7 common mistakes new affiliate marketers often make

      Affiliate marketers make mistakes, just like everybody else. But there are several common things you can learn to avoid today instead of making them over and over again. What are these marketing mistakes? Let’s look into them.

1. Promoting a product that doesn’t make sense for your audience

     Perhaps the biggest mistake new affiliate marketer usually make is not promoting a product that actually makes sense for their audiences. This often happens when someone takes an income-first approach rather than a serving-first. You should look for solutions that can help your audience, whether there’s an affiliate opportunity or not. If there happens to be one, great. That’s a bonus. If there isn’t, but you know the product could still be helpful to your audience, it’s your responsibility to share it with them.

     Do not be persuaded by the dollar value of the commissions you’ll be offered. We know when you’re just starting out, the promise of a commission can make it hard to see things clearly. However, if you continuously introduce products which are not a good fit for your audiences, the damage it could do will be potentially huge: the destruction of the trust you’ve worked hard to build with them.

     So, realize that you may have to make a choice and that it’s okay to say no. Opportunities will come your way, but your priority should be to protect your brand and your reputation. Choose wisely.

2. Not being honest about the product

     When you’re promoting your affiliate products, you have to guarantee that you set the right expectations for your audience. You need to be totally honest about what a product can and can’t do, and make sure you’re not recommending it to someone who’s not a good fit for it. Otherwise, what happens? You lose the trust of the person to whom you recommended that product.

     Being honest fosters trust, even if the circumstances aren’t totally favourable. And if you’re being honest and serving your audience in a way that’s valuable to them, they’ll often jump at the chance to help you back.

     This is where the law of reciprocity comes in - when you do something helpful for someone, they often feel compelled to do something for you in  return - and affiliate marketing can be an amazing way to give your audience a way to pay you back.

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. 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. There are lots of platforms, such as Wordpress, that lets 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 all it takes. 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.

5. Not providing high-quality regular content

     Another typical mistake affiliate marketers make is that they forget to provide regular, high-quality content. And that’s a big problem.

     Content is crucial for successful marketing. No matter what your site is about - product reviews, comparisons, knowledge sharing - each piece of content contributes to your online sales directly or indirectly. A common mistake affiliates make is publishing content that’s not insightful or actionable. Therefore anytime you want to write a piece of content, make sure there are purposes and solutions.

     Put yourself in the shoes of your potential buyers and imagine what they would be interested in. After all, you want to get people hooked with a great story and cool facts, right?

     Another mistake is that so many affiliates just do a copy and paste. Google doesn’t appreciate copied contents. However, you can refer to articles on other blogs, websites, find out what and how they are writing, and create your own content. Then make sure to post content regularly - even once a week. You should make a publishing schedule for every week or month and try your best to stick to it. Consistency is key.

6. Completely neglect SEO

     For most bloggers, without huge budgets, SEO is the single best source of targeted traffic. Publishing a new post without proper SEO is like building a house without any roads to it.

     Without the proper title tag and meta description, you’re making it very difficult, if not impossible, for people to find your content. After all, you’re in the business of generating the most traffic possible, aren’t you?

     The first step is to optimize your title tag and meta description. The more your title tag and meta description resonates with the user, the more likely they are to click through to your page. If you’re on a WordPress website, this can be as simple as installing the Yoast SEO Plugin.

      Internal and external links shouldn’t be forgotten either. Internal links help to establish information hierarchy across the site, as well as link equity. As for external links, they are believed to be the most important source of ranking power. And many other features need to be done to improve the SEO ranking of your website (keyword, bounce rate, UX/UI,…), you could learn on the Internet.

7. Not tracking website performance

     The last common mistake affiliate marketers are guilty of is not using a tracking tool. Without it, it’s impossible to know how you are doing performance-wise. Marketing is all about tracking and optimizing your data. You need to observe the cause and effects of what you do and do more of what’s working for you. Recognizing successful patterns is essential for your success.

     So make sure you deploy Google Analytics (or similar tools) to measure your website performance and decide what campaigns to keep and which to ditch.