Complete Guide to Affiliate Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

 

Have you ever thought most people (especially beginners) run their affiliate business without fixing the most common affiliate marketing mistakes?

How discouraging it will be when you work so hard to create content but you are not getting the targeted and consistent traffic, no clicks to your affiliate links, and thus no sales?

We all make mistakes. And making mistakes is human.

But what is important is how much we learn from those mistakes and try not to make the same mistakes over and over again.

Affiliate marketing is a huge business market having limitless opportunities. For many people, it has become a massive passive income stream.

Statistics show the worth of the affiliate marketing industry is an estimated $12 billion.

But there is a common misconception that affiliate marketers just need to find a niche, create great content, and drive traffic to their affiliate products. And doing so, they make huge dollars and enjoy a great lifestyle, and luxurious travels.

It’s never that easy, my friend!

There is no shortcut to becoming a successful affiliate marketer.

You need to work hard, gain knowledge of the industry, have patience, and adopt the proper content strategy.

It’s natural to make mistakes when starting out. But if you are not aware of the common pitfalls and don’t know how to fix them, you’ll be losing both time and money. These pitfalls can also damage the reputation of your website permanently.

In this post, we’ll be discussing the 7 top and most common mistakes affiliates make and learn how to avoid them. And this way, you’ll stay one step ahead of your competition, generate more revenue, and become a successful affiliate marketer.

Also Read:

• What is Affiliate Marketing and How it works?
• Top 9 Affiliate Marketing Programs and Websites
• How To Make Money With Amazon Affiliate Program?

 

Here are the 7 most common affiliate marketing mistakes we’ll be discussing in this article:

1. Choosing the wrong niche or product
2. Promoting too many products
3. Giving priority to selling, rather than helping
4. Not providing high-quality content
5. Lacking knowledge about the products you are promoting
6. Paying no attention to site speed
7. Ignoring SEO

 

Let’s get started.

 

#1. Choosing the Wrong Niche or Product

 

This is one of the biggest affiliate marketing mistakes most affiliates make. They are not able to choose the products and niche wisely for their affiliate marketing business.

If you do a quick search of the most popular affiliate marketing products, you’ll get millions of results.

But choosing the right products is critical for your success in the affiliate marketing business.

Selecting the niche and the products you are interested in will benefit both you and your customers.

When you’re excited and passionate about the products you’re promoting, it will never bore you to create more content and activities related to them.

On the other hand, if you find the qualities of the niche bland or boring, you will not enjoy your affiliate marketing endeavors.

So, never pick products from a niche just because it’s more profitable.

Though profitability is one of the most important considerations, you should go for the niche you love and that’s fun to work with.

And when your work becomes fun, you enjoy doing it. The performance of your promotions of the products is going to improve a lot and you’ll make a good profit.

Also Read:

• The Most Profitable, Evergreen, and Sustainable Affiliate Marketing Niches

• Instagram Affiliate Marketing Primer and Most Profitable Methods

 

#2. Promoting too Many Products

 

So you have found your favorite niche and got excited to select too many products from that niche, right?

But hey, hold on!

Promoting lots of products through your website could be a risky idea. It’s one of the common mistakes of affiliate marketing you need to avoid.

Why? Because you’ll have to invest more time if you try to sell and promote too many products.

Some of the products you choose for promotion aren’t going to sell well and will make more losses than profits. When you select a lot of products, you won’t be able to give quality time and attention to those products that could make lots of profits.

Managing a website promoting hundreds of products is always an uphill task. It’s never easy to keep track of so many products and continue to optimize the campaigns.

Also, having too many products will force you to promote too often. And this will be confusing for your visitors as to which products and services they should go for buying.

Your website may create wrong impressions on your visitors. They might conclude that your only focus is on making money rather than solving their problems. They’ll end up leaving your site without making any purchases.

As a result, the income you generate through affiliate commissions will suffer a lot.

So, what could be the best strategy?

Just start small. Always go for the quality, not for the quantity.

Try to choose one or two best products that could solve your visitors’ problems and put all your focus on them.

Having just one or two products to promote means you have more time to commit to them.

You’ll be able to give each campaign the individual attention it deserves. And the endorsements, reviews, and other content you create are going to be of high quality.

And this will result in more leads, more customers, more sales, and more income for your affiliate marketing business.

 

#3. Giving Priority to Selling, Rather than Helping

 

As an online marketer, it’s natural that you try monetizing your effort.

