include more long-tail keywords.

14. Ignoring the Potential of Video        

Another affiliate marketing idea that will no longer work is, using hashtags on Facebook to promote your affiliate marketing post. Using hashtags on Facebook posts lowers their visibility and may be marked as spam.

If you refuse to get into the video to promote your affiliate marketing, then you are making a huge mistake. Video is a big medium right now and will only get more popular in 2020. You are leaving money on the table if you choose not to use video.

While many affiliate marketers are happy doing blog posts like reviews or lists to promote their links, video creators and Instagram influencers are gaining more traction from visual content they put together. More and more people are moving away from written content so to maintain a sustainable affiliate marketing strategy, you need to tap into other channels as well.

In a Nutshell

The affiliate marketing experts’ opinions suggest three aspects to focus on for 2020.

  1. Focus on a Targeted Audience
  2. Promote in the right niche
  3. Build quality links

Consider these above-mentioned three points and you can surely avoid making affiliate marketing mistakes in your journey.

Furthermore, the practice of link building is going to vastly change in 2020. Quality of content and quality of link building play a major role in driving your audience – which is why it’s important to spend time ensuring that neither of these two are compromised.

The affiliate marketing business can be very competitive, but if done right, it can be a good source of income.

As an affiliate marketer, try not to focus only on raw data and end up forgetting the most crucial element of all – the individual visitor.

Always remember that the visitor is a customer. How well you please your customer will likely be the main objective that decides if you have a successful business. They affect your sales and your reputation.

Finally, be dedicated. Only through perseverance will you make it. Be prepared to work through problems, face long stretches with zero income and the ever-changing challenges that Google may throw your way.

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  1. Andrew

    Thanks for the info. A very useful article, I have not even heard of many errors. Very good article for beginners.

    Reply