Top ten mistakes affiliate marketers make

mistakes

Nobody is perfect; we all make mistakes. Unfortunately, making mistakes in business translates into losing money. Sometimes, a mistake won’t begin to cost money until after a while, so that you’ll have time to detect it and make corrections before things become too unpleasant. Other mistakes can cost you money almost immediately.

Whatever business you’re in, it’s always good to be aware of the most common mistakes that others have made. This article lays out most of these mistakes for affiliate marketing.

10. Expecting to get rich quickly

The only legal way to get rich quick is by winning a lottery. Sorry, but I don’t know how to do that.

9. First Offer commission is too low

The primary purpose of your sales funnel is to get people to purchase the first offer, so that your profits can come from the upsells. Of course, this means that your earnings on commissions for the first offer must match (or at least come very close to) what you pay for advertising. If not, you will need an upsell or two merely to break even, and that’s not a good situation.

8. Target market is too large or too small

Some marketers want to conquer all of e-commerce, but the fact is that not even Amazon has been able to do that. At the other extreme, a market that has only a few hundred buyers worldwide will never generate enough sales to make affiliate marketing worthwhile.

7. Over- or under-communicating with your list

For almost every audience, one email per day is plenty. Some people even prefer no more than one email every two days. This may sound obvious, but don’t bombard your list with emails: it gets them to unsubscribe, and you lose all those potential upsells.

Of course, the same thing can happen when you ignore your list. Eventually they will simply forget about you. At an absolute minimum, send at least 2 emails per week. Emailing more often will considerably improve the open and click rates.

6. Not running A/B tests

It’s well known that even a very minor change to a funnel page, a paid ad, or even an email can cause a major jump in audience engagement. Once you have enough traffic to do valid testing, you should be testing almost all the time. Let the data guide you, and the differences are likely to be a pleasant surprise.

5. Promoting products that are low value (for the price)

A lot of marketers promote overpriced, low-value items because of the short-term boosts to their profits. However, the long-term price they will have to pay is much higher. People will complain, unsubscribe, and delightfully talk down your business all over the Internet. It’s not worth it.

4. Relying on free traffic

This is a tempting route to go, but the tradeoff to paid traffic is that free traffic methods slow you down considerably, even to the point where there aren’t enough hours in the day to build a large enough audience.

To be fair, there IS one method of free traffic that does work: you need to have large amounts of popular content on your site. There are a few bloggers out there who have done extremely well with this approach, but the tradeoff is still present. Building this much content by yourself takes months, if not years. Or, if you hire assistants to build it for you, you would be paying them more than you would pay for advertising.

3. Not having upsells

Several new affiliate marketers make the mistake of thinking that, once they have a great funnel, they can sit back and watch the profits from their first offer roll in. This plan doesn’t work. Those who try it will lose money, or just barely break even. Profits can be achieved only with your upsells. Fortunately, you already have a list of people who are likely to be interested in many of those.

2. Not having a funnel

It amazes me how many people who just came across affiliate marketing actually BELIEVE that they can just stick affiliate links and banners here and there and expect the world to beat a path to click on them. This “strategy” doesn’t make a penny, of course, and it never will. No successful company attracts buyers without some form of sales funnel. It’s that universal.

1. Not having an email list for a specific market

I can’t say this often enough: if you don’t have a list, you don’t have a business. And it can’t be just any list, because you’re not a spammer. That’s why the first page of any online funnel absolutely MUST have a form for capturing email lists.


I hope you enjoyed this top-ten list. If you have any other top-ten ideas related to affiliate marketing, I would love to hear your suggestions: just drop me an email.

Coach Dave

Affiliate Swim is a teaching site for online entrepreneurs who want to learn how to launch affiliate campaigns.

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