Due to the low barrier to entry, many people have started their affiliate marketing business, leading to the rise of many successful affiliate marketers. However, many affiliate marketers are yet to record their desired profit levels due to common affiliate marketing mistakes.
This article will discuss the ten biggest affiliate marketing mistakes and show the solution to each.
Key Highlights
- Any product you advertise on your affiliate marketing platform should be something that interests the people who consume your content.
- A single tweak to your affiliate marketing campaign can boost your brand awareness, help you identify and resolve weak spots, draw more customers, and unlock higher earning incomes.
- Most people who are ready to purchase items prefer using long-tail keywords so they can get exactly what they want.
- When you are reviewing your competition, consider what works and how you can implement it in your own business.
- Ensure that you describe how a product will resolve your audience’s pain or increase their happiness.
Top 10 Common Affiliate Marketing Mistakes You Might Make & How To Avoid Them
Becoming a successful affiliate marketer takes time, but it is possible. There are thousands of successful businesses in the affiliate marketing industry which offers a huge opportunity for anyone to profit from advertising products and services for other brands. (Anyone who can use a website builder can benefit from affiliate marketing.)
Using the right strategy can set up your affiliate marketing business for success. Most affiliate marketers have the right marketing strategy but often make mistakes in their planning, research, or execution. These mistakes cost them a lot in terms of time and resources.
The list below will show you the common affiliate marketing mistakes to avoid as an affiliate marketer. Avoiding these mistakes will help you join the league of successful affiliate marketers and help you get the most out of the affiliate programs you are a part of.
1. Monetizing Too Early
The goal of setting up an affiliate marketing website is to make money. However, if you monetize your website too early, you may earn less than expected. In many cases, you gain nothing. Why? Because no one cares enough about what you are offering.
Affiliate marketing is like influencer marketing, where you are telling people to trust your recommendations. They need to trust you or your brand to follow your recommendations. It doesn’t matter if you have the best products. You must show people that you understand their needs and that your advertised products can meet those needs.
Solution
The solution to this common affiliate marketing mistake is using the right marketing strategy. This strategy requires creating value and building an audience around that value. You should do these two before joining any affiliate program.
- Create value: You need to create something worthy of attention. It could be informative, entertaining, educational, or a combination of two or all three. The right approach depends on your affiliate program. If you are an affiliate marketer for web hosting providers, you must provide value around that industry.
- Build an audience: Now that you have something of value, the next step is to build an audience. There are many options to do this, but we recommend leveraging SEO best practices. SEO allows you to get free traffic from search engines. When people type in queries using keywords related to your keywords, your website will show up in the search results.
You can begin making recommendations when you have built an audience around your content. At this point, your audience already values your opinion and will be more than happy to click on your affiliate links. If you rush the process, you will give people the impression that you only care about their money and have nothing of value to share in return.
2. Picking the Wrong Niche
One rookie affiliate marketing mistake we see a lot is choosing the wrong niche. While all niches have their benefits, they also have requirements and disadvantages. So before you make a choice, ensure that the products align with the needs of your readers or followers. Any product you advertise on your affiliate marketing platform should be something that will interest the people who consume your content.
Furthermore, you must determine if the niche is too competitive for you. If you are new to the affiliate marketing industry, you need to focus on niches where you can get a sizable audience within a short time, say, six months to one year. For most beginners, this means staying off the most popular niches. Experienced affiliate marketers with substantial marketing budgets dominate these popular niches.
Solution
The solution to this affiliate marketing mistake is to get the right niche. Consider your target audience, available niches, and expansion strategy before choosing a niche.
- Target audience: You need to know the needs and interests of your target audience. If you are focused on web hosting beginners, then you should only focus on topics and products within those areas.
- Niche: Within the web hosting industry, specific niches have high competition. For instance, many affiliate marketers focus on everyday hosting plans such as shared hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated server hosting. However, you can narrow your niche to web hosting for small websites or personal blogs. While the audience for those niches is smaller than the overall web hosting space, it allows you to offer products that align with their needs without facing too much competition.
- Expansion: As you grow your audience base, you might need to introduce other content topics and products. However, it would be best if you did this gradually. Start by offering a product that is a necessary pair for your existing products.
For instance, if you focus on web hosting for beginners, you can add domain registration for beginners. These two go together, and the new addition will interest some of your audience.
