At the beginning of a professional journey, every individual is filled with a sense of zeal. However, this sense of zeal can get a little lost with all of the challenges that come across. Contrary to the common belief the road to affiliate marketing is kind of bumpy and you need to dodge the roadblocks at every step. Even though you may not consider it right away, every little support you can get on this journey will help you to make it to the finish line. Other than this, taking action at the right moment is what distinguishes you from your peers. It has been proven time and again that taking appropriate actions has supported the markets immensely. This eventually led to a flourishing career in the industry.
Since you are a total newbie, it is but natural for you to commit some rookie mistakes. But the most essential part of your growth is that you make sure to learn from all the mistakes that you commit as you go and make sure that you never repeat it.
That being said, if you find yourself in a dire need of assistance or guidance to prevent you from making the same mistakes again and again, you can count on us for sure. We strive to present you not only with strategies to march forward the right path, but also foolproof solutions to your consistent mistakes.
Let us have a look at some of the most common mistakes that a new Affiliate Marketer might commit, along with the right way to tackle each one of those. Read on in order to know more specific details.
#1 Know It All
Maximum number of affiliate marketers consider themselves to know it all. After acquiring enough knowledge on one specific topic the newbies assume that they can completely eliminate the chances to acquire new knowledge.
Content marketing is changing rapidly, there are several trainings available online on affiliate marketing but many of these have turned obsolete now. They might have been effective previously but not anymore.
Solution:
I would suggest that if you wish to survive in today’s competitive world of content marketing, you need to open yourself to new things and adapt to new changes through learning. Research on the new training available and buy those to keep yourself updated!
#2 Choosing The Wrong Niche
Niche is one of the most important factors when you begin your journey as an affiliate marketer. Even though many marketers say that affiliate marketing can work for any niche you pick, each niche can be modified later with affiliate products.
You can start off by making a list of niches after analyzing the marketplace and then choose the niche from the list which best suits your interest.
There are a few niches where readers are simply looking for information and these niches are not suitable for buying any product. Few of these niches are:
- Software Cracks
- Sports News
- Movie Gossips
- Game Cheats
Solution:
These sites are meant for temporary visitors who are usually digging up some information. Despite generating traffic they are used for contextual advertising. Therefore, it is often suggested to the beginners to avoid these niches if their main purpose is affiliate marketing only.
#3 Choosing Expensive Products
It is understandable that expensive products mean better commissions, but one thing you should consider before choosing expensive products is whether they will be able to compete with conversion rate?
You should keep in mind that even though expensive products fetch better commissions, their buyers are scarce. Additionally, people don’t purchase expensive products often.
As compared to costlier products, the ones that have an average price have a wider customer base and sales.
Have a look at this example, to earn $150 from a $1500 products category, you need one sale and the commission is less. However, to fetch $1500 from the average products category, you need to sell 15 products in total and the commission would be more than the previous one. This implies that the second category is more profitable with a high conversion rate. Furthermore, your site will get more visitors which means more traffic.
Solution:
To begin with, you should avoid the products that are costly as it would be challenging to fetch any customer who wants to buy the products. It is advisable to advertise the products that are affordable and have an average price. Besides, you should also avoid the seasonal products that are sold in a particular time of the year. Create a site that has products which are used in daily routine, that would be a best fit for you as a newbie affiliate marketer.
#4 Living In A Fantasy World
When you enter affiliate marketing, you will come across various sites that are making a handsome amount of money by working on different niches.
Most of the associates in affiliate marketing get fascinated by their success and try to recreate the success of such websites and they wish to start making money without any delays. And in their rush to start generating revenue they don’t pay much attention to generate a decent income. As a result, they hinder the progress of each site in their attempt to replicate them blindly.
Solution:
When you try to replicate anybody’s success you should avoid jumping here and there, one person to another, one niche to another. It is better that you stick to one niche, and follow one strategy until your site becomes profitable. You can plan further when you have achieved a particular goal or have made yourself a brand.
#5 Not Verifying The Product Before Promoting
The main focus of affiliate marketing is promoting different products through different mediums online. But before promoting the products you must ensure that the product you are promoting is authentic and is not a scam. For example, we come across many promotional pages on Facebook that have scam product links.
Solution:
The best way to avoid such a mistake is to review all the products before promoting it on your blog so as to gain trust among your audience. However, if you come across any bad product, you can write an actual review for your trustworthy audience and warn them to stay away.
#6 Spamming Affiliate Links
Many marketers tend to spam their audience with affiliate links in a hope to earn more money. However, spamming affiliate links with an aim to generate more money is not a well appreciated idea. You must have come across such scenarios on social media.
For instance, you must have witnessed Facebook groups spamming their audience with many affiliate links in a hope to drive traffic to their website.
