Affiliate marketing: 6 mistakes that beginners can make

When an affiliate marketer just begins to work in affiliate marketing, he usually does everything just for the money. He tries to run in all directions at once and try everything – without the slightest idea of mistakes. And these mistakes happen a lot, and most of them can seriously ruin his career in the future.

Let’s talk more about the biggest mistakes in affiliate marketing that beginner marketers make.

Mistake #1. Portrait of the target audience is not made

Working with any client, with any content you should always start with the study of the target audience. It is the main basis for an effective sales campaign. The target audience needs to be studied and analyzed, and then you can use this data to conduct an effective advertising policy and create messages that will draw the attention of potential customers to your product.

There is a basic set of indicators that help describe your avatar (a specific person in the target audience) in detail.  

At a minimum it is important to know: gender, age, place of residence, marital status, income level, level of education, hobbies, how the person likes to spend his leisure time, what gadget he uses most often and where (at home or in the workplace). This will help to identify the customer’s problems, which you can solve with your product or service.

It is impossible to take information about your target audience “out of your head” and build an effective business on it, you have to do analytics. You need to study either your own customers or analyze the customers of your competitors. 

Now there are many ways to get information about potential consumers, even without contacting them. For example, start by studying social networks. In this way, you can find out their interests, based on the information about which groups they are subscribed to, what they comment on, what content prevails in their feed, what they look like, what places they visit, etc. 
So, it’s important to be as accurate as possible in your target audience or avatar portrait, based on analytics data. If you make a mistake, advertising is unlikely to work. And then you can put a lot of effort into it (creating sites, landing pages, pages on social networks, activities), but all their effectiveness will be reduced to zero.

Mistake #2. Don’t know their competitors

It’s a mistake to think that your company operates in isolation and that competitors simply don’t exist in affiliate marketing.

There is always competition, but it can be direct (companies sell the same products or services like yours and work with your target audience) or indirect (companies work with your target audience, but sell similar products or services to yours, or may sell a completely different product from yours, but to your target audience). So when developing the uniqueness of your product or service, you need to know what environment you are working in, who the person compares your product to, and who is trying to sell the same thing as you. It is the actions of your competitors that influence whether a person will choose you or not. You need to work with competitor analysis in several steps:

STEP 1: Look at their sites, social networks, read their mailing lists and messengers, study reviews, and understand what their potential client looks like. 

STEP 2: Look at the numbers and metrics on the sites: number of visits, behavioral factors (time on the site, which pages are looked at more often). Understand where the traffic is coming from. Pay attention to the channels of communication with the client on your website used by your competitor: chat-bots or something else. 

STEP 3: Analyze sales funnels, how competitors work with clients, and how they advertise.

Lifehack: Become a potential customer of your competitor and try to follow the path of an average customer. This way you’ll see the entire structure of the funnel, understand how the audience is segmented, how the marketing strategy is built, what the product line looks like, how you can pay for and receive a product or service. Be sure to see what promotions, rates are available, what the pricing policy and product line is. 

STEP 4. Gather the obtained data into a table and analyze it: find the competitor’s weaknesses, understand how you can use them. See what you can offer your customers that your competitor doesn’t offer. This way you will identify your weaknesses and be able to correct them when creating your unique selling proposition.

Mistake #3. No experience in testing

The most interesting thing is that newcomers often launch companies and invest a lot of money in them without even making sure of their profitability.

So how do you choose exactly what you need? Try to do as many tests as you can.

Also do not forget to contact the technical support. Managers have serious experience and can tell you what’s perfect for your traffic source.

Real gurus never speculate, they check how well the funnel works and only then decide if it’s worth making a serious effort.

When complaining about low income, the first thing to do is to try to find flaws in your work. If there are no mistakes, affiliate internet marketing will definitely be profitable. Now you know where the rake is laid out and you can get around it.

Mistake #4. Trying to copy other affiliates

It’s funny when you come across promotional blocks used 2-3 years ago on the vastness of the Internet.

Many newcomers don’t even try to come up with something of their own, forgetting that the relevance of promos is decreasing, traffic from some sources is getting more expensive, trends are changing, etc. What worked for someone else is not the fact that it will bring you a good income.

One of the biggest affiliate marketing mistakes is copying creo. We strongly recommend everybody to create all the creo themselves and test them.

Mistake #5. Not enough tracking

You must use unique links with each post to be able to track where your clicks are coming from. There are several different platforms and trackers available for affiliate marketing that can help you to analyze everything. 

One of the common affiliate marketing mistakes is insufficient testing. If you do the tests, you should know what you need to change to increase your profits. Knowing all the variables over time can make a big difference in your marketing strategy, allowing you to better navigate what your customers are wanting and needing. If you can anticipate their steps, you can provide better service and better links, improving your conversion rate

Mistake #6. Selecting too many traffic sources

There are many sources of traffic that you can use to make money from affiliate marketing. This results in the paradox of choice.

Beginners often think that they will stumble upon a profitable campaign if they find the “best” traffic source.

Twitter, Facebook, Google UAC, TikTok are reliable platforms, but you need to become a master at setting up one of them. If you plan to promote the whole offer and at once, you run the risk of being exhausted. In that case, you get a big load, and you don’t know what you’re doing.

The goal of affiliate marketing is to learn the source of your traffic. You get to know it inside out – what works well there, what doesn’t, what kind of customers you can get, how to set up targeting, etc.

That means you become a master on that platform, and you know exactly what you can run there to make a lot of money.

For people who haven’t even run their first campaign, there is no “right” traffic source.

There are veterans on every source, and you can’t compete with them if you don’t master the platform.

That’s why you’re better off focusing on one platform:

1. You’re mastering your bidding system. Adopting the right betting strategy is an important part of traffic advertising. Since bidding models are different from source to source, you need to stick with one long enough to learn what works best.

2. You fine-tune your targeting. Its setup varies from platform to platform.

3. You learn the limits of what you can do. Some sources, like Facebook, are very strict, and it takes time to learn what you can and can’t run.

So today we have considered the top 6 the biggest affiliate marketing mistakes of 99% starting partners. Use any source of traffic, promotional materials, test, analyze, improve. You won’t see much profit anyway, if you’ve chosen a low-quality affiliate marketing program.
Affiliate marketing traffic, CPA affiliate programs, effective advertising… you will have to understand a lot of things in order to earn productively.

Don’t make the biggest mistakes affiliate marketing , learn and develop. If not, you will also have to complain about your mistakes on forums or wonder how professionals live on the money earned by affiliate marketing on the Internet.

Always think ahead and solve problems!