Full Transcript: 

Avoid These 10 Common Affiliate Marketing Blunders to Skyrocket Your Income

Hello and welcome to the Smart Affiliate Marketing podcast.

I’m Paul – And in this episode, I’m going to outline and help you avoid these 10 most common Affiliate Marketing Blunders and help you skyrocket your income. By cutting out bad practises, you’ll soon be well on your way to success.

Let’s get straight into it.

Blunder number one is lack of consistency and dedication.

Many people come into affiliate marketing because they’re drawn in by the allure of easy money – and this is thanks to some overly optimistic advertising by some unscrupulous so-called “gurus”.

You’ve probably seen ads that claim you can make millions overnight at the touch of a button, flick of a switch. But it’s simply not true.

Affiliate marketing does require consistent effort and dedication.

So to avoid falling into this trap, make sure you set aside a certain amount of time each week, ideally as much as you possibly can without impacting other areas of your life.

Make sure you work on your business on a regular basis.

Use time management techniques, productivity hacks and set realistic goals to help you stay motivated.

Affiliate marketing is not a get rich quick scheme.

It’s a marathon, not a sprint – so stay dedicated and keep pushing forward and use any setbacks as learning opportunities.

Blunder number two that we want to avoid is choosing the wrong niche.

The best advice I can give you on this is to go back to Episode six of the Smart Affiliate marketing podcast, and it’s called Niches to Riches, where we deep dive into identifying promising niche opportunities that are relevant to you.

It’s a 10 minute episode, but it’s packed with useful tips to get you on the right track to find in the right niche.

But in summary and for the sake of your convenience, my three top tips for choosing a profitable niche are to research trends using Google trends or uber suggest, finding where your passion meets profit, which means finding a niche that aligns with your interests and has proven profitability and evaluate the competition to see how saturated the market is.

If you want to know more, go back to Episode six Niches to Riches, and that will give you the data you need.

Blunder number three – Targeting the wrong audience.

You’ve chosen your niche. Now you need to target your marketing to the exact people who would be interested in your niche.

Don’t try to appeal to everyone because your message becomes diluted. Also, if you target the wrong demographic, you’ll see low engagement, poor conversion rates and ultimately a lot of wasted effort.

My three top tips and strategies for targeting the correct audience are number one. Create a customer avatar. This is essentially defining your ideal customer, what their demographics, interests and pain points are. I’ve done a whole podcast episode on this as well – It’s Episode seven of Season one and again it’s about 10 minutes, and you can refer back to that one after niches to riches.

Tip Number two is use analytics. So leverage tools like Google Analytics and Social Media insights, to understand who’s engaging with your content. You can then adjust your strategy accordingly.

And tip Number three is to tailor your content directly to your target audience’s needs and desires. Use their language and terminology and address their pain points and offer solutions that will resonate with them. This will drive higher engagement and conversions.

Blunder Number four is ignoring the audience needs and interests.

When you do this, you risk losing their trust and engagement, so you need to be creating content that resonates with your ideal audience.

My top three tips for this are:

One: Engage directly with your audience and ask them what they want from you. Use surveys, polls or direct feedback to ascertain what they exactly want from you – and then provide it.

Tip number two: Analyse their behaviour. Keep track of which of your posts are the most popular with your audience, what they like and what they don’t like. Give them more of what they like!

And tip number three is to help solve problems. Focus on creating content that solves the specific problems of your target audience. The more value you provide, the more problems you solve, the more loyal and engaged your audience will become.

Blunder number five is promoting the wrong products or services.

And this is very important because your reputation is on the line every time you promote a product, so you have to get this right.

Here are my three top tips for selecting the best products to promote:

Tip number one is to test the product before you promote it. This makes sure you know the product inside out, you can genuinely vouch for its quality, and it helps you provide a genuine, informed review where you can highlight the good and the bad points.

Tip number two is to research reviews on the product and determine what other people and other users are saying about the product.

High ratings and positive reviews are good indicators of a quality product.

And tip number three – Relevance is key. Make sure the product aligns with your audience’s needs and interests. It’s gonna help solve their problems and get them to where they need to be. The more the products you promote, help your audience, the more they’re going to trust you and stay engaged with you.

Blunder Number six is using ineffective marketing strategies.

So many people, when they start out in affiliate marketing, they get hold of their affiliate link, and they then rely on spamming people with emails and posting their links all over social media or just using aggressive sales tactics.

Well these approaches actually turn your audience off.

You need to build the “know, like and trust” and then recommend products to your audience.

Simply spamming people with emails and social media often has a detrimental effect, and it can lead to you giving up on Affiliate Marketing.

My top tips for effective marketing strategies are:

One – Using content marketing, create high quality content that provides real value to your audience. This can be blog posts, videos, podcasts, social media and so on.

