It’s worth knowing the most common affiliate marketing mistakes to avoid as a newbie in affiliate marketing. Forewarned is forearmed and as an affiliate there’s plenty of hurdles to overcome. Knowing these common mistakes could save you a boat load of problems. So if you’re serious about earning an income from affiliate marketing, listen up!
I made pretty much all of these mistakes myself and struggled for a long time as a beginner in affiliate marketing.
The Most Common Affiliate Marketing Mistakes To Avoid #1 – Choosing The Wrong Product/s
One of your first decisions as a new affiliate is choosing a product to promote. There’s thousands of affiliate products available to choose from and as you can imagine this can lead to a lot of uncertainty. If you choose the wrong product, either because it’s poorly paying or a bad match for your niche/interest, it’s going to have an effect. So it’s worth gaining some knowledge both about the products you choose and the commission structure it offers.
Not all affiliate products are alike and there’s a huge disparity between the various programs in terms of their commission structure. For example, most physical products (e.g. from Amazon) will pay between 1% and 10% commission. So if you choose to sell a low commission product you’ll need to sell in large volume to make it pay. Digital products pay much more, often between 30% and 40%. Then there’s subscription products and high ticket affiliate products. They pay recurring commissions and much larger commissions.
Choosing these kinds of products can give you a huge head start in affiliate marketing.
The Most Common Affiliate Marketing Mistakes To Avoid #2 – Badly Aligned Niche/Product
Even with the right kind of product in the bag, (in terms of commission structure) you can still make the mistake of choosing products which are badly aligned with your niche. For example, if you’re building a niche website around the topic of golfing, you’re going to want some golf related product to sell. Your audience needs to be well aligned with your product and your product needs to be valuable to them.
If you are trying to sell someone from a website, but your product doesn’t align with the needs of your audience, it won’t sell!
To understand the needs of your audience you should spend some time working through the customer avatar worksheet pdf.
Ideally find a highly valuable product within a topic/niche which you have an interest.
The Most Common Affiliate Marketing Mistakes To Avoid #3 – Not Building An Email List
An email list is something you should definitely build as as affiliate. Without a list you need to sell directly from a website. This is a tough thing to do considering that most website visitors only stick around for a few minutes.
Plus, people buy from a website only after a number of visitors. Statistics show that most online buyers need between 6 and 8 visits to a site before they buy. These are known as “touch points” and allow a customer to gain trust in a website or seller before they buy.
Having an email list allows affiliates to both build trust and extend the period of time with which someone can buy. It also puts you in greater control of your traffic. To get traffic to a website takes either time (when building content) or money (if paying for it). So collecting email subscribers is something affiliates should definitely do if they want to become successful.
Access a free autoresponder service here.
The Most Common Affiliate Marketing Mistakes To Avoid #4 – Shiny Object Syndrome
Shiny Object Syndrome is something most new affiliates will encounter. Before getting going with an affiliate plan of action, after joining a course, another offer lands in your inbox, promising even more “ease of use” than the last one. Some may even suggest affiliate marketing is easy, if you only follow their route and of course purchase their offer!
But the course only offers the same as the last and before you have finished another shiny new “toy” lands and you begin again, tying out something else. This happened to me and I tried many courses before I figured out that I wasn’t making any headway with any of them before I jumped ship and bought another one!
To get anywhere with affiliate marketing you need to stick to a course and keep going for long enough to see some results. Sadly most new affiliates don’t see the bigger picture and quit before they even make a single sale, much less break through and start making regular sales.
Shiny Object Syndrome keeps the “dream” alive, but never offers any results because you’re always chasing something else! Find a good program and stick with it. See also how long does affiliate marketing take.
The Most Common Affiliate Marketing Mistakes To Avoid #5 – Being A Busy Fool
I first heard the term “busy fool” from one of my affiliate mentors. When you start out with affiliate marketing, it can be easy to gravitate towards the most enjoyable tasks. This could be creating logos, making videos, watching training videos or even writing a blog.
