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Affiliate marketing is serious business. What is distracting you so much that you can’t concentrate on your work? There are probably a lot of things you are doing right now that you don’t even know are negatively affecting your affiliate marketing business. Chasing butterflies here means that you have lost focus of the goal of affiliate marketing: to get traffic, to get conversions, and to make a profit. But you just might be sabotaging your affiliate marketing business by doing some things that may seem harmless
There are probably a lot of things you are doing right now that you don’t even know are negatively affecting your affiliate marketing business. Chasing butterflies here means that you have lost focus of the goal of affiliate marketing: to get traffic, to get conversions, and to make a profit. You just might be sabotaging your affiliate marketing business by doing some things that may seem harmless now but will be major issues for your bottom line later down the line. Here is a list of things that you may be doing that could just the biggest (and last) mistake you make in affiliate marketing.
Procrastination
This is an ill that affects half of the world’s working population, not just affiliate marketers. You sit down at your desk, or you stand at your desk, crack your knuckles, all ready to do some content creation. All of a sudden, you feel this great urge to download an ebook you saw online just the other day. Then you decide to take a sneak peak at it. Before you know it, you are an hour into the book, and your work hasn’t been done.
Or you just started to work on an article, then realise that you need to get some royalty-free pictures for the article you are writing. From Pixabay, you move to Facebook, then to your email, and when you get back to your work, you have lost interest, you have lost the drive to work. No harm done, you think to yourself, you can always do it later. This ‘do-it-later’ attitude is a big mistake for your affiliate marketing business. Try to avoid and set aside every possible distraction, and work when you have scheduled yourself to work.
Over-Selling
Another thing that can’t be stressed enough: pre-sell the customer, don’t over-sell. Be honest and fair in your product reviews, and say just enough to get the visitor interested and curious so that they can click that link through to the advertiser’s page.
Over-selling products to customers, throwing the product in their face and telling them they have to buy it, will have the exact effect: they won’t buy it.
Focus on the goal: make conversions, not driving customers to the competition.
Not Doing Keyword Research
Keyword research is important. Keyword research can’t be overstated. Doing your keyword research lets you know how big the competition is. The smaller the number of searches for a particular keyword, the better your chances in those niches.
Just because you are already and affiliate marketing doesn’t mean you can’t fail if you don’t focus on your business. Make sure you do your keyword research and that your SEO is up to standard.
Not Being In Your Niche Market
Just because you are dreaming of the riches you will get from affiliate marketing, you somehow picked the wrong niche market, set up your affiliate site, selected your products, and started promoting them. You promote those products for all you are worth, and yet the traffic is low, the conversions are not enough, the revenue isn’t pouring in.
This is another mistake you might be making: being in the wrong niche. It may be what you are passionate about, but it may not be for you yet. Instead of promoting coffee-for-weight-loss products, why not go more basic, and promote decaffeinated coffee. In time, with more experience, you will be able to conquer the coffee niche market.
Covering Your Site In Ads
Yes, you are promoting products. It doesn’t mean that ads are all your visitors want, or need, to see. Make your site look cleaner and simpler, with some fun content and a few ads, like one on each side of the page and one at the bottom. That looks so much better and is more likely to bring in traffic than bombarding them with ads.
Not Providing Enough Content
Writing a few miserly lines of content is not going to convert any customers for you. If you have been doing this, it is time to stop.
You need to spend time and resources curating great content for your visitors, no matter the form your content may take. Is it a product review? Try out that product so that you can have enough honest info to give to your readers. Is it a tutorial on how to use Cantu products? Try those products too. Ask others how they used them and how well they worked for them. Is it a blog post on your favourite writing tips?
You know what you need to do to create that piece of content. Give your readers something informative and fun to read, not three lines of whatever and a link to your product page.
Not Monitoring Your Performance
This is why tracking metrics are important: you need them to track your campaign performances. Why would you be an affiliate marketer and check to see how well you are doing? If not your performance, you should at least check out how well the competition is doing. You need to measure how well your marketing strategies are working for you, how many clicks and impressions you are getting, how many sales and leads you are generating per week, and see where you can improve. Your business isn’t going to run itself: you are.
Using Too Many Marketing Strategies At Once
This is the equivalent of a system overload. Calm down, take it slow, and reduce the number of marketing strategies you are using. Focus on one, get the data you need from it, and use another marketing strategy. If you can use two at a time, fine, that’s small enough. The aim is to see what works and what doesn’t, not lose track of what is really going on and just give up.