Use email marketing to build and nurture your email list and provide valuable content and personalised recommendations by email.

And marketing Tip number three is using search engine optimisation and paper click advertising to drive organic and paid traffic to your promotions.

This is a massive area, and I do have other podcast episodes on traffic techniques.

Blunder number seven is actually producing poor quality content.

This will actually disengage your audience and harm your brand’s reputation. So if your content isn’t providing value, your audience aren’t gonna stick around, and they certainly won’t buy products from you.

So my top tips for creating engaging and informative content are:

Number one. Research thoroughly and ensure your content is well researched, accurate and provides valuable insights that your audience can implement.

Number two. Make it engaging. Use a conversational tone, include visuals and have short paragraphs or sentences to make your content easily digestible.

And three. Make regular updates keep your content fresh and up to date.

Blunder number eight is ignoring best practises of “Search Engine Optimisation”.

Now, I appreciate SEO isn’t very exciting, but if you’re going to create a blog, you might as well SEO the blog or website to get the most bang for your buck. If you’re going to put all of that time into creating a website, you may as well optimise it so that you get as much traffic as possible.

Don’t forget potentially your free traffic will keep coming as long as you continue to pay your hosting. So investing either time or money into SEO can pay dividends for a very long time.

I’ll soon be doing an entire podcast on SEO, but my three biggest tips are:

Firstly, to use keyword research and identify the keywords that your target audience are looking for, Then incorporate these keywords into your content. You can use on Page SEO so optimising your contents. Title headers, meta descriptions and images – and use link build in by building back links from reputable sites to boost your content authority and improve your search rankings.

You can also do on Page SEO by building back links from one page of your website to another page using anchor text.

SEO is an ongoing process, but when done right, it can mean a lot of free traffic to your content.

Blunder number nine is failing to disclose affiliate relationships.

It’s very important to be transparent in your affiliate marketing endeavours – and being transparent about your affiliate relationships builds trust with your audience. It shows that you’re honest and keeps you compliant with regulations.

Top tips for disclosure are:

Firstly, be very clear about when a link is an affiliate link. You can say things like I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you, and this tends to work well.

Tip two is to disclose early. Don’t hide your disclosure at the bottom of the page in very small text, which is hard to read. Have it near the top or in a prominent position so that your audience can see it right away. And also build trust and emphasise that you only recommend products that you 100% believe in and feel will genuinely benefit your audience. When disclosure is done in the right way, it helps actually build your audience loyalty who go on to trust your recommendations because you’re being transparent.

And Blunder Number 10 is failure to build and nurture an email list.

All of the top affiliate marketers have email lists.

It’s one of the most powerful tools in their arsenal and means they can reach out to their audience at any given time.

It also allows you to build relationships, provide value and promote your affiliate offers. Also, you’re not subject to the whims of the algorithm of social media sites.

My three top tips for building and nurturing an email list are:

Number one – Create a lead magnet or magnets and offer your audience something valuable, like an eBook, a checklist or something exclusive,in exchange for their email address.

Regularly send them value that helps educate, entertain or solve their problems. This builds trust and keeps you forefront of their mind.

And finally, if applicable to your niche, you can segment your list based on their interests, behaviours or where they are in the buying cycle.

Let’s recap on the key points from today’s episode.

We’ve looked at consistency and dedication, how they are crucial for long term success – how finding the right niche will bring you a profitable and sustainable business – How you should then be targeting the right audience and ensuring you meet their needs and interests – and only promoting high quality relevant products that resonate and align with your audience needs.

You’ll need to use effective marketing strategies that build trust and deliver value. Use SEO to get the most traffic to your blog or website. You’ll need to disclose your affiliate relationships by being honest and transparent and build and nurture an email list for consistent and long term success.

Avoiding these 10 blunders will cut out a lot of wasted time and push you further towards your goals.

If you have any confusion or you don’t know where to start, I have a free checklist you can download at www.SmartAffiliatePodcast.com/checklist and this 20 point checklist will help you through your affiliate marketing journey, step-by-step, and get you on track to success.

It’s 100% free. There are no upsells, downsells, sidesells.

Get your free checklist and start working through alongside some podcast episodes, and you’ll soon be on your way to success.

My next episode of the Smart Affiliate Marketing podcast is “Affiliate Partner Secrets” – and How to Choose High converting affiliate programmes.

I’ll be diving into insider tips and strategies for selecting the best affiliate programmes that convert.

Thanks for tuning in to the Smart Affiliate Marketing podcast.

If you found this episode useful, please follow or subscribe.

Feel free to leave a review or share it with your fellow Internet marketers.

Until next time – Keep learning, keep growing and keep thriving in your affiliate marketing journey.

Goodbye for now!