THE 7 BIGGEST MISTAKES BEGINNER AFFILIATE MARKETERS MAKE AND HOW TO ESCAPE THAT – AFFILIATE MARKETIN

In many ways, learning from mistakes and taking responsibility for the mistakes is the best education you can ask for. –Robert Kiyosaki (Author of Rich Dad Poor Dad)

You might agree with me that in this continuation advancing world, one of the things that people are always trying their best to move away from is “mistake”. Especially if we bring in a case study from our school educational background. Students are punished for making mistakes. Therefore, we all naturally strive to get as far as possible from any form of mistakes that may cross out path.

This is not so different with successful entrepreneurs and affiliate marketers also. The only different thing around here is mindset. Entrepreneurship have come to accept the fact that mistake are an integral part of the process but have also importantly learned to capitalize on mistake and use it for the benefit of their business.

I am not asking you to either embrace mistakes or have fun with it or run away from mistakes as far as you can. The main focus of this article is to point out that you are not the only person who is or has taken on this affiliate marketing journey and so there are some mistakes that are surely bound to happen but in a way or the other they can be avoided because people have already experienced that and you can leverage their experiences to your advantage in the business model.

In the next few moments, we would be looking at some of the most common and basic mistakes affiliate marketers especially beginners make that some successful affiliate wished they had not made in their early years so you can have an upper hand.

Unfortunately, some mistakes in this article would be more relevant to people who have choose to blog as their affiliate marketing strategy. Nevertheless, there is also a ton of value for you even if you do not use blogging as a basic traffic tool.

Before we begin, you can learn about the 7 top ways we drive traffic to our affiliate offers and which one is our favorite method

Now the first biggest mistakes newbie affiliate marketers do is

PRIORITIZING SELLING OVER HELPING THE CUSTOMER.

The is zero doubt that the first thought that comes to mind when we hear of affiliate marketing is the ability to sell products we didn’t spend time to create to people and then bang in the commissions.

Yes, to some extent, this is true. Yet, what we get as a mistake if the fact that the manufacturer of the product had a core goal to help people overcome a challenge be it health, wealth or relationships related. And this should be the basic foundation of every affiliate marketer. Helping people builds trust and this would create an audience who would trust you to help them even in the future when they encounter a challenge.

Instead of prioritizing selling, I recommend you focus on what the customer really needs help about. See yourself as the consumer, ask yourself questions if you would ever use the product yourself. Put the consumer first above your commission and focus on writing about stuffs that would relate specifically to what the customer is going through. Only then would you have a powerful influence on your audience for a sustained long period of time.

SIGNING UP TO MANY PROGRAMS

If you haven’t read my article on the top high paying affiliate programs you can join today. It’s not too late since you can still check it out here.

Many people would definitely tell you about all the awesome offers and competitive advantages you would get from different affiliate programs and why you should join multiple of them. Yes, they haven’t mislead you but what they do not tell you is that as a beginner in the affiliate marketing business model, it is not always a smooth ride.

For this reason, in my early days of doing affiliate marketing, I was lucky to find a mentor who introduced me to the two concept of building success with this model and I would like to give you the same information for free here too.

THE TWO CONCEPTS

VERTICAL AFFILIATE: This has got to do with been as specific as possible. Don’t be tempted to promote multiple offers and in multiple niches too. Pick an offer or two. Learn all that needs to be known about it, watch what other people are saying, if possible order it yourself and test it.

This would help you have a very strong positioning and faith about the product you are promoting. It would give you the advantage to provide great value to the customers who would see your offer and you would be able to help them out if they have challenges.

Above all, focusing on doing more with less product offers helps you to enrich the lives of others. Indeed this is how a beginner must start out.

HORIZONTAL AFFILIATE: Now you can begin to diversify. You now know more about a subject matter because you spent the time to learn all that needed to be know when you were researching. Diversification exposes you to multiple income streams and since your audience already know you are an expert in what you do, trusting you to recommend other products to them wouldn’t be a challenge any longer.

UNINTERESTING NICHE

I have said it once and I would always stand by the fact that there are multiple niche categories that has a lot of money potential. This would drive you into settling for those niches even though you aren’t passionate about them. They might work out for you but are you going to be able to produce valuable content around them in the long run?

