10 Affiliate Marketing Mistakes to Avoid
Many senior affiliate marketers make a lot of mistakes that hurt their online businesses, revenue, and profits. Affiliate marketing is challenging if you are doing it for the first time.
You need to know the practical steps to take to avoid making some serious affiliate marketing mistakes.
Here are 10 deadly affiliate marketing mistakes to avoid.
1. Being “Salesy”
Your goal with affiliate marketing is to make money. It is tempting to put on the hat of a salesperson. You probably think that getting sales and conversions is your main priority. WRONG! This will result in the publishing of low-quality content and poor results.
As a senior affiliate marketer, you should focus on publishing high-quality content that reveals the benefits the customer gets when they purchase the product You want them to click your link and then let the sales page do its job.
2. Publishing Mediocre Content
“Content is king.” I am sure you have heard that saying if you have been online for any time. As an affiliate marketer, your product is content. Income and conversions are products of great content. Visitors will only click on your links if they think the content is credible and valuable.
Although there are lots of wanna-be marketers out there publishing hundreds of mediocre posts, your quality posts will outperform them, every time.
Your content creation process should start with keyword research. Find out what people are searching for, and what they are looking to buy. This will help you add relevant keywords to your content naturally.
3. Ignoring SEO Basics
Affiliate marketing without search engine optimization is difficult and costly. Publishing high-quality content without proper on-page SEO is fruitless.
You need to ensure there are correct meta descriptions and title tags. SEO makes it easier for search engines to understand your content and rank it properly.
Your meta description and title tags should resonate with the website visitor. Also, make sure you add proper alt tags for your images.
You have limited knowledge of SEO; you can outsource it to a reputable company. You can also use a tool to help you. My sites are on WordPress and I use Yoast SEO (there is a free version) to help me with the SEO tasks.
4. Promoting Too Many Products
Having multiple streams of income is good. You have heard millionaires promote this idea. However, you do not want to promote too many affiliate programs. It can be counterproductive and is one of the affiliate marketing mistakes that are easy to fall into.
If you promote too many products, your website visitors will have a feeling that you know little about these products. When customers doubt your authority, this will have a negative impact on the conversion rate.
The right thing to do is to promote a few products, which are of high quality and you have learned about them.
5. Not Understanding Your Niche
It is advisable to choose a niche you understand well. This will benefit both you and your visitors. When you understand the niche, your passion will easily shine through. Moreover, you are more likely to spend more time on the website adding more content and improving it.
There are more guides on finding a profitable niche than finding an interesting one. If you have a passion for something, you can easily find a niche around it.
6. Not Collecting Customer Emails
As an affiliate marketer, you need to have a solid email marketing strategy. This will help you build relationships with readers. When I first started out, I did not collect emails or build a list. What a huge waste of effort it was to attract traffic to my sites and then lose touch with them. DUH!
Like me, many affiliate marketers wait until their websites are successful to start collecting emails from potential leads. Doing this is a deadly mistake. Although collecting emails can be challenging at first, it does not have to be. You can promise something like an irresistible download or a free monthly newsletter and you will get opt-ins.
I like to focus my own efforts on building a list of buyers, which significantly increases my EPC when I promote affiliate products and services.
7. Promoting Low-quality Products
Another deadly mistake is to promote any product just for money. It is also unethical. Before you promote any given product, you should ask yourself why you are doing it.
You should promote high-quality products that benefit your customers. In this way, you can build trust and get repeat sales. If you would not buy it with confidence that it does what it says on the box, don’t promote it to others.
8. Being Impatient
Affiliate marketing is not a get-rich-quick scheme, it is a long-term business model. You will not publish the content today and wake up rich overnight.
Expecting instant results and being impatient is a recipe for disaster. Rather than being frustrated due to a lack of results, you should foster a new mindset. Keep on building your website until you achieve success.
9. Not Tracking and Testing
There are some unscrupulous affiliate companies out there. Hence, there is a need to track your conversions and clicks. This will ensure you are safe from companies that steal your sales. Also, you can easily analyze the performance of your business.
Many affiliate marketers fail to track the performance of their websites. By analyzing your performance, you can make changes based on analytics.
10. Not Investing in Premium Tools
Every business requires the right tools to succeed. For instance, if you are blogging for affiliate marketing, you need to get the right tools. These tools will have an impact on your overall sales. For instance, you need good web hosting, a responsive theme, a reliable autoresponder, and more.
It is OK to use free versions of good tools if you can’t afford the price right now but make sure you are working with a reputable company. Once you start earning an income, you can upgrade your tools.
For example, you can get hosting from Hostgator for $3.50/month for the first year. You can get a free autoresponder account at Aweber to get you started. For domain names, you can use NameCheap for great prices.
