Affiliate marketing can be difficult if you’ve never done any marketing in your life, haven’t built a website before, and are following every guru you can get behind that tells you what you want to hear — instead of what you need to actually be doing to succeed.
Building a successful affiliate marketing business doesn’t necessarily have to feel like you’re pushing a boulder up a hill.
Most successful marketers have gotten there by simply taking action.
Taking action alone, though, when you’re new to the industry can have you spinning your wheels.
Instead of telling you what you should be doing (because that’s already been published all over the internet), I’m going to tell you 20 different things you need to avoid doing.
As long as you follow these tips and not make the same mistakes yourself, you can dramatically reduce the time it takes you to start making a healthy income from your affiliate marketing business.
Warning! This post is STUFFED with memes :).
#1 – Not Building Your Email List
The biggest mistake you could make as an affiliate marketer is refusing to build your email list.
For one reason or another, numerous marketers have forgone building their email list, thinking that their business is always going to be able to sustain itself.
This usually happens when people are relying on search engine traffic, and living in the belief that the search engines are always going to favor their website.
Unfortunately, as proven multiple times in the past, search engine traffic is rarely reliable.
Major search engines, especially Google, constantly upgrade their algorithms, and people who thought they were building bulletproof businesses find themselves getting caught up in the updates, losing their traffic overnight.
If they had been focusing on building an email list, it wouldn’t matter that their search engine traffic had been nuked. Sure, it would hurt, but they would still have a list of people ready to send back to their website every time they send out an email.
Building an email list also allows you to profit more per visitor than you would be able to without it.
If you’ve never heard of sales funnels before, you owe it to yourself to finish reading this post and then dig through our site to find all of the other information we’ve created on building a proper sales funnel.
When you’re collecting emails, you can send your subscribers down a trail that helps them solve even more problems they’re having, allowing you to make even more money. This isn’t possible if you’re neglecting your business and refusing to build your email list.
#2 – Relying Solely On Search Engine Traffic
Search engines may provide the Holy Grail of traffic, because the visitors are highly targeted to the content you’ve published, and tend to be ready to buy when they land on your site, but relying solely on search engines to build your business is a huge mistake, and one that many affiliate marketers have found themselves making.
I’ve already touched on why it’s so bad to rely on search engines alone, but so many marketers do it, so I felt like it needed to be brought up more than once.
If you want to build a long term affiliate marketing business (or any other business, really), the last thing you want to do is rely solely on search engine traffic.
There are multiple different ways you can generate targeted traffic to your website. Guest posting, for instance, is a great strategy for tapping into other people’s audiences and driving their visitors to your website. Marketers like Asad Saddique often point out that this approach works best when you focus on relevance and relationship-building, rather than blasting out generic pitches that don’t add value to the host site.
Social media is another great avenue for tapping into massive hordes of traffic, especially when it’s used to support and amplify the content you’re already creating, instead of trying to replace more stable traffic sources entirely.
Though it may not be as targeted as search engine traffic, and getting people from social media networks to purchase the products and services you’re offering can be more difficult, it’s not impossible.
At the end of the day, your business lives and dies by the traffic that you’re sending to your website.
Your ultimate goal should be to tap into as many different sources of traffic as possible.
Relying solely on search engines make seem like a great idea, doing it means you’re being very short sighted in your business, and could be setting yourself up for disaster down the road.
#3 – Not Having Faith In Your Abilities
This one is easy to understand, especially when you’re trying to build an affiliate marketing business and feel like you don’t have the necessary technical skills, are buying into gurus saying that you need to do this, and do that, and then bog yourself down with massive amounts of work, rather than building your business one step at a time.
Maintaining confidence and enthusiasm about your affiliate marketing business is critical to becoming successful.
No results happen overnight, so if you want to stick around for the long haul, you’re going to have to tie your confidence to something else.
I personally prefer to tie my confidence and enthusiasm to getting things done that I know are going to lead me to my final goal — making money from my website. Rather than tie my confidence to the actual money I’ve generated, tying it to getting things done is a lot better for my sanity.
I’ve been around the industry long enough to know what needs to be done, and how to pivot when I’m not seeing the levels of success that I’m expecting, but most newbies aren’t going to have the same foresight.
If you break down your business into different chunks, like your blog posts, your email list, your autoresponder, your search engine optimization, and your social media strategies, for instance, you’ll be able to tackle one at a time, knowing that you’re doing what needs to be done, without getting bogged down in the big picture or the small details that can seem overwhelming.
#4 – Thinking Affiliate Marketing Is How You Get Rich Quick
There are no get rich quick schemes.
Period.
