3 Affiliate Marketing Mistakes You Should Steer Clear Of

Some affiliate marketing mistakes should be avoided. Instead, most affiliates tend to discuss, argue, and even go to great lengths to prove their point.

No one cares about opinion; every affiliate only wants success.

As with most businesses, there are a few basic things you’d need to do to succeed.

Agreed that ingredients like passion, determination, guts, staying organized, learning all the time, and high levels of productivity and a wee bit of craziness are all a must.

But, for affiliate marketing, I see way too many debates on things that are non-issues. Too much talk revolves around aspects that should never be even be discussed. All these non-issues take up your mind space, slow you down, make you less productive, and dilute your focus.

While I understand that are almost always multiple ways of doing achieving the same results in affiliate marketing, some are good while others are dodgy.

Some work well and some don’t.

You have no way to know what works and what doesn’t until you actually do something.

Whether you do or not, there are a few affiliate marketing mistakes you should steer clear of. Stop discuss them completely.

Here are some of those:

Thinking about those “hats”

There was a time when you could be smart: manipulate search results, chase hacks down and get quick results, look for low-hanging fruits, and do all sorts of “black hat” bullshit, and you’d see some quick wins. That was at least a decade ago. Today, none of that works. Google is way smarter than a bunch of dorm-dwelling marketers.

Facebook is upping the ante and it’ll come down real hard (and quick) on you to ban your account for good.

If you thought and hoped that you are into affiliate marketing for the long-haul, then you don’t want to think of hats. You are better off (and it’s easier and faster) to actually put in 100% white hat techniques.

You might take more time to do it but you’ll be safe, secure, and you’ll be unstoppable.

Direct linking

When you do affiliate marketing, you don’t want to rely on hope or luck. You can’t get to winning campaigns by shooting in the dark. Using direct linking in your campaigns is certainly shooting in the dark.

Direct linking, in fact, is not even allowed on some of the most popular traffic sources like Google Adwords and Facebook.

Bing allows direct linking for now, but I am sure that’s going to change soon.

Direct linking gives you no control on the marketing workflow. By linking directly to your merchant offers, you are depending on the merchant for how fast the landing pages load, how effective those landing pages are, and every single moving part in that workflow (from images to copy; from CTA to how those elements are organized).

Here’s an even bigger drawback with direct linking: you can’t ever build your own list. You’d never know who buys what, who clicks, and who’s passing through the funnel.

Sadly, you are the one who’s spending time and effort as an affiliate to make that visitor click through in the first place.

Talking about building a list…

Not thinking in terms of “lifetime audience”

You can argue all you want, but not building a list is a sin.

Consider a typical CPA affiliate marketing workflow:

— Pick an offer
— Switch on a traffic source
— Bring visitors in
— Have them click on a button
— They arrive on the offer page
— Visitors signup or buy
— You make money

Guess what happens to Bob who just signed up as a lead on the offer you were promoting? He instantly gets into the merchant’s sales funnel; not yours.

I see impatience as one of the major reasons why affiliates don’t even bother with this crucial part of their affiliate marketing business.

Most affiliates want to see the first dollar pop in after their campaigns are launched.

Nothing wrong with that. Wait for your first dollar or two.

Then, instantly change your workflow into something where you are actually building your list and depending on email marketing to make those signups, leads, and mobile app installs happen.

Are you still getting on forums to argue about these affiliate marketing mistakes?