The Biggest Mistakes Affiliate Marketers Make

Posted by Steven Wagenheim on August 08, 2010 in Affiliate Marketing, General, Marketing Articles

There are a lot of advantages of affiliate marketing over creating and selling your own product. One of them is not having to deal with the hassles of customer support and handling refunds. Plus, you don’t have to wonder if you’ll even be able to come up with a product in the first place. As an affiliate, there are tons of products to choose from. Having said all that, there are a myriad of mistakes that affiliate marketers make that can literally derail a campaign before it even gets started. This article is going to cover some of the most glaring of these mistakes. See how many you’ve made yourself.

At the top of the list is product selection. Way too many people get all hung up on promoting the flavor of the day. If a product is at the top of the Clickbank Marketplace, or whatever affiliate marketplace they might be using, they jump all over it. The thought process behind this is if the product is that popular, it must sell really well. Problem is, there is a lot that goes on behind the scenes that many affiliates don’t know about. Not every supposedly popular product is easy for affiliates to sell. In fact, many of them are downright hard as heck.

Another big mistake that affiliates make has to do with promotion. They think that all they have to do is direct link to a sales page using PPC or maybe some slapped together article and the sales will come pouring in. The problem is, when every affiliate does the same thing, there is nothing to differentiate one from the other. When that happens, sales are more a matter of luck than actual marketing smarts. And when you rely on luck, you’re putting your business in the hands of a fickle lady.

Another huge mistake that many affiliate marketers make is not tracking their campaigns. Now, if all your promotion is simply coming from one source then it’s not such a big deal. But what if you’re using PPC, article marketing, media buys, social networking and who knows what other methods? If you don’t track each method how will you know where your efforts are best spent?

Imagine you’re spending $300 a month on PPC and 4 hours a day writing articles and out of the 50 to 100 sales you’re getting each month it turns out, if you bothered to track this, that your $300 a month PPC budget has been a total waste of money. You’re not going to know that. So you’ll just keep sinking that money into your marketing month after month, hoping that your efforts are 50/50 or at least something close.

Marketing in the dark is without a doubt one of the biggest mistakes that all marketers make, whether they’re promoting their own products or those as an affiliate.

Within the halls of these three main problems there are countless mini mistakes that affiliate marketers make. We’re going to break these down in future articles and dissect each one in great detail so that the chances of you making these mistakes become slim to none.

So check back here very soon as we rip affiliate marketing to shreds. By the time we’re done, you WILL be an affiliate marketing expert.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Tired of being an affiliate failure? Want to turn yourself into an affiliate assassin like I am? Want to land in the top 20 of every affiliate promotion you tackle just like I do? Check out my site at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/affiliateassassin/index.html and start earning a solid income as an affiliate marketer.