6 Affiliate Marketing Mistakes Beginners Commonly Make

There are alot of affiliate marketing mistakes that beginners make that are easily avoidable. Newbie affiliate marketers make counterproductive mistakes, and it keeps them from having the
successful online business that they’re looking for.

I want to go over some of these affiliate marketing mistakes so that you can avoid them, and have an
advantage over other affiliates who fail to learn from their mistakes.

Let’s get started with the common affiliate marketing mistakes that beginners make. Here’s mistake number 1:

1) Promoting Too Many Affiliate Products

This is a mistake that I have made myself in the past, and it’s something that alot of affiliate marketers still do today. I understand the logic behind promoting alot of affiliate programs at once, but if you don’t know how to make money with one, how do you expect to make money with a
bunch of them?

Plus if you’re promoting alot of products, your prospects will start to doubt your authority, because you can’t make up your mind on which product is the best solution for your audience.

If you’re
promoting alot of affiliate products right now, you need to stop. Choose one product to promote, and dedicate all of your time to selling that one item.

Learn all about the product, test it, create content around it, and use it. Once you get the hang of getting affiliate commissions with this one product, then you can start to expand to other products. Check out what’s next on this list of affiliate marketing mistakes that affiliates make:

2) Not Testing The Product

I briefly touched on this a minute ago, but you must buy and test out the product that you’re promoting. If you promote a product that you’ve never used yourself, it can impact your credibility and sales. 

When you test out a product that you’re promoting, you can create more
authoritative content.
You’ll come off as knowledgeable and can answer questions about the product that people have for it. 

Also, if you don’t purchase the product, you run the risk of writing a review about the product that goes against what it’s all about. This can lead to
immediate refunds.

Always test out a product before you promote it. Promoting it will be much easier to do after you know the ins and outs of the product. Here’s what’s next on this list of affiliate marketing mistakes that affiliates make:

3) Selling In A Niche You Know Nothing About

It’s important that you
operate in a niche that you know alot about. Working in a boring niche can cause you to be unmotivated about promoting a product. Also, you run the risk of quickly running out of content to produce for the niche.

It may be tough to repurpose content in a niche that you know nothing about. Sure you may be able to write an article, but how well will you create an engaging
Youtube video or podcast about topics in a niche that you find uninteresting?

The lack of passion
will show, and you’re going to have a hard time convincing people that the product you’re promoting is something that they need to have.

If you’re currently in a niche that you know nothing about, it’s important that you QUICKLY learn as much about it as you can.

But if it’s just too boring that you don’t want to embark on this learning curve, it’s probably best that you exit the niche altogether – especially if you’re
not making any money. Here’s what’s next on this list of affiliate marketing mistakes that affiliates make:

4) Not Building An Email List

Building an email list is essential for your affiliate marketing business. This is the easiest way to sell anything, and it’s what I highly recommend you start doing if you want to
boost your affiliate commissions right away. The good news is that building an email list is easy.

All you have to do is find something that you can
offer for free to your visitors. I’ve found that offering something for free (and valuable) is a great way to build your worth and demonstrate your expertise.

Plus, people come to you with their problems and ask you for your advice on how to achieve their goals. The product that you’re promoting should be the
answer to their problems, and you can communicate this to your prospects via email.

When you do email marketing, you operate in a competition-free zone. There are no other ads around that people are looking at. It’s just your
email and message, and it’s your opportunity to make the sale. So start doing email marketing today. Here’s what’s next on this list of affiliate marketing mistakes that affiliates make:

5) Not Writing Quality Content

Many new affiliates know that
“content is king”,
so their approach to this is to create as much content as possible without any regard for quality.

This is a huge mistake.

You should always be striving to provide value to your readers. If they can’t trust or believe in what you’re saying for free, what makes you think they’re going to trust you when it comes time to make a purchasing decision?

Also, strive to write quality pieces of content because quality is the only thing that matters. And writing quality content is a
piece of cake.

To write quality content, start with an outline. An outline will give you focus and will give you the structure you need with completing a well-thought-out article. An outline will allow you to
fill in the blanks when writing, and before you know it, you’ll be done with your content. 

Always compare your content with your competition to make sure your level of quality is better than theirs. Because your prospect will go with the
affiliate whose information has helped them solve their problem or achieve their goal.

Here’s what’s next on this list of affiliate marketing mistakes that affiliates make:

6) Not Tracking And Disguising Your Links

If all you have is a raw affiliate link with no tracking, you can’t see how your campaigns are performing. There are many affiliate link-tracking software out there, but one that I use is a tool called
“Linklyhq.com“. It disguises your affiliate links to make them look credible, and gives you stats on how your link is doing.

Link tracking is essential if you want a successful affiliate business, and not tracking and disguising your links can lead to fewer clicks on them.

If you have a WordPress blog, you can use tools like
“Pretty Links”
and
“Thirsty Affiliates” to manage your links and improve your click-throughs. Be sure to track and disguise your links, because people don’t trust links that are long and ugly.

Final Thoughts On Common Affiliate Marketing Mistakes

The affiliate marketing mistakes that I’ve mentioned today can be avoided if you take your time when marketing your business. Affiliate marketing takes time, hard work, patience, and perseverance.

If you don’t respect any of these values then you don’t have what it takes to
make money with affiliate marketing. There’s alot that you need to learn, but learning from your mistakes is the first step.