Affiliate marketing is a great source of passive income, provided that you do it right. Too many affiliate marketers come into the fray with dollar signs in their eyes that they lose sight of what matters. And if their efforts don’t work, they give up.
Today, I will show you the 10 affiliate marketing mistakes you don’t want to make. These are:
- Too many products
- Poor website and content
- Not publishing regularly
- Not trying new things
- Picking the wrong niche
- Not using SEO
- Not analyzing site performance
- Being too pushy as a salesperson
- Having wrong expectations
- Copying the style of others
Let us get started!
Too Many Products
Affiliate marketers tend to do this all the time—they go to ClickBank and choose so many products. The problem with this approach is that you lose focus—you are trying to promote so many products all at once.
When I say many, I am saying anything that is more than 15. A good number of affiliate products to promote is only between 10 to 15. And with this number, you need to choose five to seven that you will heavily promote, and the rest will have partial attention from you.
Poor Website and Content
If you are blogging, your posts must be helpful enough to make your readers trust you. The problem with many affiliate marketers is that they produce too much content—they believe that more content equals more traffic.
While this is somewhat true, the content of your website must also be of high quality. You should never forget that the quality of your content is what drives credibility, and people will only click your affiliate links if you are trustworthy. It is better to publish a few quality blog posts per month than dozens that are sloppy.
Not Publishing Regularly
Your followers expect regular content from you—content that will help them understand how to do their business, or how to become better at their chosen field of interest.
Search engines also love websites that publish regular content. It tells the engines that the website is a dependable source of information and that the webmaster is active.
Whether you publish once a week or three times a week does not matter—you must publish content on a regular basis.
Not Trying New Things
As an affiliate marketer, you should not be afraid to try new stuff. There are so many ways to reach out to different audiences.
Most marketers only focus on blogging, and then they forget that one aspect of affiliate marketing that works really well is YouTube.
If your current actions are not giving you the results that you want, it just means that your affiliate marketing efforts are not enough. There are two things that you can do:
- Revisit your strategy – sometimes, your strategy is one that works but you are doing it wrong. Analyze what these errors are and correct them. A good example is writing blog posts that are too short.
- Add a marketing strategy – the next thing you can do is to add a new approach. If you are only blogging but you have not social media channel, you better start one.
As you can see, there are so many things you can do—change or add strategy as long as it fits your niche.
Picking the Wrong Niche
This is probably the most common of all the affiliate marketing mistakes out there. The niche that you choose is what is going to determine your success. You have to pick a niche that:
- Has a market
- You understand
- You love
Many affiliate marketers tend to select niches for money. This is wrong. You have to pick a niche that you understand and are passionate about so you can build value.
That said if you are building a blog empire than you’ll eventually choose niches purely for their income potential rather than your knowledge or passion of the topic. After all, at this stage, you should have a team of talented writers to pump out content for any niche.
Not Using SEO
Search engine optimization is one of the most effective ways to build an affiliate marketing business. All you have to do is to build an asset that is SEO optimized, like a website.
The thing is, SEO is not as easy as it seems—even if people say so. It takes a lot of education to understand how to do it right. Also, SEO tools are costly. The free ones do not really tell you how your website is doing—and you cannot assess the strength of your website’s SEO.
Here is the correct way to do SEO:
This report came from SEMRush. A tool like that is costly, as you will have to pay $99 per month. So, if you do not have the budget for this, just pay for affordable high-quality SEO service from a freelancer once in a while—one who has access to the tool.
Not Analyzing Site Performance
Your site’s performance is crucial to your success. If you are not analyzing your performance, then you are not in a real business. Earlier, I talked about SEO. This time, you need to have a conscious effort to check what is going on in your business.
You need a spreadsheet that tells you:
- The frequency of your blog posts
- The relationship of your post with your sales
- The relationship of your posts and word count against your traffic
Many online software tools are expensive, and they are paid on a monthly basis. As a businessperson, what you want is to reduce your cost, not increase it.
The only solution is to create your own spreadsheet or buy one that is ready-made.
Being Too Pushy as a Salesperson
Understandably, you are an affiliate marketer and you want to make sales. The problem is that consumers do not like people who are salesy—they hate marketers.
So, what should you do?
What you need to do is to provide value. You have to create content that helps—content where people learn something for free. You need to be subtle when asking people to buy—only insert your affiliate links in anchor texts that do not look so salesy.
Having Wrong Expectations
Many affiliate marketers think that they will get rich quick. This is bad. It can take months before you can make your first affiliate sale. After that, you are not even sure how many people will buy again.
And because they never got rich, they quit. While it is true that affiliate marketing is a great source of passive income, it takes years to make this happen—set five years minimum to achieve a consistent amount of sales.
Copying the Style of Others
Just because you saw others succeed in doing one thing doesn’t mean you will get the same results. Remember, your success depends on how you serve your audience.
At best, try to understand what made other people successful. Do not copy what they did, but understand the underlying principles of what they did. Once you have figured out what that is, create your own strategy, and apply the principle to your affiliate marketing business.
Summary
There you go, the 10 affiliate marketing mistakes that you should never make. If you want to succeed in affiliate marketing, the keys are consistency and quality. Always create content that your audience is going to benefit from—make sales by not trying to make sales.
Affiliate marketing is a business, and you have to treat it like one. If you are just blogging and letting things happen, you will never really get that far—you need to make a conscious effort in everything that you do.
For a list of useful tools that you could use to help create and maintain your online business, take a look at this website.
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