But making conversions or sales your number one priority is one of the biggest affiliate marketing mistakes. And around 99% of new affiliates are doing so.

Promoting products just for making money is always unethical.

Your audience comes first. Put in a lot of effort, time, and means to create high-value content. In the beginning, just stop bothering about the money.

Here are a few key points you should keep in mind while creating content:

• Make sure that the website’s link is naturally integrated into the article. Your articles should contextually relate to the links you include. This will make your articles more relatable and less artificial.
• In your banner ads or pop-ups, make sure they don’t frustrate your visitors to leave your site and never return in the future.

So, if you’re really serious about affiliate marketing, your focus should always be on helping your audience rather than selling products to them.

Also Read: What are the Best Ways to Promote Your Affiliate Links? (10 Best Tactics)

 

#4. Not Providing High-Quality Content

 

If you are not striving to produce regular and high-quality content, you are making one of the gravest mistakes of affiliate marketing.

It’s crucial to provide your audience with relevant and valuable content they would love to engage with.

Your priority should always be to build a strong content foundation. Only then will your site be able to retain visitors.

Your affiliate links will get more clicks only when your readers deem your content valuable and credible, and find all the information they need.

IMPORTANT! Your focus should be on the quality of content rather than quantity. Make sure that you produce one or two in-depth, valuable, and top-notch quality posts every month. The readers will enjoy such content, get all the information to make a purchasing decision, and would definitely love to come back again for more.

But how to produce a high-quality blog post?

You need to follow a few steps while creating content that will help you outrank the competition in the search results.

First and foremost, you need to identify the topic that could easily rank in the results pages. Next, you have to do keyword research to find out the following details about your competition:

• The number of domain backlinks. You can use Ubersuggest or MozBar to know how many backlinks your competition has.
• The word count of their posts. While creating your content, keep in mind that the average word count of the first-page result is 1890 words.
• The readability of top-ranking posts. You should also include images in your posts. It helps rank your posts higher in search results.

These details will help you brainstorm post ideas to create content that could provide great value to your readers. Your content will be valuable to your audience only if it has a purpose and solution.

Just try to imagine the kind of information your readers need and what would interest them. And then deliver those pieces of information to them through your content.

Finally, you have to put as much time and effort as you can into promoting your article using different tools, such as:

• Email list: One of the best tools to increase engagement and conversion, sending your content to your email subscribers will help you greatly.
• Social media: You can share your content on all the social media platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, etc.
• Link building: Go for building links to the relevant bloggers, who, in turn, may also link back to your posts.

Also Read:

• How to Write A Blog Post: 9 Most Essential Steps to Write A Great Blog Post
• How To Write SEO-Friendly Content?

#5. Lacking Knowledge about the Products You Are Promoting

 

This is one of the most common affiliate marketing mistakes many affiliates make. They just focus on the commissions they will be earning.

So, they go to promote such products or services that may result in high commissions for them without investing much time to learn about those products or services.

How will you be able to convince someone to buy your products or services when you don’t know everything about them in detail and haven’t tried or used them yourself?

Your readers are well-informed. Never try to underestimate them.

If you haven’t studied deeply or don’t have a complete idea about what you’re promoting, you can never write such content that could convince your readers to buy your products.

So, what’s the best strategy to write a post so that your audience may find it genuine and authentic?

You need to stay up-to-date on your niche. Be well-informed about what you’re promoting before you start writing. For this, you can subscribe to the leading blogs in your niche and forums. You can also check out the questions people are asking on Quora and Reddit. This will help you greatly in creating valuable and informative content.

What works wonders in affiliate marketing is your personal stories about your experiences with the products or services you promote.

If possible, purchase the products you want to promote and use them. You’ll be able to share your experiences and demonstrate very effectively how to use them and how exactly they work.

People love stories. If your stories are genuine and authentic, people would definitely love to hear whatever you think about the product or service.

IMPORTANT! ‘Made up’ stories aren’t going to work at all. With all the information at their fingertips, your readers can easily find out if you know what you’re writing about.

You can earn the trust of your target audience only when you are honest with them. You need to explain all the advantages and shortcomings of the product. Once you earn their trust, it’s going to help you in long run, both in engagement with your content and conversions.

 

#6. Paying no attention to Site Speed

 

Yet another affiliate marketing mistake. People usually ignore the speed and performance of their site.

Slow websites rank higher in the search results (and therefore, lower traffic and revenue) than fast-loading sites.

