Top 13 Affiliate Marketing Mistakes Done by Newbies that Stopping them from Earning Regular Consistent Income

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You have been in the affiliate marketing industry for over a year. But unfortunately haven’t started your earnings yet.
Or You have been earning some money here and there but not consistent enough to make a living from it.
Or You have just started your Journey and want to move in the right direction without making many mistakes.

Be it any case.

You entered this space after seeing 100s of success stories of people making consistent money without owning their product. They are living the life they desire.

This triggered you and you wanted to do the same. That’s why you step forward in this journey.

After not getting results, Your initial thought is “Why is affiliate marketing difficult for me but it seems easy for other people?”

The truth is you have seen 100s of people making money & getting the results they desire.

But there are 1000s of people who make little to no money using similar models.

Their dreams are getting crushed down daily. The sparkle with which they started this journey is getting lost.

So does this mean this is not a correct or proven method to make money and is only for lucky ones?

Absolutely NOT.

You have yourself seen the results. And these are genuine results. If they can do it so can you.

But there is a high possibility that you might be making some or the other mistakes, that are stopping you from getting the result you desire.

And that’s what this article is about.

We are going to discuss the Top 13 Affiliate Marketing Mistakes that many newbies make and later on the struggle to even survive. These are reasons why 95% of Affiliates make little to no money.

And if you want to join the rest 5% of the people, you need to avoid them.

So let’s know in detail what are mistakes and how you can avoid them.

Top Affiliate Marketing Mistakes Done by Newbies that You Must Avoid

#1 – Not Building your Own Email List

This is the most often and probably the costliest affiliate marketing mistake done by any newbie (I am also guilty of it).

Email is the biggest asset that you can build for any business. Affiliate Marketing is no different.

• Ads costs are continuously rising.
• Organic growth is getting low.
• Your accounts can anytime be banned
• One time you are making a lot of money and the other time just not getting up. Lack of Consistent Income.

All these are something that an affiliate continuously deals with.

And there is only one solution to it, Build your own email list.

There is no business without an email list/contact details (large or small). Even if you have a smaller list, how engaged you are with your list determines how much money you will make consistently.

Money is in the relationship with your list.

Learn: How to build a Lead Generation Funnel and Grow your email list

#2 – Not Testing Affiliate Offers before running Paid Ads

One of the affiliate marketing mistakes many do.

People have come to this industry to make money. Plus many blogs, videos, and people market it as a source of passive income (which is true if done right but at a later stage).

But newbies lack the patience which is required. Hence they quickly start promoting the product through paid ads without testing it with organic methods.

What it does is if someone has not run ads before, they end up wasting too much money at the start. As a result, the career gets over before it even starts.

You mustn’t repeat this mistake. First, try and sell the products through organic methods. Get the initial few sales. And when it works, proceed with paid ads or methods.

This way you will exactly know what offer is working, what title is working, what marketing messaging is working, etc.

Giving you better results and more money in the longer term.

#3 – Not Knowing the Product Inside Out

As an affiliate, your responsibility is to recommend products that actually help people. It should help people achieve their desired outcomes.

Hence, your product selection should be specific and what you think suits best your audience.

It’s not about making maximum money just by recommending crap.

You must completely know the product, such that any question people are asking about it, you must have the answer to it.

It is not your product. But treat it as if it is and become aware of it completely before recommending it.

You mustn’t repeat this mistake of knowing only surface-level stuff and recommending it.

#4 – Getting into the Trap of Making Quick Bucks

At the start, many newbies does this mistake.

They get into the trap of promoting anything & everything to make quick money.

• They start Promoting Products that don’t make sense to the core audience
• They take Income First Approach than the Serving First Approach
• They Sign Up for Too Many Affiliate Programs thinking of making money by promoting anything.

Your focus should be to build a Long-Term Relationship with People and promote Products you Believe In and it adds to Your Philosophy and Value System.

Learn: Top 10 Affiliate Networks to find a product on and start promoting

#5 – Promoting Network Marketing Opportunities (MLM) in the Name of Affiliate Marketing

I am an engineer. So when I informed my friends that I am into affiliate marketing and earn a commission when someone buys through my link.

