JOIN NOW, EARN 50% OF OUR TOTAL REVENUE MONTHLY

Common Affiliate Marketing
Mistakes #1: Not Building an Email
List
The biggest mistake you could make as an
affiliate marketer is refusing to build your email
list.
For one reason or another, numerous marketers
have forgone building their email list, thinking
that their business is always going to be able to
sustain itself.
This usually happens when people are relying on
search engine traffic , and living in the belief that
search engines are always going to favor their
website.
Unfortunately, as proven multiple times in the
past, search engine traffic is rarely reliable.
If they had been focusing on building an email
list, it wouldn’t matter that their search engine
traffic had been nuked.
Sure, it would hurt, but they would still have a
list of people ready to send back to their website
every time they send out an email.
Building an email list also allows you to profit
more per visitor than you would be able to
without it.
If you’ve never heard of sales funnels before,
then you need to read this post and then dig
through our site to find all of the other
information we’ve created on building a proper
sales funnel.
When you’re collecting emails, you can send your
subscribers down a trail that helps them solve
even more problems they’re having, allowing you
to make even more money.
Common Affiliate Marketing
Mistakes #2: Relying only on
Organic Traffic
Search engines may provide the Holy Grail of
organic traffic, because the visitors are highly
targeted to the content you’ve published, and
tend to be ready to buy when they land on your
site.
However, relying solely on search engines to
build your business is a huge affiliate marketing
mistake, and one that many affiliate marketers
have found themselves making.
If you want to build a long term affiliate
marketing business (or any other business,
really), the last thing you want to do is rely
solely on search engine traffic.
There are multiple different ways you can
generate targeted traffic to your website.
Social media is another great avenue for tapping
into massive hordes of traffic.
Though it may not be as targeted as search
engine traffic, and getting people from social
media networks to purchase the products and
services you’re offering can be more difficult, it’s
not impossible.
At the end of the day, your business lives and
dies by the traffic that you’re sending to your
website.
Your ultimate goal should be to tap into as
many different sources of traffic as possible.
Relying solely on search engines may seem like
a great idea, but doing it means you’re being
very short-sighted in your business and could be
setting yourself up for disaster down the road.
For starters, however, you would need to
promote your affiliate products on other channels
like social media and emails instead of relying on
search engine only.
Common Affiliate Marketing
Mistakes #3: Not Trusting Your
Abilities
This one is easy to understand, especially when
you’re trying to build an affiliate marketing
business and feel like you don’t have the
necessary technical skills, are buying into gurus
saying that you need to do this, and do that, and
then bog yourself down with massive amounts of
work, rather than building your business one step
at a time.
Maintaining confidence and enthusiasm about
your affiliate marketing business is critical to
becoming successful.
No results happen overnight, so if you want to
stick around for the long haul, you’re going to
have to tie your confidence to something else.
I personally prefer to tie my confidence and
enthusiasm towards getting things done that I
know are going to lead me to my final goal
— making money from my website .
Rather than tie my confidence to the actual
money generated, tying it to getting things done
is a lot better for your sanity.
SOLUTION: If you break down your business into
different chunks, like your blog posts, your email
list, your autoresponder, your search engine
optimization, and your social media strategies,
for instance, you’ll be able to tackle one at a
time.
And knowing that you’re doing what needs to be
done, without getting bogged down in the big
picture or the small details that can seem
overwhelming.
Common Affiliate Marketing
Mistakes #4: Affiliate Marketing is
a Get Rich Quickie
There are no get rich quick schemes.
Period!
If anyone tries to tell you that affiliate marketing
is a way for you to get rich overnight, run for the
hills.
They’re feeding you a lie, and probably trying to
get you to buy a course from them that teaches
you how to do it.
What stands our affiliate marketing class out is
that we not only teach you how to make money
from affiliate marketing but also show you the
step by step process, timeline and ingredients
needed to actualize the affiliate marketing
dream.
Affiliate marketing is no different than any other
business.
Building something successful requires a lot of
time, energy and, more importantly, patience.
Sure, you may have small wins here, and there,
that you didn’t see coming, but that is a part of
the process.
All of those small, unexpected wins can add up
to make you a lot of money, but they’re not
going to happen overnight.
When you see these small wins happening, you
can usually attribute them to something you had
done weeks, or even months before.
Affiliate marketing is an amazing business
model, especially for beginners, because it’s
easy to test and figure out what’s going on
without having to devote massive amounts of
your money to the business.
While you can make a lot of money with affiliate
marketing -and many people do- in no way,
shape, or form is it a way for you to get rich
quick.
I firmly believe that if you go into building your
business, expecting not to earn a dime from it
for the first year, you’ll be pleasantly surprised,
instead of always setting yourself up to get
discouraged.