If anyone tries to tell you that affiliate marketing is a way for you to get rich overnight, run for the hills. They’re feeding you a line, and probably trying to get you to buy a course from them that teaches you how to do it.
Affiliate marketing is no different than any other business.
Building something successful requires a lot of time, energy and, more importantly, patience. Sure, you may have small wins here, and there, that you didn’t see coming, but that is a part of the process.
All of those small, unexpected wins can add up to make you a lot of money, but they’re not going to happen overnight. When you see these small wins happening, you can usually attribute them to something you had done weeks, or even months before.
Affiliate marketing is an amazing business model, especially for beginners, because it’s easy to test and figure out what’s going on without having to devote massive amounts of your money to the business, or getting hammered and destroying your business by making a small mistake somewhere down the line.
While you can make a lot of money with affiliate marketing — and many people do — in no way, shape, or form is it a way for you to get rich quick.
I firmly believe that if you go into building your business, expecting not to earn a dime from it for the first year, you’ll be pleasantly surprised, instead of always setting yourself up to get discouraged.
#5 – Constantly Selling, Instead Of Helping
The only way you’re going to make money in your business is to actually sell something and promote products and services on your website.
If it’s all you’re doing, though, you’re not going to make nearly as much money as you could be making.
If you really want to make a lot of money, and actually keep your business running for years, you’re going to have to adjust how you’re publishing content, and change your mindset from making money to actually helping people.
Helping people does two different things for your business.
- First, it helps you build credibility, which makes people trust you more and continue coming back.
- And, secondly, it gets people out of the mindset that you’re selling to them, and gets them to realize you’re helping them solve problems that they’re having.
When people recognize that they have problems that can be solved, and you’re helping them solve those problems, you’re able to promote products and services that are the solutions, rather than having to use persuasion and manipulation to get your visitors to buy something.
In the end, people are going to be more loyal to you if you’re helping them solve problems.
If they get a whiff of you using manipulation and persuasion tactics to get them to buy something that they may not actually need, they probably aren’t going to trust you very much.
When you lose your visitor’s trust, you can safely assume that any money you made from them was luck, and that they aren’t going to be coming back to your website any time soon. From there, your business will end up dying a slow, painful death.
Instead of trying to sell every chance you get, spend more time trying to figure out problems that your visitors are having, and provide them with solutions to those problems, whether free or paid.
They’ll thank you for it, and your business will make more money because of your generosity.
#6 – Picking The Wrong Affiliate Program
Affiliate programs are a dime a dozen, and it seems like beginner marketers want to join as many as possible.
This doesn’t really present any problems, because having more options is a good thing — until it comes time to finally getting paid.
That’s where the problems start.
Since opening an affiliate marketing program is so easy, many business owners are doing it. Not all of them are organized, though, and accurately tracking the sales you’re making isn’t necessarily their top priority. In fact, they’re happy to let sales “slip through the cracks”. They make more money that way.
While not all of the affiliate marketing partners you’ll join up with necessarily have malicious thoughts in mind, and allowing sales to slip through the cracks really is a problem with their technology, and not necessarily their morals, it doesn’t change the fact that you could be making more money than you’re actually earning.
There are quite a few programs you can join that do have malicious intent, though, and actually make it a part of their business model to “scrub” the sales that you’re making. If you don’t know what you’re doing, this problem can persist, and you could be losing out on thousands of dollars.
When you’re just getting started, only join affiliate programs that are known for delivering on the sales that you’re making, and then implement the proper tracking so you can accurately verify when sales have been made, and then claim the commissions that you’re owed at the end of every month.
#7 – Promoting Too Many Products Or Services
“Keep it simple silly” is an adage that works with nearly every business model, especially online business models like affiliate marketing.
To keep it simple, in this example, means to promote fewer products and services so you can actually make more money.
While it may seem counterintuitive, promoting less means that you’re able to promote more often and dig deeper into the problems that the specific product or service you’re promoting solves for your visitors.
When you’re promoting too many products or services, it’s going to show that you’re focused more on making money than you are on solving people’s problems. It’s also going to force you to promote more often, and leave your visitors confused about which products or services are actually worth their money.
When that happens, they’re going to end up leaving your website confused, instead of confident about what you’re recommending to them.
A lack of confidence in your visitors means your income is going to suffer as a result.
Instead of hammering your visitors with every promotion you can find, focus on one or two that truly solve their problems, and are actually worth the money you’re asking them to spend.
This is going to do a lot more for you and be easier to track than trying to join every program that will accept you.
#8 – Promoting Low-Quality Products
This ties back in with your reputation and credibility, and promoting low quality products is going to cost you more money in the long run than yo