As with any venture into a new industry, there is always a period of growing pains when you become an affiliate marketer. When you first start out, you’ll go through some trial and error and make the kinds of valuable mistakes that lead to greater lessons on how to improve your business. However, there are some mistakes that are extremely common that don’t really add to your expertise. Many of these simple mistakes can be very discouraging and even costly, so they are better off avoided. Here are the most common mistakes first time affiliate marketers make and some tips on what to do instead.
Mistake #1: Picking The Wrong Product To Promote
Picking a great product is crucial for your success. There are millions of products you can promote and a lot of time, people will pick products based solely on commission rates. Though commission rates are obviously important, affiliate marketing requires a different strategy than just moving units for money. Affiliate marketing is a relationship-based marketing strategy where people are relying on you for informative, trustworthy recommendations for products and services that will add value to their lives. So instead of just simply looking at commission rates, look for products that you know a lot about, that are high quality, and that you can truly believe in. These products will be much easier for you to market and sell, and you will find that selling a product you love will make you more money than something a product you don’t care about.
Mistake #2: Selling Too Many Products
Most of the time, choosing too many products to sell comes from enthusiasm. The enthusiasm is great and you should definitely keep that energy up, but don’t spread your voice too thin. Promoting too many products at once, takes value away from each of those products and you will not see great sales. Instead, pick a handful of great products that you can really focus all of that enthusiasm on. If you dedicate more time to a single product, you are much more likely to turn your endorsements and reviews of that product into direct action. You can always expand into more products as your business grows, just make sure that you give each product campaign the individualized attention it needs to really succeed.
Mistake #3: Designing A Poor Quality Website
Now no one is expecting you to build a beautiful website from scratch if you aren’t an experienced web designer. However, if your website runs slowly, is cluttered with too many ads, or is difficult to read, you’re going to immediately lose traffic and never even have the chance to engage those potential customers again. So when you build your website, keep these things in mind. You can start by looking at the affiliate marketing sites you personally enjoy and see how they have organized their site. Take notes about the features that stand out to you. What have they done to make the site visitor-friendly? Why is the site easy to navigate? Are there special design elements that add value to their overall brand? Take these ideas and integrate them into your site design. Your website doesn’t have to be specifically beautiful, but it does need to be extremely functional and representative of your brand. If you are feeling a bit overwhelmed about starting a website, check out the tips provided here.
Mistake #4: Not Providing High Quality Regular Content
Quality content is the key to successful affiliate marketing. Content drives traffic, builds a customer base, markets the product, and leads to actionable sales. A huge mistake affiliate marketers make is not making the content interesting. People don’t want to read 1,000-word sales pitches, they want to read something that adds value to their life. They also don’t want to read anything that has 50 of the same keyword awkwardly and densely shoved into an article. You want to hook them with great content, things like interesting information, cool facts, fun stories, thoughtful product reviews, etc. Then you also want to post regularly. If you don’t post often, your customers won’t have anything new to read on your site. So they won’t be incentivized to keep coming back to your page. You want people to visit routinely so you have more opportunities to sell to them.
Mistake #5: Not Tracking Analytics
Marketing analytics are a crucial part of affiliate marketing. From the very moment you become an affiliate marketer, you need to track your data. When you make a sale, you need to know exactly how and why you made that sale, so you find formulas that work for you. There is a lot of analytics data you should track from conversion rate, to average order value, to campaign return on investment. All of these things will help you recognize the patterns of your performance so you can decide what campaigns to keep and what to ditch. There are tons of great tools that can help you track your analytics and many web hosting platforms offer free analytic tools right in the control panel. So it’s easy to track this information and turn it into an actionable marketing strategy.
When you first become an affiliate marketer, it’s easy to make some mistakes. Most of these mistakes however, are just part of the normal learning process. However, the five mistakes listed here can end up costing you a lot of time and money, so it’s better to avoid them from the beginning.
If you are just starting out as an affiliate marketer, there’s going to be a lot of bad advice out there. Many companies promise get rich quick schemes and will encourage you to sell bad products ineffectively. However, at Affiliate Marketer Training, we pride ourselves on helping new affiliate marketers learn the best practices so they can succeed. So if you are looking for more great tips and techniques to become an affiliate marketer, check out our free advice and services so you can start your new career off on the right foot!