SOLUTION: Since affiliate marketing is not a get
rich quick scheme, you need to build sustainable
and long term processes around your business
promotion.
In other words, you need to have a long term
plan for your marketing and operations, which
includes learning from a good affiliate marketing
trainer.
Common Affiliate Marketing
Mistakes #5: Selling, instead of
Helping
The only way you’re going to make money in
your business is to actually sell something and
promote products and services on your website.
If it’s all you’re doing, though, you’re not going to
make nearly as much money as you could be
making.
If you really want to make a lot of money, and
actually keep your business running for years,
you’re going to have to adjust how you’re
publishing content, and change your mindset
from making money to actually helping people.
Helping people does two different things for your
business.
First, it helps you build credibility, which
makes people trust you more and continue
coming back.
And, secondly, it gets people out of the
mindset that you’re selling to them, and gets
them to realize you’re helping them solve
problems that they’re having and may be
willing to pay you to solve.
When people recognize that they have problems
that can be solved, and you’re helping them
solve those problems, you’re able to promote
products and services that are the solutions,
rather and manipulation to get your visitors to
buy something.
If they get an idea of you using manipulation and
persuasion tactics to get them to buy something
that they may not actually need, they probably
aren’t going to trust you very much.
When you lose your visitor’s trust, you can safely
assume that any money you made from them
was luck, and that they aren’t going to be
coming back to your website any time soon.
From there, your business will end up dying a
slow, painful death.
SOLUTION: Instead of trying to sell every chance
you get, spend more time trying to figure out
problems that your visitors are having,
and provide them with solutions to those
problems, whether free or paid.
They’ll thank you for it, and your business will
make more money because of your generosity.
Common Affiliate Marketing
Mistakes #6: Joining the Wrong
Affiliate Program
Affiliate programs are a dime a dozen, and it
seems like beginner marketers want to join as
many as possible.
This doesn’t really present any problems,
because having more options is a good thing -
until it comes time to finally getting paid.
That’s where the problems start.
Since opening an affiliate marketing program is
so easy, many business owners are doing it.
Not all of them are organized, though, and
accurately tracking the sales you’re making isn’t
necessarily their top priority.
In fact, they’re happy to let sales “slip through
your pipes”.
They make more money that way.
While not all of the affiliate marketing partners
you’ll join up with necessarily have malicious
thoughts in mind, and allowing sales to slip
through the cracks really is a problem with their
technology, and not necessarily their morals.
It doesn’t, however, change the fact that you
could be making more money than you’re
actually earning.
There are quite a few programs you can join that
do have malicious intent, though, and actually
make it a part of their business model to “scrub”
the sales that you’re making.
If you don’t know what you’re doing, this problem
can persist, and you could be losing out on
thousands of dollars.
SOLUTION: When you’re just getting started, only
join affiliate programs that are known for
delivering on the sales that you’re making, and
then implement the proper tracking so you can
accurately verify when sales have been made,
and then claim the commissions that you’re
owed at the end of every month.
Common Affiliate Marketing
Mistakes #7: Promoting Too Many
Products Or Services
Yes… Promoting your affiliate products is very
important, but then…
…“keep it simple silly” is an adage that works
with nearly every business model, especially
online business models like affiliate marketing.
While it may seem counter-intuitive, promoting
less means that you’re able to promote more
often and dig deeper into the problems that the
specific product or service you’re promoting
solves for your visitors.
When you’re promoting too many products or
services, it’s going to show that you’re focused
more on making money than you are on solving
people’s problems.
It’s also going to force you to promote more
often, and leave your visitors confused about
which products or services are actually worth
their money.
When that happens, they’re going to end up
leaving your website confused, instead of
confident about what you’re recommending to
them.
A lack of confidence in your visitors means your
income is going to suffer as a result.
SOLUTION: Instead of hammering your visitors
with every promotion you can find, focus on one
or two that truly solve their problems, and are
actually worth the money you’re asking them to
spend.
This is going to do a lot more for you and be
easier to track than trying to join every program
that will accept you.
Common Affiliate Marketing
Mistakes #8: Promoting Low-
Quality Products
This ties back in with your reputation and
credibility, and promoting low-quality products is
going to cost you more money in the long run
than you’ll make by promoting the products in
the first place.
Think about it like this.
Let’s assume you have a problem and make your
way into an affiliate’s website, take their
recommendation, and buy the product that
they’re promoting.
Then, it arrives to your front door and you crack
it open, trying to solve the problem you’re
having.
Except, when you get it open, you start using the
product and it breaks after a few short minutes.
What do you think is going to happen?
Chances are, you’re going to be upset with the
affiliate that recommended it to you, promising
that it was the greatest invention since sliced
bread.
