5 Affiliate marketing mistakes to avoid

Or mess up with your business...

Affiliate marketing is undeniably the easiest and fastest way to earn money online. With millions of producers with products to expose to the online market, affiliate marketers are having their share of a good bite in the online market.

Starting an affiliate marketing business is relatively easy and you can start earning your money within a short time. But I think all these goodies in the affiliate marketing world are really getting into people's heads in that upcoming affiliates have the simple notion that affiliate marketing is all about making money; nothing else. You would rather read the revelation I am about to unveil.
Many upcoming affiliates make a number of mistakes, maybe due to their luck of knowledge or simply because of their ignorance. Let us look at some of these mistakes and how to avoid them.

1. More banners or links, more commissions

This is basically the first believe of any upcoming affiliate. When I was starting out, the first mission I set up in my mind was to fill my site with as many banners as possible. Did I earn anything? I don't remember but I do remember one thing; it was a bad idea.
Research shows that 70% of the users in your site won't even notice the banners, leave alone click on them. If this is what you are doing, or are planning to do, drop it. You are wasting your site's space and you are not gonna get a penny for it. Many banners do not mean you gotta earn more commissions. That would be true if you are selling advertising spaces, but for banners that you signed up for in an affiliate program, that is shit that you should avoid like hell. Google Adsense will deny you access to their services but they hate more images than content, especially from sites they do not trust.

2. Joining as many affiliate programs as possible

This is another ingrained tendency of upcoming affiliate marketers. Over 85% of upcoming affiliates will join more than ten affiliate programs in the first week of creating their sites!
Of cause joining an affiliate  program is the easiest thing on earth. So why not join as many of them as possible if not all of them? Uh-oh, you are gonna flop!
So what? Simple. When you create an affiliate site, make sure that it is fully ready for marketing before filing it with banners and holy crap from the lot of affiliate programs you will probably be generally awarded. Write enriching content and fill your pages with useful information first.
Make sure that you have marketed yourself and your site enough to get good traffic. After all the back bone of successful affiliate marketing is good traffic. If you fill your site with banners- a damn lot of them within the first week, nobody is even going to click on them because you got no traffic. Then then next thing you will know is that the affiliate program has been withdrawn because you are not being of much help.
Join only the affiliate programs that are relevant to your site and can be of use to your readers. Do not be in a hurry to earn money or you will never see a penny.  If I were you- which unfortunately am not but really wish I could be, I would join my first affiliate program two months after creating the website. None of your applications will be disapproved. I tell you...

3. Promoting the wrong product

In your hurry to fill your site with banners, any product will probably do.  You go around picking products that have higher commissions attached to them or simply those that a friend of yours is promoting and is really making money from them without considering your area of specialization. The simple law of any affiliate marketer worth the credit, should be to promote products that are in agreement with the site's purpose. If you are blogging about Fishing and the pop up banners on your sidebar are showing something like where to get supper hot baby panties, then your readers are gonna hate you for it and flow away.Do not promote a product for the sake of it, or because a friend is promoting it or simply because it earns more commissions. Choose products that are relevant to your site and your readers can show interest in.

4. Promoting products that you have not used or tested yourself

This again takes us back to the believe that affiliate marketing is for solely making money and no other crap.
Over 70% of affiliates will promote products that they have not used themselves nor do they know anything about. The deal is to get your commissions and leave the rest of the product description to the producers. Really?
Look at it this way, when one of your readers buy a product you promoted on your site and later find out that the same product or service you were proudly promoting is scam! Do you think that person will ever purchase anything through your links again? And keep in mind that in no time all of your clients will find out you are an agent of scam products or services and before you realize what is happening they will all be fleeing your site like hell. This is the worst affiliate marketing mistake you can ever make and you are not gonna smile about it when it finally explodes sending all your clients away.
May be we do misunderstand the meaning of affiliate marketing. It is not about promoting any product from hell or Zion as long as they are depositing commissions to your account, affiliate marketing is about promoting promoting products and services that you have personally used or know a lot about them to guarantee their credibility to your own customers. That way you will earn their loyalty and trust and any product that you are promoting will never miss in their cart or wish list.

5. Place banners on your sidebar and wait for commissions to flow in

When I started out as an affiliate marketer, I used to admire and envy sites that had many banners displayed. And the next thing, I was doing the same. I thought having many banners on your sidebar was cool and would send readers clicking on them like crazy. I got nothing but I learnt my lesson the hard way.
That is the worst way ever to do affiliate marketing. Any smart affiliate would write something, however short , about the products they are promoting just to give their readers a gist of what they should expect. People will usually ignore the banners on your sidebar unless you say something about them.
Writing short reviews about those products won't get you anywhere near hell. It is another way of informing your clients that you are promoting stuff you have used yourself or know something about. That will get their attention and they might just make use of your affiliate links and arrive at the merchant site to make purchases.

You have probably been making some of these mistakes without your knowledge or simply through ignorance. Ignorance is no principle of an affiliate marketer. You got to be sure of what you are up to and make the best out of your hard work. Make the necessary corrections now and start realizing your dream affiliate marketing career.
 
                       To your success