Affiliate Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

It takes time, hard work, and plenty of experience to be successful at affiliate marketing but if you take the time to learn from others’ mistakes, you can make fewer mistakes of your own as an affiliate marketer. Avoid the following mistakes from the start.

Using Popups

Popups are annoying advertisements that are best left out of your affiliate marketing business. Most people use popup blockers these days because they are so annoying but even if your popup ad gets past that, chances are the visitor will quickly leave your site anyway so you might want to concentrate your marketing efforts in ways that do not annoy people. Remember, you want to solve problems for your site visitors. Solving problems will turn visitors into customers while popups will most likely chase them away for good.

Not doing Market Research

Every successful marketer performs marketing research and you will need to do this time and time again for your affiliate marketing business. Market research tells the affiliate marketer what is selling, what is not selling, and who is buying, among many other important factors. Although you don’t need to spend money to get started in affiliate marketing, it does take quite an investment of time to be successful and time, after all, is money so don’t set yourself up for failure by not doing your research.

Don’t Spam the Forums

If you’re going to use online forum communities to market your products and this can be a great way to advertise your affiliate marketing business, make sure you become a valuable member of the community; don’t just breeze into the forum and post messages that scream, “Buy from me!” Doing so will only succeed in turning off members of the forum and you will lose all credibility from the very beginning. Instead, participate in relevant discussions and post a link to your website or product site in your signature line. Once you become a valuable member of the community, others will click on your links because they’ll wonder what you’re up to.

Not Keeping Accurate Records

Successful affiliate marketers keep accurate records. Not only do you need to keep accurate business records, but you’ll need to keep track of how well your products are selling and through which avenue they are selling. For example, where is the traffic coming from that is resulting in sales? Is it coming from the links in your signature in forum posting? Are customers finding your site through the search engines? Through article marketing? By knowing which method of marketing is drawing your customers, you will be able to concentrate on that method and spend less time on advertising methods that aren’t bringing you customers.

You will, inevitably, make some mistakes as you embark on your affiliate marketing career. That is to be expected. The important thing is to learn from your mistakes and not repeat them. In addition, by doing your homework you can learn from the mistakes of others so you don’t have to make the same mistakes.