Every day several new people are lured into affiliate marketing with a simple HOPE of making a full-time online income just like the pro’s. Indeed, affiliate marketing is one the best way of making money online and sky is the limit. But when it comes to real-world scenario, maximum of these new affiliates fail in affiliate marketing. That’s when the most commonly asked question arises: Why I failed at affiliate marketing instead of how to start affiliate marketing? Below are some affiliate marketing tips and problems discussed thoroughly.
Here is the Truth: The so-called GURU’S won’t tell you. Affiliate marketing is a not a fast money making system. It’s a slow process and isn’t for everyone. It requires hard work, dedication and patience. Success doesn’t come overnight and I am not here to hype you that “I am going to tell you how to become rich overnight” and neither I am a so-called guru. As the affiliate marketing industry expands every day, the competition gets more tightened. Those who can’t bear the heat of competition fails terribly. Getting started without knowing completely about how to do affiliate marketing is really a bad move.
[clickToTweet tweet=”The truth the so-called GURU’S won’t tell you via @affiliateninjac #AffiliateMarketing #Marketing” quote=”The truth the so-called GURU’S won’t tell you” theme=”style3″]The Reasons Why Maximum New Affiliates Fail At The First Place – Affiliate Marketing Tips
- Lack Of Preparation: – That’s the biggest reason why one fails at affiliate marketing combined with an improper plan of action. Part of preparation is researching and plan of action is execution. That is the first step on how to start affiliate marketing. When none of them is properly done, it simply leads to failure. People generally have the tendency to follow someone who is getting success or jumping into something just because they are lured. Those kinds of action without doing proper research, without acquiring enough information and knowledge, without creating a structured plan of action to execute ideas eventually ends up in a big failure. Believe it or not, most new affiliate marketers will find it hard to believe but can’t run away from the truth.
- Lack Of Interest: – All of us have probably heard the phrase “Do what you love & love what you do”.
DO what YOU love | LOVE what YOU do
It’s appropriate when it comes to one’s interest. Interests are natural and if it’s not natural, then it’s not interesting. My point here is, if you are interested in something, passion for doing it will come automatically and when someone is passionate and dedicated, success is bound to come. I’m an affiliate marketer because I’m very passionate about what I do and I love doing it. Technically, I’m a software engineer but never pursued the dream of almost all software engineers which is to get a job in top MNC. I always wanted to do something different and here I am doing full-time affiliate marketing because I love promoting products and services, I love creating sites and blogs, I love writing, I love teaching and sharing my knowledge. I will continue to do so and will still be an affiliate marketer because that’s what interests me.
- Lack Of Strategy:- Like I’ve said earlier affiliate marketing isn’t for everybody. I will stick to what I’ve said as marketing is an art. It’s the art of marketing a product to targeted users and motivating them to buy or signup or install whatever may be the goal. Every successful marketer has their own strategies and blueprint for marketing and they follow it. One must be creative enough to employ unique and effective ways to reach out to potential buyers or targeted user with the main objective of paying less and gaining more in terms of quality and quantity. Most of the new affiliate marketers failed to have a proper strategy and blueprint for marketing their products and so they fail. Gather as much knowledge as you can, learn about all affiliate marketing tips, news, guides, case-studies and try to implement them in a proper way.
- Low Budget:- Unlike SEO, you can’t rely on Google and other search engines for organic traffic to excel in affiliate marketing. Because no offer is permanent in affiliate marketing world and you can’t simply create a new site for each product and do SEO and wait to get organic traffic and conversions. For quick traffic, affiliate marketers need to opt for paid advertisement. A good budget is very essential in affiliate marketing as marketers need to get a good VPS hosting, best tracker, a VPN and funds to invest in the paid advertisement (which is mandatory for everybody). What should be the minimum budget? Well, that question has no pre-defined answer. It solely depends on the affiliate marketer’s investment capacity. But an honest answer would be – “The more you can invest, the better is your prospect to earn“. There is no easy money in affiliate marketing and in order to make money you have to spend money.
- Settling For Cheap: – This is the most common mistake made by almost every new affiliate marketers.
HE DID IT ….AGAIN
Trying to settle for shared hosting and not using a tracker or using a nulled script will lead them to their failure. Good hosting and a very good tracker is very important, to gather data, analyze them and to optimize campaigns. Affiliate marketers go for shared hosting and then they start crying about low CTR and CR. What happens when you send huge volume of traffic to your campaigns hosted on shared hosting and it crashes when you’re asleep. It’s a thing to think about. Read my recent post on Website Hosting Reviews and its importance.