Solution:
Blogging for affiliate marketing is the best alternative if you wish to attain success. You can use blogging as a way to promote yourself as a brand which in turn will lead you to build a trust with your target audience. But you must ensure that you are not using the spamming technique to gain their trust.
#7 Poor Quality Webpage
Many times newcomers use a webpage that has poor user interface- such as slow loading rate, too many advertisements or an unattractive theme. Chances are the user won’t come back to your platform again.
Solution:
While designing the web page as a beginner you should keep in mind that you are choosing the right theme and keeping the design simple and attractive. Moreover, consider the actions that your visitors want to take when he visits the webpage.
#8 Prioritising Money
This is one of the challenges that affiliate marketers face. Many beginners in affiliate marketing choose to promote products just for money. As a beginner, before promoting a product you should ask yourself first, would you buy the product that you are promoting?
Solution:
The best approach that you can follow as an affiliate marketer is that you try to solve problems of others by promoting products. Before promoting a product, you should research and make sure the kind of products that are in high demand in the market.
After finalizing the product that you want to promote, you should focus on the problems that your prospective consumers want to be addressed, and promote the product convincingly. You should focus on promoting the products to solve your consumer’s problems rather than making money.
#9 Promote Too Many Products
The newbies in affiliate marketing in their enthusiasm and optimism end up getting their hands on multiple products at once. Instead of focusing on promoting a single product they start promoting too many products simultaneously. The key here is not quantities but consistency.
Solution:
It is advisable that you choose and concentrate your passion into a couple of outstanding items. This makes it easy to convert the ratings and feedback into desired acts- i.e partner sales.
You can then slowly and gradually extend the products you are promoting.
#10 Picking A Low Quality Platform Or Product
These days a lot of affiliate marketing programs offer you a smart affiliate income, but if you come to think of it practically, not all the platforms suit your advertising needs.
If you pick a low quality platform or the product, it would not fetch you many visitors on your site. And even if someone purchases a product from your website, chances are they will not visit your website again if they are not satisfied with the product offered by you.
Solution:
Therefore, it is very important that you build trust with your customer by promoting quality products and services. And to ensure that your products are of good quality you need to use reliable platforms for marketing. Hence, before you start advertising, the task is to find an appropriate platform.
#11 Not Focussing On Quality Of Content
Another common mistake that affiliate marketers make is not focussing on delivering high-quality content to their visitors. The quality of content is very essential for effective marketing. Make sure that the content you publish on your site is informative and practical.
Solution:
Ensure that the content on your website is written with a target and objective in mind. While writing, step into the shoes of your prospective client and visualize the type of content they would need when they visit your site.
#12 Following The Herd
Initially, every marketer tries to copy what other marketers are doing and follow them blindly. This might work for them in the beginning but eventually it poses a problem to them. Every market place has its own set of challenges, and if you wish to overcome these challenges, you must do something different than others rather than following the herd.
Every marketer has a different marketing strategy, what works for them may not work for you!
#Solution
The best thing is to create your own strategy to make a difference rather than following the herd blindly. You can add value to your affiliate offer which will set you apart from the rest. You can take inspiration from other marketers, but in the end you should create something different by yourself. And even if you wish to follow a marketer, it is advised that before following the one you should peep into and understand the whole policy rather than following them blindly.
#13 Not Tracking Performance
Keeping a track of your clicks and conversions is one of the important steps in affiliate marketing. It not only prevents shady companies from scrubbing your sales but makes it easier for you to figure out what is working for your business.
Many newbie marketers do not track what is happening on their website, and make changes without fetching the data that suggests what they should actually focus on.
Solution:
There are several tracking softwares like vollum available on the web that help you analyse the links people are clicking on and also help you to verify the click you are sending to the affiliate network.
After analyzing the links, you can make changes to increase your conversion rates and split test and have data to back up the decisions you make.
Tracking data helps you to know if the changes you made were effective or how effective they actually were. If you are not tracking what is happening on your site, you are just hoping that you will become successful, instead of actually knowing if you are doing the right thing.
#14 Not Staying Focussed on One Thing
Many Digital Marketers, rather than following one thing, focus on chasing different strategies. They tend to switch up their traffic every week, constantly change their website design, and consume a large amount of content rather than putting in the effort to grow their business. These are some terrible mistakes that a newbie makes which hinders his way to success.
Solution:
One simple way to avoid such a situation is to focus on one course until successful. It means whether it is an actual training course that you are using to help you grow your business, or a single strategy that you are trying to implement, you need to follow it and keep doing it consistently until you are successful.
“Single-minded” focus is the mantra that most of the successful digital marketers attribute the growth of their business to.
