Top 11 Affiliate Marketing Beginner Mistakes To AVOID

Hey everyone. Welcome back to another affiliate marketing blog post. This post is going to be all about affiliate marketing, geared specifically to beginners. Now, I’ve been doing affiliate marketing for over five years now, and I see beginners making a lot of common mistakes.

So, in this blog post, I’m quickly going to share with you the top 11 affiliate marketing mistakes that I see beginners making, and these are not going to be the common mistakes that you find in all of the typical blog posts, these are going to be things that I have personally learned from trial and error, that I’m seeing other people doing.

So, with all that being said, these are not in any particular order. They’re all equally important. I left all of the fluff out of this. However, the last one on this list is the cardinal sin for affiliate marketing, so hopefully you stick around to the end and see the one thing that you definitely should not be doing in affiliate marketing.

With all that being said, let’s get straight into today’s content. The first mistake that I see so many beginners making is they get too fluffy with their content. Now, what I mean by that is when they’re creating content, whether that’s a blog post, or that’s a video, they are leaving in the BS and the filler content that nobody really wants to hear or to read.

So, with that being said, what I’ve learned over the years is get straight to the valuable stuff. Only put in the unique things that the reader or the viewer really wants to know, and that will make sure that you are keeping people’s attention, because you’re constantly giving them good information.

The second mistake that beginner affiliate marketers make is they think that the more products that they promote, the more money they’re going to make. This is actually a huge myth, and it’s a misconception that I think people get from listening to the wrong people on YouTube, people who haven’t done affiliate marketing and they’re not really trying to help you.

What this looks like in real life is I’m watching people go to these big affiliate networks, going to Clickbank, for instance, and they’re joining all of the programs that are within their same niche.

Then, from there, they’re creating content that’s about all of these different products. That is not going to lead you to more sales and more commissions in affiliate marketing. All that’s going to do is give the people that are watching or reading your content too many choices.

It’s essentially called paralysis by analysis. They’re analyzing all of the different options you gave you, and they don’t end up choosing any of them. So, what you wanna do is go through all of those different affiliate opportunities and find out which is the absolute best product, and then get laser focused on your content from there, and create content focused just on that company.

The third mistake that new affiliate marketers are making is they’re not providing enough value in their content. When it comes to affiliate marketing, what we need to do is get people to click on our affiliate link.

However, if we’re not giving anyone an incentive to click on our affiliate link, why would they not just go type in the website address and go make their purchase that way? Well, that’s where providing the value comes in.

If you create your piece of content, whether that’s written, or a video, and you provide so much value that’s actually helpful for that person reading it or watching it, they will have more incentive to spend the extra second to find your affiliate link and click it, because it’s essentially the law of reciprocity.

You gave them a lot upfront, totally for free, now they’re just gonna go out of their way to give you a thank you, without costing them anything extra. So, keep that in mind, to provide as much value as possible in whatever kind of content you’re making.

Moving on to the fourth mistake. This is one that almost all new affiliate marketers make, and that is they’re promoting low-commission products. Now, I really wanna be clear on this one, because it’s a big point for affiliate marketing that a lot of people get confused.

When you are starting out with affiliate marketing, joining a program like Amazon’s affiliate program is a great place to start. It’s going to give you a low commission rate, however, you have all of the products on Amazon to promote, and Amazon is a very reputable company.

However, as you get further along in affiliate marketing, you can find individual companies that sell certain products within your niche, and you’ll make much higher commissions from them than you would by promoting those same products on Amazon.

So, my point here is not to seek out the highest-commission products, because they’re not always the best, but rather, to find out what products are working best in your niche, and then join those programs directly with the company, ’cause you’ll get a higher commission than if you’re promoting them on Amazon.

As a quick side note, if you are enjoying this video, please just give it a thumbs up. That’s all I ask, and I would really appreciate it. Okay, the fifth very common mistake that affiliate marketing beginners make is they’re ignoring SEO basics.

Now, SEO is the short way of saying, “search engine optimization,” and it’s basically, Google is a search engine, and you wanna optimize your content to show up the highest, or closest to the first result on Google.

Now, as beginners are just getting into affiliate marketing, I see them often forgetting that they need to put in the keyword, or what they want to show up for in Google, in the title of whatever that content is, whether that’s a written blog post, or if that’s a video.

If you leave out the keyword and you don’t tell Google what you wanna show up for, then they don’t know what to rank you for in the results. So, just make sure that you’re putting in the keywords, or what you wanna show up for, in the title of your affiliate content.

Okay, the sixth mistake is one that is a little bit more advanced, but it’s a huge mistake that, if you understand from the get-go, you will just simply make more money in affiliate marketing. What this one is, is that a lot of beginners in affiliate marketing are promoting the wrong kind of products.

What a lot of new affiliate marketers don’t realize is that you don’t have to promote just products. There are several other different categories, like digital products, and things of that nature, that you can be promoting.

