Common Affiliate Marketing Mistakes
05-04-2017
There is a real skill set to Affiliate Marketing. It’s not just about sticking up a website, then collecting sales commissions. The best Affiliate Marketers make things look easy, but the truth is they spent a lot of time learning a great deal along the way to reach that level of success.
We’re examining five common mistakes new Affiliate Marketers often make and why doing the exact opposite of these is in your best interest.
Affiliate Marketing Mistakes #1: Taking Shortcuts
There are many areas where Affiliate Marketers take shortcuts. The first is plagiarising content or purchasing poor quality content. Sure, most of us don’t start out as great content creators. It’s human nature that things we don’t know tend to make us nervous and intimidate us. That’s what causes most people to take shortcuts.
The solution is to take a long-term approach. If you do things properly from the start, it’ll certainly pay dividends down the road. Oh, and here’s the good news. The more you create, the better you will actually become!
The other area where Affiliate Marketers frequently take shortcuts is not testing PPC ads and offers. Google and Bing offer so many tools to webmasters that there’s no excuse not to test your PPC campaigns. So, test keywords to see which give you the greatest return. There are plenty of keywords generators out there.
Affiliate Marketing Mistakes #1: Ignoring Competition
There are people within your vertical that are doing well. It’s your job to find them and study their site(s). You must see what they’re doing and how they’re doing it; check out their design, content, landing pages, PPC ads, and other online efforts. The following are two great tools for analysing your competitors’ website: SEMrush and SpyFu.
Affiliate Marketing Mistakes #1: Chasing Popular Keywords
If you go after the most popular keywords right away, you better have a lot of money saved because it’ll be expensive, from a PPC standpoint. The most popular keywords will obviously require the highest bids.
If you’re looking at things from an SEO (organic search) perspective, going after the most popular keywords will keep you below page one for a while. The sites on page one have been targeting those for a while. You don’t just open your website, optimise for a few keywords, and end up on page one.
We recommend ranking for less popular keywords first (often known as long tail keywords), while you work on content for the more popular keywords. It’ll take a while to rank on page one for “cheap auto insurance,” but ranking for “cheap auto insurance Hastings” will be much easier at first.
Affiliate Marketing Mistakes #1: Not Passing Unique Identifiers
What do we mean by that? Well, every lead you pass onto your Affiliate Network should have a snippet of code (called a SubID) that identifies where the lead came from. It’s imperative to be able to track your leads and optimise your campaigns accordingly and these SubIDs allow for that. If this is new to you, work with your network’s Affiliate Manager to make the most of your lead submissions.
Affiliate Marketing Mistakes #1: Plastering Your Links
The fact is that poor traffic comes in part from poor link and ad placement. Your links must be relevant to your industry. You want to attract users with genuine interest. You cannot do that if your links end up on non-relevant sites. What’ll happen if you do this? Well, over time, you can start seeing non-relevant lead submissions, which can earn you a reputation for poor quality leads.
You should keep in mind that advertisers have budgets and if they are receiving leads from a bad course, they will shut off that source immediately. They’re looking for ROI. The better quality you send to an advertiser, the longer you will work with them. It’s simple quality over quantity.
Conclusion
The best advice we have for rookie Affiliate Marketers is that you should choose an Affiliate Network with experienced Affiliate Managers and a great support system and let them help you.
Join our growing network of Affiliates by signing up today!
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