You’re also probably not going to be going back
to their website to take any more of their
recommendations.
You’re going to assume they only recommended
the product to take money, and you’re liable to
run to the internet to leave negative reviews.
Sounds like a pretty bad experience, right?
If you’re like so many other customers, you’re
going to go out of your way to make sure other
people understand how shady the affiliate was,
and keep them from making any purchases, too.
So not only did they lose your business, they lost
business from other people, too.
This happens all the time, unfortunately. It’s also
one of the biggest problems with affiliate
marketing — affiliates prefer to make a quick
buck, rather than put in the work required to
promote high-quality products and services.
SOLUTION: Don’t do this, too! Promote only
quality products.
Common Affiliate Marketing
Mistakes #9: Not Performing
Keyword Research
Just because you shouldn’t rely solely on search
engine traffic to build your business doesn’t
mean that you should ignore it, either.
When you’re ready to publish a new piece of
content, not spending the extra little bit of time
required to do proper keyword research means
that you’re making an active decision to cost
yourself money.
Finding a few keywords that your new blog post
could rank for doesn’t really take a lot of time,
and sets you up to pull in search engine traffic
that is highly targeted to what you’ve written —
and the products that you’re promoting inside of
the post.
If you don’t do it, you’re pretty much
guaranteeing that you’re not going to rank for
the keywords you want to rank for, and are going
to be required to generate traffic to the post
using other traffic channels that may not
be nearly as profitable as search engine traffic.
SOLUTION: Try this the next time you’ve written
a blog post and go to publish it on your website:
Head over to Google’s Keyword Planner , enter in
a few keywords you think your visitors would
type into the search engines to find your
content, and then work those keywords into the
post before you publish it.
READ: How to Use Google Keyword Planner
The process takes 20-30 minutes, tops, and is
highly profitable in the long run.
Chances are high that you’ll end up ranking for
keywords you never intended to, and uncover
new ways to bring even more traffic into your
website.
Common Affiliate Marketing
Mistakes #10: Writing Low-Quality
Reviews
If you really want to make money, especially big
money, you’re going to have to put in the time to
set yourself apart from your competition.
Writing low-quality reviews, or even outsourcing
them for pennies a word, isn’t the way to get
high-quality content that your visitors are going
to love and trust.
Outsourcing your content for as cheaply as you
can get it may seem enticing at first, but when
you realize that you’re going to have to spend
twice as much to fix the mistake when the
content isn’t actually generating sales, you’re
going to get pretty discouraged.
Churning out dozens of articles every single day
is part of the “hustle”, but doesn’t pay off in the
long run.
Even if you’re able to write all of the content
yourself, you’re going to be able to make more
money from a single, high-quality piece of
content than you can from dozens of pieces of
content that only lightly skim the topic.
Covering the problems that your visitors are
having using in-depth content is a great way to
earn their trust, and show them that you truly
understand what is happening in their lives.
SOLUTION: So, sure, it may take 12 hours to
create one piece of high-quality content, where
during those same 12 hours you could turn out
12 different pieces of low-quality content, but
the one single blog post that covers the topic in-
depth is always going to produce more income
for you.
Common Affiliate Marketing
Mistakes #11: Not Tracking And
Testing
When I touched on the fact that there are
unscrupulous affiliate marketing networks in the
industry, I also touched on how important
tracking your clicks and conversions are.
Not only will it keep you safe from shady
companies scrubbing your sales, but it will also
make it easier for you to figure out what’s going
on in your own business.
A lot of affiliate marketers (too many, actually)
do not track what is happening on their website,
and make changes based on their emotions and
feelings rather than what the data is actually
telling them to do.
Implementing basic tracking isn’t difficult,
especially if your website is built on WordPress.
Installing the “ Pretty Links ” plugin is one of the
easiest ways to see what links people are
clicking on, and allows you to verify that the
clicks you’re sending to the affiliate network are
being properly tracked.
Then, when you’re ready to make changes to
increase your conversion rates, you can split test
and have data to back up the decisions you
make.
This is critical, since most people make changes
and have very little in the way of data to tell
them if those changes were effective, and how
effective they actually were.
Without tracking what’s happening on your site,
you’re hoping and praying that you’ll become
successful, instead of actually knowing that
you’re doing the right things.
Common Affiliate Marketing
Mistakes #12: Not Staying
Focused On One Thing
If you’ve been around the industry for any length
of time, you’ve already heard the term “shiny
object syndrome”.
However, if you’re unfamiliar with it, it means to
end up chasing different strategies instead of
focusing on the one in front of you.
Shiny objects refer to things like switching up
your traffic strategy every week, constantly
tweaking your website’s design, bouncing from
guru to guru consuming as much content as you
can without really putting in the effort to grow
your business.