They started telling me that I should leave it as all this was a scam. No one will buy anything.

Why has this notion arrived?

It’s here because they have seen in the market people giving many false promises. Many of these opportunities don’t work and all are crap.

This doesn’t mean all MLM Opportunities are bad. But the perception of people regarding it is certainly on the wrong side.

So what these companies have started doing is they lure people in by letting them know that this is an affiliate marketing learning opportunity (for people in making money online niche).

But when you enroll for the program you will only learn how to promote their own product and nothing else. And you will also be taught to do the same and let people know about this opportunity as affiliate marketing and not MLM.

But don’t fall into that trap. Even if you will get that initial result, you lose people’s trust. And affiliate marketing is all about TRUST and helping people.

Be completely honest. Clearly let people know that this is a Network Marketing Opportunity and not Affiliate Marketing.

You can know more about this difference by reading this article that goes in-depth about the difference.

Don’t make the mistake of recommending MLM Opportunity as an Affiliate Marketing Learning Opportunity.

#6- Directly Promoting Affiliate links through Ads & Social Media Posts

Paid Ads and Social Media are one of the ways where you can drive visitors to your affiliate products. They are traffic generation sources.

But a mistake that many newbies does is they directly promote their links in their posts or ads campaigns. They directly drive traffic to the affiliate page.

But Facebook, Instagram, and ad platforms will ban you if you do this. As a result, you will lose all the audience that you created.

Plus you will also not be able to get sales.

Hence, the correct way is to drive this traffic to a landing page, a video, or a blog and promote affiliate links through them not directly.

This way you will build more trust and won’t get banned.

#7- Not being Honest about the product or Offer

The audience can see through your messages. They will clearly know if you are recommending products only for a commission or genuinely care for them.

Be Completely Honest about the product. You must clearly let your audience know both the benefits as well as limitations.

Also, Set the Right Expectations for the Product you are promoting. Don’t over-promise people.

You can promote multiple products for the same requirements. But be completely clear, about why you are recommending two things.

For example, I recommend Hostinger & GreenGeeks both for hosting your website. But Hostinger is for newbies because it is cost-effective and you don’t require large storage.

But when you become an expert, you need more storage as you will have more blogs and pages on your website. Hence you can’t let the website get slowed down. Thus you need a better provider which I think GreeGeeks is.

This way you must clearly let people know in what condition they should buy which product.

#8 – Not giving a clear disclaimer upfront

As an affiliate marketer, there are two disclaimers that you need to declare whenever you promote any product.

These are:

• Affiliate Disclaimer: You have to mention that you are an affiliate of the product you are promoting and that you will receive a small commission if they buy it using your link. This must be done every time you promote your affiliate link.
• Result Disclaimer: You can’t claim that any product or product can 100% guarantee help people to make money. Whenever you are mentioning any result achieved by people, you have to mention that These results are not typical and have been achieved by people after doing lots of things right. And this doesn’t guarantee that they will also receive the same result.

These are important not only from a moral point of view but also from government policies. It needs to by the government rules and does your business.

People think that if they put forward these disclaimers, it will repel people from buying the product. But that’s not True.

You will be able to get more conversions because of the act of reciprocation. Since you are helping people by providing them the value they would want to return the favor. By recommending products you believe in, you are helping people.

Proceed with the mindset of Selling is Serving, and everything will be good to go.

#9 – Not creating their own Brand but only selling products

As an affiliate marketer, one doesn’t need to build their own brand.

You can directly create sales pages and sell your products by running paid ads to them. And that works if you are ready to continuously pay for traffic.

But when you put effort and start building your brand and get in front of people, you will be able to get maximum results in long term. People will recognize you, giving you more ways to earn money.

Your focus should not only be to sell products but also on Solving Problems and helping people achieve the desired outcome. So that later on if you decide to launch your product you can easily do it because you already have a brand built for you.

