Affiliate marketing takes a lot of patience, industry knowledge, and content strategy to get things done the right way. In order to avoid the biggest mistakes that most affiliate marketers make along the way, you will be equipped with everything you need for a successful business. Here are the 7 most common mistakes affiliate marketers make:
What are the Most Common Affiliate Marketing Mistakes?
Here are the points that will help you understand the common errors and mistakes in affiliate marketing.
- Prioritize selling over helping
- Publishing low quality content
- Ignoring the content’s readability
- Not utilizing the content
- Ignoring the basics of SEO
- Not really understanding as to what you are selling
How to Prioritize Selling over Helping?
Getting conversions is the number one priority as an online marketer. This mindset results in mediocre content. It is important that you should focus on creating high value content above everything else. Focus on writing around the reader’s intent when you put them first. Instead of only explaining the features, you should focus on the user benefits.
Avoid user friction whenever possible. Banner advertisements have a time and place but are they worth it? Will your popup ads be considered as intrusive content in the eyes of Google? Every sales tactic whether a notification request or a banner ad comes with consequences. It is for you to decide whether the user’s friction is worthy of it or not.
Publishing Content that is of Low Quality
Whether you like it or not your content is your product as an affiliate marketer. The amount of clicks you place are a result of great content that readers consider valuable and credible. Above everything else, affiliate marketers must strive to produce high quality content. There are plenty of affiliate marketers who think that 10 mediocre posts will outperform 1 post. When you have to produce high quality blog posts, you must identify a topic that is feasible to rank for.
Ask yourself:
- How many root domain backlinks do they have?
- What is the word count for the top performing posts?
- Does your post have an image?
Once you have uncovered the details, you will have the framework to write the top ranking piece of content. It is equally important to put a lot of time in promoting the newly published article:
- Share a guide on the social media
- Send it to the email lists
- Do link building to respective bloggers so that they link back to your article
Overlooking the Website’s Speed
Do you know that the bounce rates increase by around fifty percent if the web page takes more than two seconds to load. Users are usually impatient so if the website speed keeps them waiting, they wont wait for it and your bounce rate will automatically be compromised.
Most of the time, a slow website can be attributed to server response times and large files. In case you are on WordPress, there are a few plugins that we usually recommend time and again.
- Imagify: If there are large images then you must use Imagify to compress the files without compromising on the quality
- WP Rocket: For delivering content, we would recommend setting up browser caching and testing out delaying the rendering of CSS and Javascript. As a word of caution, altering the Javascript and CSS rendering can cause issues with the website’s functionality.
- Cloudfare: When in doubt, implement a CDN via the Cloudfare WordPress plugin to speed up the content’s delivery on time.
- You can’t load every website within 2 seconds. You must help improve the speed of the website. Not only will quicker load times help with the user experience but it will also influence the rankings and conversion rates.
Ignoring the Content’s Readability
In the age of short attention spans, visitors have a low tolerance for hard to read content. However, the font size is not the only thing that you should keep in mind. When it comes to font size, you should avoid using font size that is smaller than sixteen points, especially when it comes to mobile users.
You must also consider the line height, seriff vs sans fonts and tracking in the blog templates. Don’t go for long sentences and paragraphs. Keep the approach to only four sentences or less. If you have to look up for a word to use it when writing then don’t include it.
Not Understanding what You are Selling
One of the most common mistakes that affiliate marketers consider is not investing the time to learn about what they are planning to write. Don’t underestimate that the readers are tech savvy. You should subscribe to industry leading blogs, Google alerts and forums to stay up to date. Go to quora and reddit to find out the questions people want to ask. Equip yourself with the knowledge necessary to earn readers the trust and engagement through your content.
Ignoring the Basics of SEO
Another major mistake people make is to ignore the basics of SEO. When you publish a new post without proper SEO it is like building a house without having any roads leading to it. Without the meta description, title tag, it becomes impossible for people to find the content. You are also in the business of generating the most traffic. After optimizing the title tag and meta description, you must research the overarching theme of your post and strive to create a compelling meta description and title tag for potential visitors. This could be your sales pitch in the search engine results.
If you are on a WordPress website, you should simply install the Yoast SEO plugin. You will also need to focus on writing compelling copy in the meta description and title tag. Internal and external links shouldn’t be forgotten as well. The internal links establish information hierarchy across the site. As for the external links they are considered to be the most important source.
Not Able to Utilize the Evergreen Content
The internet is moving fast and so it is up to us as content creators to keep up with the pace. While there is some validity to this argument there is an immense amount of link building value that comes from writing long form sustainable content. You can also increase the value of content by further incorporating the elements in the post title.
These are the common errors of affiliate marketing that you should know about.