Affiliate Marketing 104: 7 Unforgivable Mistakes Every Affiliate Marketer Should Avoid

Mistakes are inevitable especially when you are just attempting a new thing. I guess that is the reason Albeit Einstein in one of his quotes says, “a person who never made a mistake never tried anything new”. However, despite that, some unforgivable mistakes are better avoided than committed.

Affiliate marketing is mostly regarded as a passive source of income in the digital marketing business. However, to some people, it is the worst investment they have ever made. The business requires that newbies exercise patience, innovation, and great writing skills. Also, they must avoid mistakes that can destroy all their marketing efforts. The following are the seven mistakes frequently made by affiliate marketers and the ways to avoid them.

1. Choosing the wrong niche

Choosing the wrong niche is usually the first and worst mistake committed by newbies in the business. They are often blinded by the desire to make quick money than following their passion. Sincerely, the fitness and weight loss niche are presently a hot cake, but it would be a disaster to go into it only because of the high demand. Luckily, a person can make a few bucks in the first few months, but they will eventually crumble when they experience some bad days.

High demand is very much considered in the selection of a niche, but passion should come first. It’s passion for something that will make a person write blogs even when no income is realized for several months. Therefore, you should take your time to study yourself, what you love talking about, products you can advertise for free, and study the traffic received in the niche.

2. Publishing poor content

Content is the only leveraging power possessed by an affiliate marketer and some people love to regard it as the main product. Therefore, it is expected of you to optimize it to the best of your ability. First of all, it is the content that will tell whether a publisher is quite knowledgeable about the product or not. For this reason, marketers should ensure that they have used the product and have made enough research to cover every aspect of the topic.

Meanwhile, the structure and readability of the content matter a lot. Search engines are known for pulling up lots of results for any topic searched on the internet. And the researcher will only go for the ones that attract them, and easily understood. Therefore, affiliate marketers should enrich their content with high-quality images and attractive titles. You would agree with me that one of the reasons you are reading this article is because you don’t want to be a victim of the unforgivable mistakes. I could have just said mistakes to avoid in affiliate marketing.

3. Ignoring site performance

You are losing on lots of sales if you are not improving the speed and performance of your website. The faster the speed of the loading of your website pages the more the visitors you receive and the more the sales. The best way to increase the speed of your website is to use powerful web hosting. Also, some plugins can be installed on a website for the quick loading of the website pages. Examples of such plugins are image optimizers, CDNs and page caching.

Moreover, affiliate marketers should make their website mobile-friendly because most of the researchers are mobile users. Going through contents that are not complete on both sides of the screen can be very annoying and it will discourage them from coming to your website again, even if you have good content.

4. Not extending your reach

Blogs can help you reach out to customers, but only follow up mechanism will bring about the sale. Affiliate marketers should adopt email marketing to engage their customers to the point of purchase. By sending frequent messages to people on your email list, you are reminding them of your brand and the products they are yet to decide on. Moreover, research shows that consumers will decide about your products on coming across your affiliate links about 5-7 times. By this, they would have tested your persistence and have enough information about the product.

All affiliate marketers should have an email list of the people that have visited their website. Meanwhile, buying an email list is not as effective as building one from your blog. You can install plugins such as forms or email opt in to get the email address of all your website visitors. Remember you should have something to offer in exchange for their email.

5. Overlooking SEO

I think most affiliate marketers avoid this part because it’s a bit technical and may cost some amount. Search engine optimization plays a major role in ranking your website high on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) and also in overcoming competition.

The first step in SEO is keyword research. Keyword research will assist you in developing high ranking content. Keywords are the words tracked by search engine algorithms to produce result whenever a search is made. Therefore, affiliate marketers should first make use of keywords research tools to generate keywords of a topic before writing.

The other part of SEO is backlinks. These are links that connect two different pages of your websites and, your website to other websites. Search engines like Google use these backlinks to evaluate your website’s credibility.

6. Expecting fast income

Anybody that is going into affiliate marketing must have patience. The first few years are where the hustling and bustling lies. The moment you overcome that stage, you can expect income alerts while sleeping.

7. Losing focus

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