3. Promoting Irrelevant Products
One thing you must remember in affiliate marketing is that your brand exists to serve your audience. When you focus on a particular audience segment, you must devote your resources to meet the needs of people within that segment.
Many rookie affiliate marketers need to remember this when choosing products to advertise on their websites. In most cases, they focus on products that offer high commissions or are in high demand. Ultimately, they don’t make their desired earnings because their audience is not interested in those products or cannot afford them.
Solution
Before choosing to advertise any product on your affiliate marketing, you first need to do some research. Certainly, profitability is a crucial factor but not the only one. Other essential factors include pricing, interest level, and benefits. These three factors are audience-focused and will influence how much commission you can earn on a single product.
- Pricing: You must ensure that most of your audience can afford the product. If your audience can’t afford it, you must look for a cheaper alternative. Affiliate marketing is a numbers game. You earn more by offering products most of your target audience can afford than from a product only a few can afford.
- Interest level: When you’ve determined that a fair majority of your audience can afford the product, it is time to check the interest level. You can do this by checking which content gets the most views on your website. If content around a specific topic gets little to no clicks, it is not advisable to focus on affiliate programs for that topic.
- Benefits: Your audience will only spend money on things they believe are beneficial to them, so before you advertise a product, ask yourself, “Would this product be beneficial to my audience?” If the answer is no, then the product is irrelevant.
4. Aiming for Highly Competitive Keywords
Keywords are the words or phrases people use when looking for products and solutions on search engines. Affiliate marketers target these keywords so they can reach people who may be interested in their products. On the surface, going for frequently occurring words is a good idea. After all, since many people are using these keywords in their search queries, you are sure to attract the right audience.
The issue is, just as you are targeting those keywords, other affiliate marketers are doing the same. So you will find yourself competing with thousands or even millions of web pages for those keywords. In many cases, the bigger brands get a large chunk of the traffic for those keywords, while other affiliate marketers have to scramble for the rest.
Solution
Focus on low-difficulty keywords. With low-difficulty keywords, you can reach the top of search engine results within six months to one year of blogging. Use online tools like KWFinder or Semrush to find low-difficulty keywords that align with what your target audience uses in their search queries.
It would help to incorporate these keywords in your headings and content title. You can also use them in your content but ensure you don’t go overboard.
5. Not Keeping Score of Your Performance
Many newbies and even established affiliate marketers fail to track the success of their affiliate marketing strategy, especially when it is bringing in some income. They let it run for months and even years without bothering to see how each campaign or product is performing.
The most significant effect of this mistake is that it makes you lose out on substantial potential profit. In many cases, a single tweak to your affiliate marketing campaign can boost your brand awareness, help you identify and resolve weak spots, draw more customers, and unlock higher earning incomes.
Solution
The only way to avoid this mistake is to regularly monitor your website, marketing, and sales performance.
- Website: You should monitor your website stats weekly to see if you need to catch up in some areas. Some key aspects to check are your web traffic and site loading speeds. You also want to fix broken links and ensure users can navigate your website easily.
- Marketing: You should have a measurable goal for each marketing campaign and see if the campaign meets that goal. You should also explore the best channels for connecting with your target audience.
- Sales: You should track your monthly sales to see your bestselling and least-selling products. You should also compare your sales with the overall sales level of other marketers to see how you are performing. These data will help you determine if you are on the right track or need improvements.
6. Missing Out On Long-Tail Keywords
Almost all affiliate marketers know that keywords boost search engine rankings. Unfortunately, many of them don’t know about long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords typically have two to five words and offer an easy way for affiliate businesses to target their audience specifically. It is an effective SEO technique for websites that cannot rank well with short-tail keywords (also known as a ‘head term’)
For instance, when a potential buyer searches Google for the keyword “website builder”, they will get almost a billion web pages in the search results. On the other hand, a long-tail keyword search that incorporates “website builder” such as “website builder for affiliate marketing” significantly narrows the search results to a few hundred million web pages. Most people prefer using long-tail keywords to ensure their search results align with what they want.
Solution
Use long-tail keywords in your website content, especially article titles and headings. Some of the ways you can use long tail keywords optimally include:
- Research: You need to research what your ideal audience is searching for. You can do this by checking the “people also ask” and “related searches” sections on Google search result pages.
- Traffic potential: Use keywords with low competition and high search volume.
- Content inclusion: Integrate long-tail keywords into your website’s content.