In fact, most people leave a website because of its poor performance. If the loading time of your site is more than 2 seconds, the bounce rate will increase by 50%. This means 50% of your site visitors will leave your site if your site takes more than 2 seconds to load.

When your visitors leave your site because of the slow speed of your site, they won’t be able to click on your affiliate links. And it’ll badly impact your affiliate marketing efforts. In the long run, you’re going to lose sales.

But what could be the causes of your site loading slowly?

It could be due to the server taking longer to respond to large image files, installing too many plugins, or the theme you choose for your site.

You can use free tools such as Google Page Speed Insights or GTMetrix to easily test your website’s performance.

All you need to do is enter your website’s URL in the search bar and they’ll provide you with all the insights. They’ll also give you suggestions for improvements.

Here are a few plugins I would recommend to improve the loading speed of your site:

• Smush or TinyPNG: If large media files are the culprit behind the slow speed of your site, these plugins help greatly in compressing the files. And they do so without sacrificing the quality of the image.
• WP Rocket or WP Super cache: You can set up browser caching with one of these plugins.

The fast-loading sites decrease the bounce rates and improve the user experience of sites. And thus, the rankings of sites and conversion rates also improve.

 

#7. Ignoring SEO

 

No matter whether you are a blogger, website designer, or another online service provider, SEO is important for all of your online efforts.

If you have put in your best effort in creating comprehensive content but haven’t cared to optimize it for the search engines, then, it’s going to be of no use.

If you are into affiliate marketing and not doing proper SEO before publishing content, it could be one of the serious affiliate marketing mistakes you’ll be making.

After all, as a blogger and affiliate marketer to generate more income, you’ll definitely like to drive the most traffic possible to your site … won’t you?

By SEO, we mean optimizing your content to increase your website’s rankings in organic search results by using some techniques. When you focus more on properly optimizing your posts and pages, it becomes very easy for search engines to find your website.

There are other options also such as social media, to drive traffic to your site. But if you are low on budget, SEO could be one of the best sources of targeted traffic.

So what are some important things you need to make sure your content is optimized for search engines?

Here are a few things to consider:

• The first step is to do keyword research. You can use the tools such as Google Keyword Planner or Ubersuggest to find relevant keywords for your niche.

While choosing the keywords, keep in mind that they have high search volume and low competition.

Why? Because if you go for keywords with high search volume, it’s going to be harder for your site to rank in search results.

Once you finalize the keywords associated with your niche, use them throughout your content.

IMPORTANT! Avoid keyword stuffing so that your content looks natural. Your reader will also have difficulty reading your post if you have excessive keywords. You just need to focus on creating useful and information-rich content using keywords appropriately and in context.

• Create Title TAGS AND Meta Descriptions for your posts. If you are using WordPress, just install the plugin Yoast SEO and write title tags and meta descriptions and optimize them. This will greatly increase the click-through rate of your site.
• You also focus on creating backlinks to your posts. Backlinks help your content get more visitors from other sources. This builds the credibility of your website and thus helps you rank higher in search results.
• Use internal and external links. By using internal links, you just create an informative hierarchy across your site. This way, people end up spending more time on your site.

By using external links, you are just showing Google the credibility and authority of another site’s content. It has the great potential to rank your site higher on results pages.

• You should use media in your posts such as images and videos.

Also Read:

• What is SEO and What are its Different Types?
• Mobile SEO: The Ultimate Guide to Optimize for Mobile-Friendly SEO
• What is Website Structure and How to Create SEO-Friendly Site Structure?
• On-Page SEO: Top 12 On-Page SEO Techniques

Final Thoughts

 

No doubt there’s huge competition, but if done with a good strategy, affiliate marketing is one of the best sources of online income.

A successful affiliate marketing business requires commitment, perseverance, knowledge of the products you are promoting, building relationships with the clients, and of course, patience.

Making mistakes for beginners is natural. But even the most experienced marketers can also make big mistakes. But mistakes are fixable.

If you think you are making mistakes, try to identify them and fix them using the techniques discussed above. And nothing is going to stop you from building a strong and successful business.

To recap, here are the 7 most common and deadly mistakes most affiliates make:

1. Choosing the wrong niche/product
2. Promoting too many products
3. Giving priority to selling, rather than helping
4. Not providing high-quality content
5. Lacking knowledge about the products you are promoting
6. Paying no attention to site speed
7. Ignoring SEO

Would you like to add other affiliate marketing mistakes to the list that marketers need to avoid? Do let me know in the comments section below.