Affiliate marketing is a lucrative way to generate income with your online business. However, there are a lot of things that can go wrong and wreck your affiliate marketing business.
Hence, in this article, I will give you a sound understanding of beginner’s common affiliate marketing mistakes and how to avoid them.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is the process of promoting other people’s products or services and getting paid when someone buys through your link.
For example, you find a product you like, promote it to others and get a small profit for the sale you made.
Succeeding with affiliate marketing relies mainly upon traffic, and various methods are deployed. However, the most realistic is bringing people to your website by consistently writing valuable and helpful content.
If you can solve your audience’s problems, they will trust you and connect better with you.
You may make a great commission even with a small amount of traffic if the process is done the right way; otherwise, it’s so easy to make mistakes if it’s done the wrong way.
But if you are aware of the common mistakes, you will be starting your online business on the proper foundation.
Is Affiliate Marketing Easy?
If you’re just starting with affiliate marketing, you will be told how many people earn passive income and live the lifestyle of their dreams.
Yes, it’s true that people are making money with affiliate marketing but don’t be carried away.
Many newbies feel they have everything they need to start and don’t need to acquire new knowledge, forgetting that online marketing is consistently changing.
While it might be true that people are making great commissions, bear in mind that those successes result from hard work, commitment, and patience, and it didn’t happen overnight.
Affiliate marketing requires a lot of effort and market research to succeed.
Moreover, you may need to keep track of recent trends in the online world consistently. And that’s why I think it’s best to learn from experience affiliate marketers who have been in the business for a long.
There are many affiliate marketing training courses for beginners online, but the best one I have tried and recommended is Wealthy Affiliate.
9 Common Affiliate Marketing Mistakes To Avoid
1. Poor website Design
The first impression visitors have on landing on your website will determine whether they will stay or not. A poor website design may impact their experience, thus increasing your bounce rate.
You can create a nice-looking website on WordPress. You don’t necessarily have to be a guru in graphic design as WordPress is quite flexible, and there are tons of tutorials on the internet to guide you.
A well-designed and responsive website increases customers engagement and loyalty.
2. Promoting Products Based on Commission Rate
When you’re just starting with affiliate marketing, it’s possible to have the feel to pick as many products as possible.
Don’t make money your priority; instead, you should focus on a few products. Put your audience first, take time to understand their needs, and position your content effectively.
When you put your interest above those of your audience, you may lose that trust and credibility. So, earn your readers’ trust first and only recommend products you have used yourself and benefit them.
You can even demonstrate how the product helps you solve your problem.
3. Not Managing Your Affiliate Links
It would be best to have essential tools to enhance your site visibility and coordinate your affiliate links to succeed in affiliate marketing.
It may become difficult over time to track your links leading to less revenue. Fortunately, there are free plugins you can leverage.
You may also need to shorten your affiliate link as most of them are long and less attractive when used raw.
- SEO plugins – Yoast, All in SEO. To enhance visibility
- Link shortener like pretty link, thirsty affiliate.
4. Neglecting SEO
Search Engine Optimization is an excellent avenue to improve your site visibility and visits through organic search engine results.
Maximizing users’ experience on your website will result in more clicks, leads, and conversion rates.
Find Keywords your post could rank for. Then then, do thorough keyword research targeting low competition and long-tail keywords.
As a result, you may get more conversions and more sales when using the keywords in your blog post.
Also, pay attention to your title tag, meta description, internal links, and external links to increase your site visibility on the search engine.
5. Overlooking a Mailing List
An email list helps you have the contact database of visitors to your site, as most people who come to your website may not return.
Moreover, it’s an avenue to reach them again and develop a genuine relationship with them. With time, you can convert them into customers.
Include an opt-in form on your website, give out valuable freebies and start building your audience list right away.
Continue to grow your list; sign up with an email marketing tool like Aweber. Even with the free plan, you have everything you need to get started.
6. Publishing Low-Quality Content
One of the biggest mistakes in affiliate marketing is to write content that adds no value to your audience. Yes, you need the traffic to move your affiliate marketing; does it translate to writing low-quality content?
Instead, you should write comprehensive, valuable posts that provide your audience with the necessary information and help them make a better decision.
Writing high-quality content can build customer loyalty and conversion rates.
Examples you can leverage include comparable lists, product reviews, tutorials, “how-to guides,” and likes.
Here is my how-to start a blog guide.
The focus of your blog post should be to write valuable and helpful content. It’s not the massive amount of content that matters but writing quality ones, even if they are few.
7. Overlooking site speed
A slow loading site may impact users’ experience and deter them from staying on your website.
People are constantly searching for solutions to their problems, and they may leave for another site if your page takes too long to load.
Luckily, you can install a couple of WordPress plugins to increase the loading speed, WP Rocket, W3 total cache, WP super cache, and likes.
8. Promoting The Wrong Product
Although there are so many products you can promote, choosing the right one is vital.
Therefore, ensure you do thorough research before selecting the product.
9. Selecting Too Many Products
When choosing an affiliate product, it’s possible to be tempted to select many of them at once. Instead, choose a few of them, research about them, and create good content to promote them.
Have a structured plan to grow affiliate products over time. Promote the product you’ve used and is of good quality as your audience relies on you to share your experience about the product.
Conclusion
Affiliate marketing can be a good source of passive income, but it’s so easy to make mistakes due to lack of experience when you’re just starting. However, when you’re aware of the common mistakes, you can avoid them.
I can’t emphasize that it’s best to learn from experienced online marketers who eat and drink affiliate marketing. You will be getting the hands-on experience you need to kick start your online business.
Let’s recap; the standard affiliate marketing mistakes newbies make are
- Poor website Design
- Promoting Products Based on Commission Rate
- Not managing your affiliate links
- Neglecting SEO
- Overlooking a mailing list
- Publishing low-quality content
- Overlooking site speed
- Promoting the wrong product
- Selecting Too Many Products
If you are a newbie in affiliate marketing, ensure you start with your audience first, find out what keeps them awake at night, and find the product that solves that problem.
Then position your content to solve the problems and put in the required time and effort, and you will be on your way to success.
Over to you
Do you have any other common affiliate marketing mistakes to add?
Let’s know in the comment below.
And if you’re looking for the best way to start a profitable online business, this course is for you; get started today.
Hey Muslimah! This is a very well-written post and I really liked your list of fails most new affiliate markets should avoid. It is overwhelming when starting out as an affiliate marketer and newbies are bound to make mistakes. Its great that you have a list like this that not only helps them to avoid these mistakes but to also know what to do instead.
One of the biggest areas ppl (women mostly) get stuck at is beautifying their website layout. Although necessary, it is super time-consuming and can lead to slow site speeds when you overdo it (I am totally guilty of this!).
Do you have a suggestion to how to optimize images on your site so that it doesn’t slow down site speed?
Hi Sasha. I agree to customize a website can be challenging and time-consuming. I think some WordPress themes are easy to customize and can reduce the time spent. I use the Astra theme and find it relatively easy to customize to suit my brand identity.
You may use image optimization tools to compress your images to the smallest size. There is a variety of them; you may check out this post https://introbusinesses.com/50-blogging-tools-and-resources-to-grow-your-blog/ for more information.
Thank you for stopping by.