I haven’t been blogging much lately (I’ve been extremely busy), so I figured I would create a new Blog post about the top 5 mistakes that you can make as a Newbie Affiliate Marketer.
I know how much some people hate reading long Blog posts - so I will make this straight to the point and as short as possible!
Here’s the Top 5 Affiliate Marketing Mistakes That I’ve seen and/or done:
- Learning Affiliate Marketing from expensive ebooks — now this may sound strange to some, but this is a big mistake to most newbies. Sure, there’s a lot of good “expensive” ebooks, but there’s a lot of ebooks that I highly suggest you STAY AWAY from. I may get some flack for this but: Day Job Killer is NOT a good book to learn Affiliate Marketing. I don’t agree with most of what Chris talks about in this book and I would never recommend it to anyone…
- Trying to save a few bucks and not starting an opt-in list — I see A LOT of newbies/beginners who tend to think a little backwards… they’ll go out and spend ridiculous amounts of money on junk products and then they try to save a few bucks by not signing up for a service such as aWeber. Wrong! I know a lot of non-affiliates who read this blog might be thinking I’m an evil marketer, but getting people to optin to your Email lists can make some BIG money down the road. It’s like they say: “The money is in the list”… it’s very true, in most cases! Why waste money on getting people to show up at your site ONE TIME? Collect leads and send them useful information… don’t spam them - if you do, you ARE wasting money.
- Overlooking SEO (Search Engine Optimization) — Ughhhh… I don’t mean to be hard on beginners, but you NEED to learn SEO! This is not a suggestion - this should be a NO BRAINER. If you’re not learning and focusing on SEO - you’re losing a lot of valuable traffic. A lot of marketers might simply throw all of their time and money into a simple squeeze page or a landing page through a PPC campaign and not use SEO… BUT, you’re killing your potential! Organic results are GREAT. Use them.
- Not taking enough time on Landing Pages — I’ve been there… I’ve gotten lazy. I would throw up a new site in a day and be done with it. Never testing, never thinking twice… Then I realized: I WAS LOSING A LOT OF MONEY. Test and Tweak your landing pages. This not only gives you better conversions, it lowers your PPC bids! (GQS = Google Quality Score in AdWords will raise your bid prices for your keywords if your Landing Pages are not relevant to the keywords and ads…)
- Never letting go of a Campaign – This seems to be the biggest problem with most Affiliate Marketers. They will focus sooo hard on their campaigns and see absolutely NO results, even with rigorous testing, and they will not give up. Look, nobody wants to give up… but the fact is - there ARE times when you have to face the facts: Not every campaign is going to make money. Half of your campaigns will be absolutely worthless… come back and try again if you feel it’s necessary, but work on what is making you money and try to duplicate it. Don’t continue working on a dud…
Now there is a follow up to #5, but for the sake of a numbered theme (5), I will make this a bonus…
I also see a lot of Newbies/beginner Affiliate Marketers who don’t try hard enough. They think that just because they find a hot niche and throw up a Website, that they should see instant results. Test and Tweak and keep trying… obviously, don’t try too hard to where you know you’re working on a dud - but don’t give up without even trying!