- Measurement: Using a link tracking tool to track how each long-tail keyword variation performs. You can alternate different variations and use the one with the best results.
7. Being a Copycat
Most people begin their affiliate marketing business after seeing other people succeed. They also go a step further to imitate the marketing techniques the successful marketer uses in a bid to replicate their success. While this is okay, it can go wrong if you blindly follow all their methods. Even if you are getting personal mentorship from your favorite marketing gurus, you should check how each piece of advice aligns with your chosen niche.
The strategies used in one niche may backfire in another. For instance, if you are selling products themed around relationships, you can use sensational headlines and pack your content with emotions. On the other hand, if your target audience is web developers, you must demonstrate competence and show how your advertised products will improve their productivity.
Solution
Here are some things to ensure you are not following ideas blindly:
- Competition insights: When reviewing your competition, consider what works and how you can implement it in your business. Look at the variables that make those methods successful and implement those that will work for you.
- Recommendations: When it comes to advice from marketing gurus, pay more attention to those within your niche. And even at that, you should be innovative in the way you implement their recommendations.
8. Launching Marketing Before Having Information About the Product
Nowadays, anyone can start a blog, YouTube channel, or social media account and begin promoting products and services. The ease of doing so is why many people turn to affiliate marketing. They see it as an easy way to make money. They invariably discover that affiliate marketing requires research.
Most people can tell when you are advertising a product you know nothing about because, in most cases, these people have used a similar product or have a basic understanding of how the product should work. So when they read your content, they expect to see specific talking points, especially on how the product works, factors to look out for, side effects, and pricing. They will only trust you if they get the sense that you have used the product or understand what it is supposed to do.
Solution
The solution is to use the item before recommending it to your audience. This way, you will have plenty of talking points and be able to answer most questions regarding user experience. If you can’t use the specific product, you should learn as much as possible about it. You can study materials provided by the company and reviews from other users.
9. Avoiding the Benefits and Emphasizing Features
One of the fundamental principles of marketing is to show people the benefits of a product. What most novice affiliate marketers do is tell their audience the features of the advertised products instead of the benefits. While describing the features can be beneficial, it rarely prompts readers to purchase. It makes your content feel like a news report rather than a sales copy.
The biggest effect of this mistake is that you will lose out on commissions. Since your earnings depend on customers making purchases, you lose potential earnings each time a member of your audience doesn’t click on your affiliate link. In many cases, this single mistake is responsible for the low sales recorded by many affiliate marketing businesses.
Solution
Ensure that you describe how a product will resolve your audience’s pain or increase their happiness. That approach will help the reader connect to the product on a personal level. It will stop being a product and start looking like an item they need. When they make that emotional connection, they will be excited to click on your affiliate link and buy the product.
10. Losing Your Focus
The last common mistake many affiliate marketers make is losing focus on what matters to their audience. They get distracted by trending products or their competitors’ income levels and begin to look for ways to incorporate more products into their business. While having many products can increase your earnings, the products can quickly become too many.
Furthermore, adding new products regularly or changing the products you offer can make you look like an unserious marketer. Large brands can add multiple products to their portfolio because they have built a broad audience base. Such a strategy doesn’t work for beginners and small affiliate businesses. Adding too many products can stretch your resources too thin and nullify your efforts.
Solution
Here are our recommendations to avoid this mistake:
- One product: We recommend you stick to only one product early in your affiliate marketing journey. This product should be essential to your target audience and align with your content.
- Establish one product before adding another: When you have built sufficient trust from your audience, you can add another product. You then repeat the process of building trust before you scale your business with another product.
Conclusion
Here are the ten most common affiliate marketing mistakes new and existing affiliate marketers make:
- Monetizing too early
- Picking the wrong niche
- Promoting irrelevant products
- Aiming for highly competitive keywords
- Not keeping score of performance
- Missing out on long-tail keywords
- Being a copycat!
- Launching marketing before having information about the product
- Avoiding the benefits and emphasizing features
- Losing your focus
To ensure your affiliate marketing success, you must avoid all these mistakes. Most of the solutions we offer require you to have a lot of patience. In many cases, it will take about six months to one year to begin seeing the results. However, consider them as foundational blocks for your affiliate marketing business. If you set the foundation right, you’ll ultimately be able to scale your business.
What Now?
- Learn How To Start Affiliate Marketing
- Build An Affiliate Marketing Website
- Find a Top Web Hosting Provider
- Making money with websites