By looking at all of these categories, that’s often where people find the absolute best niche that they are built to go into. This is literally such an important concept to understand when you’re going into affiliate marketing, so I dedicated an entire chapter to just the different categories of affiliate marketing products in the full course.

So, if you’re a student in the course, be sure to watch that chapter before you get started in picking your niche in affiliate marketing. Okay, the seventh mistake, that honestly could be the cardinal sin for affiliate marketing, but it’s not.

It’s just so common, is being too salesy. When it comes to affiliate marketing, you’re basically a commission-based salesman, but I think a lot of people go into affiliate marketing with that mindset, and honestly, from years of doing affiliate marketing, I can tell you that’s the wrong mindset.

If you are too salesy and too pushy in your content, trying to promote or really just push a product down someone’s throat, they’re not going to want to buy it. No one wants to be told what to buy. However, if you can spend the time to go out and truly find the best product, which is the best solution for a problem, and then you create your affiliate content with the full mindset of educating someone on why that product is the best solution for that product, backed by all of the research that you’ve already done, that is the mindset that I would use for affiliate marketing, educating, rather than selling.

If you can set your mindset that way from the beginning, you will have so much more success with affiliate marketing. Okay, this is another really important mistake that I really recommend understanding before getting into affiliate marketing, and that is that new affiliate marketers are creating content that’s in the wrong part of the buyer cycle.

Now, again, I have an entire chapter on this in the course, but basically, there are different times in the buyer cycle, from when someone thinks about making a purchase to when they actually make a purchase, and a lot of beginners in affiliate marketing are creating content that they think is good because other people are creating it, but it’s way outside of the buyer cycle, so nobody actually converts on that and makes a purchase through the affiliate link.

If you can understand the different times and the different parts of the buyer cycle, and you create content that fits those time slots, you are going to be reaching people at the perfect time. They will mentally be ready to make a purchase, and then your content educated them on why that is the best solution, and then they just go ahead and make the purchase.

Without getting into too much detail on that one, let’s move into the ninth common mistake, and this one’s actually the golden rule for affiliate marketing. What this one is, is promoting low-quality products.

If I had to pick one on this list that I could just snap my fingers and it would totally disappear from all of the content from all of the affiliate marketers on the internet, this is the one that I would choose.

What new people are doing when they’re coming into affiliate marketing is they’re looking for the high-commission products and not researching that product at all. What’s happening is that creates all of this content out there that’s leading people into truly the wrong products.

These are low-quality products that have terrible customer service, and they’re basically fly-by-night offers just offering high commissions. So, the golden rule for affiliate marketing to be successful is to find the absolute best products and then promote theirs.

And, don’t get confused and think that the best products have low commissions. You can find really, really good products that also have really, really good commissions, you just have to do a little bit of upfront research.

Number 10 on this list is becoming extremely important in just the last couple of years, and what this is is only creating written content. Now, what I mean by that is creating a niche affiliate marketing website and writing blog posts.

This is something that I’ve been doing for years already, and I have noticed that as chat GPT, or artificial intelligence, has come to the forefront, this has become more competitive. If you haven’t heard of chat GPT, it’s basically an artificial intelligence-powered free tool that anyone can use online, and you type in the blog article that you want it to write, and it’ll write you a very similar blog article from scratch that would’ve taken you several hours to type by hand.

People are creating affiliate marketing websites and they’re posting blog articles written by chat GPT. So, if you’re getting into affiliate marketing, I seriously cannot recommend enough to create videos, instead of written blog articles.

I will say that they both still work. However, if you can get yourself to create videos, you can make so much more money. Just to give you some real numbers on this, in the last three years of creating affiliate marketing YouTube videos, I’ve made over a million dollars in profit, and honestly, I was just doing this part-time.

I was still working on my other online business models and taking time off, and still generated that much money with the videos. Okay, and that brings us into the last mistake, which is the cardinal sin of affiliate marketing, and that is forgetting a CTA.

What I see so many new people in affiliate marketing doing is they’re forgetting to include a call to action. What a call to action is is a friendly reminder to use your affiliate link. There’s a saying out there that sums this up perfectly.

The saying goes, “You miss every shot that you don’t take.” So, by you reminding people where your affiliate link is in your content, and reminding them to use it, you will see that a lot more people click on your affiliate link and make purchases that way, instead of just going to Google and navigating to the website on their own.

Now, speaking of that, I don’t have any affiliate products to refer you to, but the call to action that I’ll put in this blog post is if you wanna learn more about affiliate marketing, specifically with videos, I’m going to put a link to my full affiliate marketing masterclass here.

This goes through everything you need to know for affiliate marketing with videos. It’s the good business model. It’s the one that I did part-time and made over a million dollars profit with, and I laid literally everything out in this course.

So, if you wanna learn this business model, it’s the absolute best resource I can offer you. All right, guys, that’s it for this video. As always, if you have any questions at all, just let me know down in the comments, and I’ll see you all in the next blog post.