#15 Relying Entirely On Organic Traffic
If you wish to become successful in affiliate marketing, you can not depend only on one thing for your website traffic. In affiliate marketing, product selling is the key to more revenue, but product selling in turn depends on the traffic you generate to your website. There are a lot of sources besides search engines that you can rely on to generate more traffic to your website.
You can generate traffic from other sources like referral, social media, direct, etc.
Solution:
You can build a blog by writing quality content on a specific topic and publish it on your website. You can even start an SEO campaign that can help you tap different traffic sources. You can develop quality posts mainly by targeting long tail competitive keywords.
#16 Focussing On High Competitive Keywords
Although it is quite easy to use less competitive keywords and get limited competitors, in such a case, the income would also be limited. While on the contrary, if you focus on high competitive keywords with your limited budget, you would end up with a better result.
However, it is not advised to choose from high competitive keywords as a beginner, rather you should focus on keywords with less competition. As a newbie, focussing on the less competitive keywords is going to help you appear on the first page of the search engine.
Solution:
It is recommended that you research the keyword before using it. Tools like KWFinder or SEMRush can help you to find out the exact match keywords. After getting a list of keywords that match your search, pick the less competitive ones.
#17 Overlooking Long Tail Keywords
In the beginning, most of the competitors tend to use short tailed keywords rather than researching on long tail keywords. As a result, the rankings do not appear on the first or second page.
Generally, long tail keywords are more specific, less competitive and easy to target. And overlooking long tail keywords is one of the major mistakes that newcomers in affiliate marketing make.
Solution:
Instead of using short tailed keywords, use of long-tailed keywords is the key to getting better ranking and driving traffic from search engines. Tools like SEMrush, KWFinder, and the long tail pro can come handy to you in discovering the brand specific long tail keywords.
#18 Thinking Of Getting Rich Overnight
Getting successful and turning rich overnight is a great misconception that people have in regards to affiliate marketing. Success is a result of consistent hard work and dedication and there is no shortcut to it.
And this holds true in case of affiliate marketing as well. There is no magic wand that can turn you into a successful marketer overnight. If someone is alluring with this, then they definitely are trying to mislead or misguide you on your journey.
Solution:
Affiliate marketing is no different than other businesses. If you wish to build a career in affiliate marketing, it requires a lot of money, time, effort and dedication on your part and it doesn’t happen overnight. Patience is the key here. You must follow the right direction patiently even if you are not getting a single penny from it in the beginning.
#19 Neglecting SEO Basics
Neglecting SEO basics is like opening a shop and not having roads that reach that shop. You are making it extremely difficult and almost impossible for users to locate your content without a title tag and meta description.
Another mistake that you are making in regards to SEO is that you are ignoring in-links and external links. Internal links come handy in creating a hierarchy of knowledge and connection equity through the web. On the other hand, external links are the most appropriate way to inform Google how reliable and authoritative the content on your website is. You can use your post and seek ways to connect to other sites around your blog.
Solution:
The first step is to create an optimal title tag and Meta definition. Skim through the main concept of your post and try to make a convincing title tag for your future guest visitors and Meta overview. This is one of the marketing strategies in the search engine results.
You must keep in mind that the greater the resonance of your title tag and Meta definition, the more times people tap on your site. You must concentrate on writing a strong edition when you are writing your Meta summary and title tag. However, there are some people who can not do it by themselves so it is often advised that they seek help from an SEO expert in this matter.
#20 Ignoring Content Readability
When a visitor lands on your website, it has a very short time span to skim through the content. And in such a short duration of focus, visitors do not have the patience to read contradictory content or the content that does not appeal to their eyes. This is why it is advised that the font size should not be less than 16pt, specifically for mobile applications.
However, font size is not the only thing that accounts for the readability of the content. Line-height, font type and blog types are other factors that you must keep into account when it comes to content readability.
Solution:
Besides keeping the font less than 16pt, you should focus on the font style as well. The golden rule of using a serif font for the content of the paragraph comes handy to you when you are trying to improve the content readability.
You should try to avoid lengthy descriptions and phrases. Researches reveal that the expression becomes hard to read after 25 phrases. For paragraphs, you should try to limit them to 4 or fewer sentences wherever possible.
Final Note:
Creating a successful career in affiliate marketing requires a lot of dedication, passion, knowledge, and patience on your part. Additionally, you must also focus on updating yourself with the current marketing trends and build effective relationships with your customers through quality traffic and helpful product recommendations.
In many cases, affiliate marketers do not succeed as they use pernicious strategies and the information that we pointed above are some of the common affiliate marketing mistakes that they make.
Being successful in affiliate marketing is not that challenging if you play by the rules and are equipped with practical knowledge.