Biggest Mistakes To Avoid When Starting Affiliate Marketing

Intro

If you are searching for a new way to make money online, affiliate marketing still offers huge potential to generate income.

While it has been around since the 1990s, it still provides new opportunities for potential affiliates to work with advertisers to promote their products and services. However, affiliate marketing isn’t as straightforward as some people would have you believe. While the basic concepts aren’t too difficult, putting all this into practice requires work.

The good news is that this guide, prepared by experts from Adromeda CPA Network, will explain some of the biggest mistakes to avoid if you are new to affiliate marketing. In fact, even some people with experience will learn some things in this guide.

Why Are Mistakes Bad?

It sounds like a silly headline because, of course, mistakes are bad. The key thing to remember is that making a mistake isn’t the end of the world, and everyone makes them. Even someone who has been practicing affiliate marketing for 15 years and is making a killing promoting products online will make a mistake at some point.

The key thing to remember is that a mistake doesn’t mean the end. It is just a simple setback in the grand scheme of things, and many mistakes that we’re going to cover in this guide can be rectified, or at least you will learn from them to ensure they don’t happen again.

Biggest Mistakes To Avoid When Starting Affiliate Marketing

These are 12 mistakes that we see beginner affiliate marketers making.

1. Underestimating The Work Involved

We’ll start off right at the beginning, before you even get to choosing a niche, selecting products, and deciding on what publishing types to promote.

Affiliate marketing isn’t a road to making millions in a very short space of time. There is a lot of work and dedication involved in getting everything set up and running. While this can turn into passive income down the line (especially if you have high-quality content ranking highly on Google with high-converting offers), the beginning takes some work.

The first mistake we find many people making is thinking all this will be easy (probably because they have seen some YouTube ad telling them that) and then giving up when they find out that it won’t make them a millionaire overnight.

Get in the mindset of having to put the work in, but if you do this, the rewards can be very lucrative.

2. Getting Started With The Wrong Niche

Niche choice is vitally important for both short-term and long-term success. We see so many people choose what we would consider to be a bad niche to operate in.

This can be for several reasons. For example:

• The niche you have chosen is highly saturated with tons of competition from experienced marketers
• It just isn’t very profitable with poor offers that don’t convert well or pay much commission
• You’ve chosen the niche purely on commissioner rates without researching if anyone is actually interested in it

The importance of research at this stage can’t be emphasized enough. If you pick the wrong niche at the beginning, then you are set up to fail right from the start. Affiliate marketing is all about trial and error, but you can certainly cut down on any failures by researching the niche and offers properly and choosing one with a healthy audience interest and demand, and that isn’t hugely oversaturated.

3. Focusing On Tier 1 Geo’s

Affiliate marketing is essentially broken down into three tiers in terms of geo-offers.

Tier 1 geos are countries such as the USA, Canada, UK, and Western Europe that provide offers with high payouts and an audience that tends to have more income. Tier 2 geos consist of countries in South America and Eastern Europe that won’t be as high converting but will have lower competition with an audience that still has money to spend. Tier 3 geos are developing countries, particularly in Africa and Asia, that are often low converting but are far less competitive.

It sounds a bit strange to say around Tier 1 geos because they offer the audience with the most disposable income and usually the best offers.

However, if you are just starting out, it is best to target Tier 3 and maybe some Tier 2 geo’s offers, depending on the offer itself. As these are less competitive (but still potentially lucrative), you can experiment and still make some sales, which will boost your capital and allow you to gain valuable skills before you move on to offers that are targeted to more lucrative regions.

4. Misinterpreting Your Audience

At the heart of affiliate marketing is your audience. These are the people who will be clicking on your affiliate links, completing an action, and ultimately making you money.

One of the biggest mistakes we find new people making in affiliate marketing is not understanding what their audience actually wants. Let’s say you find a product and you think it sounds fantastic, and it has a high commission rate. Is it actually something your audience wants, or is it something that you think is good?

Similarly to picking the right niche, choosing the right offers also requires you to put in the research in the beginning. Promoting poor offers will get you nowhere in affiliate marketing, regardless of how many amazing 1000-word blog posts you write or how optimized your ad campaign is.

5. Taking On Too Many Offers

It can seem tempting to widen the net and start promoting a ton of different products in the beginning. The more you promote, the more commission you will get, right? Well, not really.

