It doesn’t matter what you try in life, you are bound to make some mistakes. Even seasoned professionals still make occasional errors. Affiliate marketing is no different. If you are just starting out, you will make mistakes, but minimising the amount of mistakes you make and the impact they have on your business will help to fast-track your success in the online world.
In this post I’ll be highlighting some of the mistakes I’ve made with affiliate marketing and what to avoid so you don’t make the same errors I did in the beginning.
Start With Just One Niche And One Website
In other words, don’t spread your focus and workload too thin. This is absolutely vital in the beginning. You want to give your full focus and attention to working on one niche and building out one website to be the very best it can be. You will learn more about your chosen niche this way and you will really learn to both perfect your site, add new tools and functions, work out which affiliate offers are converting and those you are wasting your time with. You will also write better posts, refine those posts and optimise your pages.
If you are trying to run too many websites on different subjects, none of your sites will get the full attention they require to really start to gain traffic and become profitable. You will spread your workload too thin and quite possibly just confuse yourself and end up feeling overwhelmed.
Don’t Try To Learn Everything At Once
If you are new to online marketing, then there is a big learning curve involved. If you put pressure on yourself to learn everything at once or too quickly, it will be information overload and your brain just might explode. This could lead to you giving up and quitting because it all seems too hard. Just take your time, taking one step at a time. It’s not a race. Don’t do anything in desperation for money, either. This business won’t get you quick money. It’s a process, and it all starts with you offering something of value to your readers and site visitors.
Limit Your Affiliate Programs/Products
When I first started I signed up with so many different affiliate programs and started out promoting so many different products, I just couldn’t keep track of what I was doing. Another thing to consider is this: If you focus on just promoting a few products at first, you increase your chances of making a sale of those products. Once again it’s all about focus and giving something your full attention. If every post you write promotes a different product, then you only have one chance of getting a customer for that product. Whereas, if you have a number of different posts that promote the same product, this greatly increases your chances of making sales. It’s also a lot easier to keep track of.
Be Patient
As I alluded to earlier, it takes time to learn this business and it takes time before you will start to see some money coming in, so go into it with a “patience” mindset to begin with. If you are in a hurry to make money, you will just end up disappointed and maybe quit before you have given your online business a chance. You really want to set yourself a goal of sticking with it for a year and reassessing how things are going by then.
Don’t quit too soon. The payoff in affiliate marketing comes down the track, but in the beginning there is much learning and work to be done.
Follow The Training
Find a quality online training platform that really teaches you the right way to do an affiliate marketing business. There are some good ones out there, and I’ll recommend the place I trained with at the end of this post.
Once you start the training, follow it to the letter. Learn from the experts. That’s why you’re doing training to start with, so why go against what they advise? Study at your own pace, build your first money making website while you’re learning and just take things step-by-step. It’s not a race. You are learning to build a profitable business in the online world and it is well worth your time and effort.
To Wrap Up
These are a few of the mistakes I made early on. I have definitely learnt a lot over the years, but even now I’m still learning and improving. Limit your mistakes and you will reach success more quickly. Believe in yourself and be committed to your goal of creating a successful affiliate marketing business.
By the way, I did my training with a company called Wealthy Affiliate. It’s free to get started and the community there is just so helpful, particularly to newcomers.
You can read my review of Wealthy Affiliate here.
Darren Burton
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Patience is the key to affiliate marketing as it takes time to build up enough quality content to gain trust and authority with the Search Engines who return the favour for your hard work with higher rankings.
There are no quick fixes here and to what I’ve been told gaining traffic any other way does not work whilst any companies offering you to pay for their services offering quick ways to receive traffic are scams.
The most prolific way to receive traffic is by using an up to date keyword tool for selecting high traffic keywords for your title that have low competition from other websites using the same and make your web posts engaging by receiving comments. Search Engines adore interaction and will rank you for it.
But as you say it all takes time to climb the mountain to receive the rankings and there is no quick solution yet it’s definitely worth it once you’ve gained authority.
How many posts per week do you write?
Simon.
Hi Simon. Everything you say here is pretty true and on the money, and it all does take time. At the moment I write about 15-20 posts per week across several websites.