But often, the tasks we prefer to do are the least important ones which make the least difference to our business. The important tasks are often the more difficult ones which we don’t want to do.
They are outside our comfort zone. For me, this was running paid advertising and shooting videos. So I wasted a lot of time early on in my affiliate marketing journey doing the things which (although were enjoyable) and came easy to me, didn’t move my business forwards.
Don’t be a busy fool, doing things you enjoy. Focus on getting outside your comfort zone and doing the important things which really move the (money) needle on your affiliate business.
#6 – Expectations
When I started out as an affiliate marketer I listened to the “guru’s” who told me how easy it was going to be. I thought I could buy a $40 course and make my millions with a few clicks of my mouse! Unfortunately that’s simply not the case. Affiliate marketing is not easy and 95% of affiliates will quit. See affiliate marketing success rate.
It takes a lot of commitment to build an affiliate business even with help and support, the right knowledge and a solid plan. High expectations of an online business with the slow realisation that it’s not easy is probably one of the main reasons so many affiliate marketers will quit.
You can spend a lot of time as an affiliate doing the work, and yet still nothing is guaranteed in terms of results. Affiliate marketing is a performance based business which means you can earn a potentially unlimited income from it. But sadly this also means that if you don’t sell anything you don’t earn anything.
High expectations of an “easy ride” are often dashed when the reality kicks in. Be realistic and expect to put the work in before you reap the rewards. Stick with it and see the bigger picture. But don’t expect something for nothing with affiliate marketing and you won’t be disappointed.
#7- Not Learning Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a business model where the affiliate is rewarded for product referrals. No sales = no profit! Unless you can effectively send a paying customer to a product, you won’t make any money. To do this effectively means either paying for traffic or building traffic organically through content creation.
Content marketing is a tactic which draws traffic for free from the search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo etc.). For this to work, you’re going to need to do a lot of upfront work. Most of this work isn’t rewarded immediately and it can take months before you see the fruits of your labour.
To get traffic more easily is going to cost you a marketing budget. When spending money on marketing, you’re going to need to test and measure before you increase your budget. This takes time and of course you’re going to need to spend money while you’re learning. Or, if you want a cheaper route, you’ll need to create content.
This can be frustrating especially for the beginner who expects a financial reward too soon! But once you master a marketing strategy which works, you can automate sales and scale up (if using paid marketing).
Expect to put some time and effort in here before you can reap the rewards, which may be months after you start.
#8 – Going It Alone
For a long time I struggled alone with affiliate marketing which is another common mistake. I tried to do everything myself for cheap by looking on YouTube and jumping from one cheap course to another. Unfortunately this isn’t always the solution because different courses teach different tactics.
It’s much better to join a community, where you can get help, support but also accountability. Affiliate marketing takes time and most people quit. It’s much harder to sustain the necessary effort to become successful with an affiliate business when you’re in the right environment.
Most people aren’t surrounded by like minded entrepreneurial types, but rather those who would pull them back, rather than help them succeed! Joining an online community is one of the best things you can do for success with an online business. Access one here.
#9 – Quitting
Quitting is probably the biggest mistake you can make as an affiliate, unless of course it’s definitely not for you. There’s no shame in quitting because you’ve realised that affiliate marketing isn’t a good fit, but it’s a shame to quit only because you don’t see the bigger picture.
Ultimately affiliate marketing can give you a passive income from the internet which has massive implications for freedom, flexibility, becoming your own boss, and being in control of your life. But unless you really want these things passionately, or have another strong reason to commit to the affiliate journey, there are other, easier ways to make a living.
Affiliate marketing is a little like the Chinese bamboo tree which takes several years to cultivate before it even breaks through the soil. If you’re not up for that commitment, it’s perhaps not for you. But once the Chinese bamboo tree breaks the surface of the soil, it can grow 90 feet in only a few weeks.
This is a great analogy for affiliate marketing and it can give you financial and geographical freedom. However, most affiliates quit before their first sale which shows you that you need a lot of determination and a strong reason to keep going to make a success of it.