People who are new to affiliate marketing will make mistakes and overstretch themselves regularly. If you choose 10 offers to promote right from the start, how many of those are going to have good quality content that will convince people to take action? Not many.

The best approach is to focus on a max of 3 offers in the beginning. Do these really well and create high-quality content that converts, and start to make a commission from these offers. Once you do this, you can leverage your newfound skills and upscale this to new products as you progress.

6. Neglecting Your Content

This follows on from our last point - content really is the key to getting conversions and ultimately making money.

I’ve seen many beginners to affiliate marketing creating poor content and wondering why they aren’t getting any conversions. If your website, social media, or ad content is poor, why would someone click your affiliate link and complete an action? They won’t.

Affiliate marketing can be quite saturated depending on the niche, so you need to put the time and effort into creating content that is better than what is already out there. Creating AI-generated reviews or content that says the same thing but in a slightly different way won’t get you many sales.

7. Ignoring Your Competitors

Whether you like it or not, affiliate marketing is a competitive market that puts you up against other people who want to make money in the same niche as you.

Ignoring them and their methods is a recipe for failure. If you want to succeed in affiliate marketing, you need to look at what your competitors are doing. What kind of traffic are they getting, what publishing types are they using, and is it working for them?

These are all things to think about because once you know what they are doing, you can either do it better or use a strategy that they aren’t expecting to compete with them.

8. Ignoring Your Own Analytics

While you need to know what your competition is up to, you also need to know what your own analytics are. Not every campaign you run is going to be successful, and this applies to someone who is just starting as much as it applies to someone who has been making money from affiliate marketing for 10 years.

If you ignore your own tracking, you will keep doing the same thing over and over again without seeing any results.

If one of your campaigns isn’t performing well, look into why that is. Once you find the cause, you can adjust your campaign accordingly and tweak it so you start to see results. Most affiliate platforms offer powerful tracking tools, and it is one of the first things we recommend to people when they are finding the best cpa network for them.

9. Working Across Different Verticals

In the beginning, anyway. If you start to spread yourself too thin - like we mentioned above about taking on too many offers - you will get discouraged with affiliate marketing pretty fast.

Many of the best affiliate marketers work across many different verticals, but that is because they have the experience. If you start to do that in the beginning by taking on a dating niche, then a health niche, then a finance niche, you will be all over the place.

Choose a vertical to start with and do that one well before you start to expand into different niches. Building up an audience and authority in one or two niches will serve you better than being average in 5.

10. Using One Traffic Source

We see many beginner affiliates using just one traffic source for their offers.

They might just rely on optimizing website content for SEO, but they won’t have any social media presence, use paid ads, or try to build up an email list.

To be successful in affiliate marketing, you need to focus on several traffic sources at once. Some offers will work better with SEO than others, while some offers will be much more lucrative by promoting on social media instead of email.

It really comes down to what you are promoting, but just using one traffic source for your offers will result in you hitting a ceiling with your profits and expansion.

11. Doing This All By Yourself

There is a huge amount of support available out there for affiliates, and our advice is to utilize this support as much as possible.

In the beginning, affiliate marketing is extremely overwhelming, so reach out on marketing forums, social media, or even affiliate network support channels and get help if you need it.

If you just go about this whole process yourself, you will likely encounter setbacks that you don’t know how to recover from. While you shouldn’t expect someone in direct competition with you to tell you how to do your campaigns better, there are so many affiliates out there working across hundreds of niches that will be happy to provide guidance.

12. Giving Up Too Early

Finally, the last mistake people make when they start affiliate marketing is simply giving up when the money is rolling in within the first few months.

It can take a long time to build up a website, an audience, and get to grips with different offers, techniques, and strategies. This isn’t an overnight success, and you need to put the work in and try out new things before you start making significant money in this business.

However, if you simply give up early in your affiliate marketing career, you are depriving yourself of potentially making a lot of money in the future. While it can seem frustrating, stick with the process and don’t be afraid to see failure as a minor setback that you overcome rather than the end.

Mistakes To Avoid When Starting Affiliate Marketing

Everyone will make mistakes at some point in their affiliate marketing career.

Not every mistake results in a terrible consequence, and it is really about how you learn from it and ensure that it doesn’t happen again that is important. Affiliate marketing requires a lot of patience and determination to learn new skills.

If you are up for the challenge and don’t mind having a few setbacks along the way, you can turn affiliate marketing into a lucrative money maker, but you have to go in with the right mindset.