All of these are terrible mistakes, and are holding
you back from making the type of money you
should be making.
There is an acronym for the word “focus”:
F – Follow
O – One
C – Course
U – Until
S – Successful.
Whether that is an actual training course that
you’re using to help you grow your business, or if
it’s a single strategy that you’re trying to
implement, you want to make sure that you’re
doing it -and only it- until it is successful.
This single-minded focus is what most
successful marketers can attribute the growth of
their business to. Definitely not chasing one
“shiny” object after the next.
SOLUTION: If you find yourself bouncing from
website to website, trying to learn as much as
you can, or purchasing multiple different courses,
thinking that the next one you buy is going to be
the cause of your success, I want you to do
something — just stop.
Stop bouncing from course to course, and
strategy to strategy.
Common Affiliate Marketing
Mistakes #13: Following The Herd
At some point in time, you’re going to have to let
go of the gurus and cut your own path through
life.
While you don’t necessarily have to reinvent the
wheel, and learning more about what you’re
doing is generally considered a good thing,
spending years learning how to build your
business isn’t nearly as important as spending a
single year actually building your business.
Sometimes, you’re going to make mistakes, and
other times you’re going to have small wins that
add up to a big income for you.
Those things aren’t going to happen if you’re
constantly reading, trying to figure out what the
big name gurus are doing and teaching, or trying
to learn from other people all of the time.
Most times, people that are following the latest
gurus are taking what they say word for word,
which means they may be fighting a losing
battle.
There’s no telling that what the guru is giving
them is actually relevant to their business.
However, if you’re cutting your own path and
building your business on your terms, you’re
going to instantly stand out from the pack.
SOLUTION: Getting yourself noticed will be easy,
because you’re not going to be doing the same
thing that a thousand other marketers are doing.
In the end, you’ll feel a lot better about your
successes because you actually earned them,
instead of doing what you were told by
somebody that doesn’t actually have a clue
about the business you’re trying to build.
Common Affiliate Marketing
Mistakes #14: Not Focusing On A
Specific Niche/Vertical
If you have a large budget, a lot of confidence,
some technical skills, and believe you can take
on the big competitors in the industry you’ve
chosen, there’s nothing wrong with casting a
large net and attempting to make money in a
broad topic.
However, for most people reading this,
competing on a general topic is going to be fairly
hard to do, and is actually going to hinder your
progress, making it a lot harder for you to build a
successful business.
Instead of trying to compete with major players
that have built their websites, it’s a lot better for
you, as a beginner with a smaller budget and less
experience, to focus on a tighter niche inside of
the larger industry.
As time goes on, your website grows in age, your
traffic numbers increase, and you start making
more money to support a larger content and
marketing budget, you’ll be able to branch out
from your niche and start taking on the larger
industry.
SOLUTION: When you spend time focusing on a
tighter niche, you’re also giving yourself more
chances to figure out the intimate problems that
your visitors are having, and deliver the best
solutions to those problems.
Common Affiliate Marketing
Mistakes #15: Being Impatient
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and a successful
affiliate marketing business won’t be, either.
Many of the most successful people, gurus, and
coaches you see teaching you the latest and
greatest techniques have been at it for years.
If there is someone you’re following that seems
to have come out of nowhere, you can safely bet
that they have actually been at it for a couple
years, and it took them that long to reach the
mass population.
Being impatient and expecting results to
instantly come to you is a recipe for disaster.
I’ve personally seen more people quit building
their business because they were told that
something was going to happen in their first
month or even their first 6 months.
Instead of getting frustrated at the lack of
results, you’re going to become elated when
results -and income- happens while you weren’t
expecting it to.
These are two completely different mindsets, but
I can say that the people that have been around
for years all started their business with a
curiosity about what was actually possible,
instead of tying their enthusiasm to how quickly
they could start making money.
You can also get some more common affiliate
marketing mistakes from this video.
CONCLUSION
Creating a successful affiliate marketing
business requires passion, commitment,
knowledge of products, updated knowledge about
market trends, relationship building with clients,
quality traffic, and helpful product
recommendations.
Many times, affiliate marketers with great
products fail to make their business profitable
just because they deploy detrimental strategies
and the information is above is a small step to
help them avoid these common affiliate
marketing mistakes.
So, these are 15 mistakes you should not be
doing with affiliate marketing.
You can excel as an affiliate marketer but you
need to know what it takes and apply the rules
and all the practical information that you would
need to succeed.
You can get all of these and more from our
digital marketing training and our 1-year support
ensures that you get the assistance that you
need whenever you get stuck anywhere, any
time.
Click here to learn more about how our training
can make you successful.
On a final note, success with affiliate marketing
doesn’t happen overnight but with the right
strategies and hard work, you will eventually
succeed!