- Improper Campaign Set Up: – Well, it’s another common mistake made by so many marketers. First mistake is not to check the offer url, its design, its appeal, its urgency. That’s one of the most important criteria every affiliate marketer should look out when choosing an offer. Campaign performance greatly depends on the offer you are promoting and its landing page. Just like affiliate marketers landing page design is important, so is advertisers offer page design. Sometimes, some marketers choose an offer blindly for a different country other than the one they are residing as a result they are unable to view the offer page. To view all the offer page of any country you need a VPN and I would suggest Zenmate VPN as I use it personally and it’s quite cheap. The next mistake is not to use subid variables and postback url to track all the valuable information about campaign performance data which the marketer is buying at the initial stage of the campaign. Without data, you and your campaigns are doomed. So my suggestion would be to get Zenmate VPN and becoming serious while setting up your campaign.
- Not Gathering Enough Data: – Data is everything and without data a campaign can never be optimized. New affiliates always have a tendency to stop/pause even before gathering enough data to evaluate and optimize campaigns. I always suggest my students and readers to spend at least 1.5x or 2x the payout amount for each variable on which campaign optimization is dependent. If you are among those affiliates who don’t gather enough data then go through my guide on complete campaign optimization posted inside
AffiliateFix DOJO. - Coming To Early Conclusions: – I have seen it so many times and people who always ask me questions make the same mistake. Always remember, a CPA campaign doesn’t perform the same for a certain period of clicks, doesn’t perform the same every hour or doesn’t perform the same every day. The conversion rate will go up and down, so in affiliate marketing world it’s determined by average data. For example: After starting a new campaign, data might show -30% ROI after few hours but at the end of the day the campaign might end up at +20% ROI. So coming to early conclusions about any offer or campaigns is the most foolish act. Collect data and let the campaign run for a couple of days, and try to optimize along the way when you have enough data to evaluate and cut out low performing variables.
- Switching Verticals/ Traffic Source: – I have seen it so many times and I personally did it at the beginning of my affiliate marketing journey. The best suggestion is to stick with one vertical (mobile/web or pay per call) and select few traffic sources for your vertical. Stick to them until you’ve mastered them. Always remember that affiliate marketing is a learning curve and you learn from your own mistakes and also from others mistake.
- Failing To Diversify: – Every vertical has several niches like business, dating, auto, sweepstakes etc. Maximum of the new affiliates don’t diversify their campaigns on new niches after having a couple of successful campaigns and as a result, they end up being in their old position when the offers gets expired or saturated. Affiliate marketing is ever expanding world with ever increasing competition. Affiliate marketing world don’t have any place for lazy people. So, if you can’t keep up your pace leave affiliate marketing and do something where you feel comfortable.
- Not Doing Split Testing: – One of the common reason behind affiliate marketer’s failure is that they don’t do split testing and A/B testing. Split testing is so important and a small change can increase the efficiency and profitability of a campaign to a huge level. Split testing between offers on same niche, same offers from different networks is so important and would yield different results for different offer/networks. Along with that A/B testing which is testing different variations of ads/banners and landing pages is so important. But most of the time affiliates forget to do it. A small change can do a miracle. Read more about a case study on A/B testing with country flag.
- Giving Up Too Quickly:- Maximum of the new affiliates who had high expectations from affiliate marketing give up just before getting success. The main reason behind it is that new affiliates are being lured and motivated by someone’s success and when they don’t get it quickly they come to a conclusion that it’s not for them. “Patience and hard work is the key to success“ and those affiliates fail who don’t have patience and passion to reach their goal.
- Not Taking Action:- This is the most common problem for every new affiliate. They keep on reading and gets overloaded with information but forget to take action. They don’t realize, gathering information isn’t what they need. The most important thing to do is this: execute while you are learning. Learn one thing and try it out and test it. That’s the way you should do it not like “OK I have done enough reading, I will do it tomorrow”. Affiliates who keep it for later always forget what they have learned the previous day.
TAKE ACTION
Affiliate Marketing Tips And Checklist For New Readers Of My Blog: – Here is a small check list of content for all new affiliate marketer.
Thanks for bearing with me and taking your time to read such a lengthy post. I guess I’m able to share all the affiliate marketing tips I have gathered so far in my affiliate marketing journey. If you have enjoyed my article then do leave a comment. 🙂
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4 Comments
Wayne
That’s sounds really honest, I like to learn more stuff from you especially with CPA offers but over all the whole idea of Affiliate Marketing
Souvik Mallick
Thanks for dropping your comment. It’s highly appreciated. You can learn more by going through my case-studies and my journal. You can go through other’s case-studies and journal too. Learn from other’s mistake as it won’t cost you a penny. Try not to repeat the same mistake & don’t be afraid to lose money. Good luck 🙂
Dave Dally
People fail in affiliate programmes because they don’t have enough experience and they don’t want to get some advice when they need it. When you start such a programme you should have a very good picture of your every step and know what to do in every situation.
salman
Nice informative articles.. thanks