In my previous article how to pick the right niche, one of the things we stressed about was the fact that you should have a little passion about a niche before deciding to invest your effort and time into it. Know that sometimes the energy and zeal to press on may be lost and gone. You might hit the burn out stage of your journey and when this happens, one of the things that would get you to rise up every day and try to still pursuit this business would be your passion to help the people who need you.

PUBLISHING LOW QUALITY CONTENT

Whether you agree or not, your content is your number one product as an affiliate marketer. You might be having the best offer in your niche but if your content is not that good to convince your audience to click the link button, then they would never land on your awesome sales page and there wouldn’t be any sale.

Strive as much as you can to produce high quality content to get your audience or readers engaged and willing to check out the next steps they are to take. In order to achieve that height, it goes back down to been a VERTICAL AFFILIATE especially as a beginner.

Identify topics that are much easier to rank for. Spend a few minutes doing some keyword research on topics even before you start writing content on them. You can even use backline checkers to check the backlines of the top ranking article on your topic.

Lastly you can use a word counter to know how many words the first ranking article is having, then you can double or triple on that.

Remember, the quality of your content would positively impact the conversion rate of your affiliate offers.

UNREALISTIC INCOME EXPECTATION

If the ultimate reason why you are getting into affiliate marketing is because of the money, you might get disappointed unless maybe you fall into a little bit of luck. Yes, newbies dive into affiliate marketing because they hear of people making hug commission and living a good lifestyle.

Great, even though this is so true, the reality is that there is a learning curve to it and as a newbie, you should be ready to commit to investing an awful lot in time, effort, and even sometimes cash.

Think about this as the time you would need to research, create content, optimize an article and multiply it by a sizeable number of hundred articles. In the same way, you would need to constantly revise and update these articles and in addition, paying for web hosting, domain among others.

When it comes to building an affiliate website, it takes even about 35 weeks (8 – 9 weeks) with a minimum of 30 articles for google to recognize you as a growing website.

Therefore, set real targets, focus on just a few dollars in your first 12 – 18 months. Work hard and then before you can start seeing better pay days.

In case you are not using blogging as a basis, it is even so important to know that Email marketing, YouTube and a few other methods which we talked about in our 7 ways to drive traffic to your affiliate offer requires a minimum of 90 days of consistency to get you going.

NOT COLLECTING EMAILS FROM THE START

Another most common mistake beginner affiliates makes is not collecting email list of people who come into contact with their products. But you should know that a strong email marketing strategy is a must for affiliate marketers. It is by far the only genuine way you can build a relationship with your readers and also provide them with a ready-made list of potential leads.

Collecting these emails may seem difficult at first to some people but that is just the right thing to do because that is where you can promote offers that you wouldn’t have to spend hours researching for great content to write about.

If you haven’t heard already, then there is a popular saying that “the money is in the list”.

Right down on this page there is an email opt-in. Just don’t forget to fill it with your best email for amazing bonuses.

Learn more about how to use email marketing with affiliate marketing here.

LOSING FOCUS

Don’t focus on the money, Focus on being a better affiliate marketer.

When website traffic begins to start building and scaling up. One of the tempting mistakes affiliate marketers get trapped into to trying to increase income by monetizing with various forms of advertising such as Google ads, Bing ads or even YouTube ads. This is a great way of doubling your income and I don’t stand against that but what I need you to know is that more contents will automatically impact the performance of your site.

Therefore, stay focused on the value you are providing with your niche. Don’t try to overpower your audience. Stay relevant and keep moving visitors in the direction of your affiliate sale.

A sale can bring you more commissions that what an advertising network provides. Unfortunately also, you may have very little control on what they advertise and how it would redirect the attention of your readers to different sales pages.

CONCLUSION

I would not blindly tell you that the affiliate marketing model is a very lucrative business you can venture into.

Yet, know that there are a lot of competition and that you need to do a few things right. With everything you have learnt, always remember that the visitor, reader or subscriber to your email list is a potential customer.

How well you treat the customer will in most case be the main reason he/ she decides to follow your recommendations and have a successful business with you.

The amount of sales you make depends on that reputation.

READ ALSO: The Top 25 Most Profitable Niches For Affiliate Marketing