Learn: Top Skills to Master to Become a Successful Affiliate Marketer

#10 – Not Treating it as a Genuine Business Model

As an Affiliate Marketer, one treats this as a hobby or something that be done as a side hustle and hobby. But this is a genuine Business Model and you need to treat this as one.

Even if you are starting it as a side hustle, you must give ample amount of time to it.

If you want to get the results that you desire and earn regular income from it, you have to invest your Time & Money in it.

It’s about building the skill set and continuously executing your plans.

But many treat it as a hobby. Something that can be done in free time.

You have to continuously build assets & upskill yourself.

This is only the way to get regular income and later achieve the status of getting it passively.

#11 – Choosing Profit over Interest while selecting your Niche

This is one of the most common affiliate marketing mistakes done by newbies.

They have seen others making money in the Marketing niche or Health Niche and proceed based on that.

They favor money over liking or interest in the topic. And later struggle to make money.

You don’t need to be an expert in the topic or know everything. You just need to be interested in that topic and be curious enough to learn more about it.

This way even if you don’t get results initially, you won’t quit easily. Your role is to Find a sweet spot between Interest and Profitability.

Learn: How to find your own profitable niche

#12 – Not Tracking & Managing Affiliate Link

You need to continuously measure your efforts.

What marketing campaigns, strategies, platforms, etc are working for you?

Which channel is bringing in maximum results? Be it blog posts, paid ads, youtube videos, or social media posts, everything needs to be measured.

This way you will exactly know what is working for you and you can put maximum effort into things that are working for you and eliminate others.

You need to also manage your affiliate link properly.

The affiliate link that you will get will be very long and you can’t remember it. But suddenly if someone asks you to let them know about a product. Since you don’t have your PC in front of you, you miss the commission.

Thus you have to shorten the link and you can even brand your link. For this purpose, you can use Pretty Links.

It is a WordPress plugin that not only helps you to shorten your link but also adds it to your domain.

Example: You can customize an affiliate link and make it something like domain.com/link. It will get redirected to the original link and you will get the commission. And even if later on the affiliate link changes, you just have to change the link from the backend and not look for every page that you have added that link and change it separately.

Learn Marketing & Sales Metrics you must track to grow and scale your business online

#13 – Copying Others

This is one of the costliest mistakes you could do.

Most newbies copy others or big influencers. They copy their content, promotional strategy, funnels, videos, courses, and everything.

You could get some results in the beginning but it will harm you in the long run as it will largely harm your brand.

You can model the content pieces & strategies. But not directly copy it.

You need to add your own elements to it like your story, your experience, your examples, your beliefs, etc. You need to showcase yourself in them.

This way you will genuinely build a connection & trust with your audience. And once you are successful in doing this, you can recommend whatever you want, giving you better results.

Learn: How to do proper Competitor Research

Bonus

#14 – Promoting only One-Time Commission Products

This is technically not an affiliate marketing mistake. But something that can harm you and not let you scale much.

As an affiliate marketer, your goal is to build your asset and start generating passive income from it so that you can have Freedom.

But if you continuously promote one-time commission products or amazon associate products or seasonal products, you need to continuously put forward the effort, and if the effort stops your commission will also stop.

Thus better option is to find products that give you recurring commissions each month or some products that have an internal membership funnel built inside them i.e multiple products placed in a systematic manner.

Conclusion

Now you are completely aware of these Top 14 Mistakes that stop people from earning money with Affiliate Marketing. You might have also been doing some.

Now you know what shouldn’t you be doing.

Does this mean you will not be making mistakes along the road? Absolutely not.

You will and you should.

Mistakes are what teach us and prepare us for the upcoming Future.

You can’t avoid them. But you can do less of them at the start and achieve results faster.

By Learning from someone who has actually been where you are and is now living a Lifestyle of Freedom.

Jonathan Montoya – Creator of Passive Income Lifestyle, where he helps people to quit their 9-5 Job and live their lifestyle of Freedom.

Click the link below (affiliate link) and know about his 72-Hour Freedom Challenge. A Starter Guide & Genuine Program for newbie affiliate marketers that empowers them to start their own affiliate business in only 72 Hours.

Or Read my Complete Review of the Challenge & make an informed decision