5 Affiliate Marketing Mistakes To Avoid

Good morning!

Sorry it’s been two weeks since my last newsletter! I was relaxing on a well earned vacation in Mallorca, sipping on riojas and eating my way through the island 🤌.

And because I want your affiliate business to thrive so you can take as many luxury vacations as you want, here are 5 common affiliate marketing mistakes most beginners make that you should avoid.

Mistakes that waste thousands of dollars, prevent campaigns from turning into online ATMs, and eventually lead to people quitting affiliate marketing all together. 

1. Not Understanding Who Your Audience Is - This is one of the most common ones I see. Affiliate marketers don’t take the time to try to truly understand who’s buying the products they're selling. How old are they? What’s their gender? What problems are they facing in life? What life events are they going through? What problem is your product going to solve for them? Who are they buying the product for? Is it for them, their daughter, their elderly parents?

   When building out a campaign you should take at least 10 minutes and really think of who it is that’s buying your product. Build out a caricature of them in your mind. Give them a name. Then when you build out your landing page and write your ad copy, you can write it for them, address their problems, and gear the angle of your ad copy to something that would appeal to them.

2. Bad/Lazy Copywriting - It’s unreal how many people want to be successful at affiliate marketing but don’t take the time to learn how to write good ad copy. And they wonder why they don’t get a lot of sales. The real super affiliates who make millions per year write their own pages, and they know how to write. They’ve studied copywriting.

   They know how to find marketing angles that work. And sure, you can use A.I. But if you’re not skilled at copywriting you won’t know how to touch up the words the A.I. wrote for maximum effect. And I still think A.I. doesn’t hold a candle to the top performing pages written by skilled copywriters.

   Either way, I would recommend reading a book called Cashvertising and start there if you want to get good at writing copy. In order to win at affiliate marketing you need convincing ad copy. Your affiliate landing page is your sword in the online arena, and the better your ad copy the sharper your sword. You wouldn’t go to battle with a dull sword, so why spend money trying to get conversions with a dull page?

3. Poor Landing Page User Experience - Do you buy from websites, or click links on websites that look scammy to you? Probably not. If you want to increase your sales you need to give the user a very good experience on your site. Don’t hit them with a popup right when they get to your site. Don’t have ads loading late in the middle of the article. Don’t have a slow loading page. Don’t have a shitty logo. Your landing page needs to radiate trustworthiness to the end user. Like they’re not going to get a virus from sitting on your page, or get scammed by following your affiliate links. Make sure your landing page is trustworthy, loads fast, is clean, easy to understand, and well structured. 

4. No Tracking - Now that you know who you’re selling to, have written a bomb ad copy, and formatted it on a clean, fast loading landing page. You have to add some kind of tracking. Most new affiliates don’t do this and they’re doomed to fail before they even begin. You need tracking like Anytrack or Voluum to let Google, Facebook, TikTok, Outbrain, Taboola, etc… know which of their users are converting so their ad algorithms can optimize to serve your ads to more of those kinds of people.

   This is how your campaigns get stronger and more profitable over time. The tracking is less for you and more for the ad platforms to learn and optimize your campaigns. I personally use Anytrack, but there are a lot of options out there. However you choose to do it, you need to have the ad platforms receive your conversion data.

5. Pausing Campaigns Too Early - Once your campaigns are live and receiving traffic and conversions, they may not be profitable right away. That’s ok. Most ad platforms have a learning period of about 7 days. Don’t expect to be profitable in these 7 days. Just let your campaigns receive conversions, pass that data to the networks via your tracking, and let the networks algorithms do their thing. You can hop in there as well and guide it in the right direction by adjusting things as you see fit based on the data you’ve received.

   Then you can start really adjusting things after the learning phase and help move it into profitability. Most campaigns won’t be profitable on day 1. I have many campaigns that are bringing in $5k+ in profit per month on auto pilot, that weren’t profitable for the first two months. But now they’re bullet proof and have been running for over a year without me touching them… little online ATMs.

   So don’t stop a good thing before it has a chance to start. Use your tracking, watch your data, and together with the ad platforms machine learning you can move your campaigns into the black. But it takes time.

Those are the top 5 mistakes I see most affiliates make. If you have any questions feel free to comment on this post or shoot me an email reply. 

Talk to you next week!
Matt