The Dos and Donts of Affiliate Marketing You Need to Know

affiliate marketing

Affiliate Marketing has yielded the unbelievable by letting you earn money while your sleep.

In this article, I will show the list of the do’s and don’ts of affiliate marketing to help you cut back on common obstacles and begin a successful journey.

This multi-million dollar business is the best way to start a business from the ground up and with minimal investment to help you achieve your goals.

With this, you forward customers to the product’s landing page, gain commission with every purchase, grow your own money tree, and retire in your 30s.

Sounds simple?

It’s not.

So, let’s get started!

Don’t: Sell the Product You Don’t Know/Trust

When it comes to affiliate marketing, research is key.

So before you dive into promoting a product on your page/email campaign, make sure the brand is trusted and you aren’t getting bombarded with customer complaints. And let’s not forget the number of visitors you will lose just from a single bad review.

If you are writing product reviews as an affiliate marketer, you are the trusted source between the brand and the customers to help people make the right decisions—not biased.

Do: Promote a product that you know

The great thing about being an affiliate marketer is you have the freedom to choose which product to advertise. This not only helps you stay honest with your audience and easily write about the topic you are interested in.

Therefore, I highly recommend trying the product and honestly spreading the message to build trust among your audience. 

Don’t: Have a Vague Call to Action

So you have managed to hook your audience with your website copy, but by the end of the webpage, unless you have a solid call of action (CTA), your viewers are simply going to enjoy the page, and move on to your competitor’s website.

Yes, that’s the reality; I’m sure you must have done that too.

Thus, it is crucial to have a precise, personalized, and powerful CTA to lay a clear route for your leads to become potential customers.

You can do this by:

  • Using bold and attention-grabbing CTA buttons.
  • Good CTA subject lines like ‘Request a FREE demo,’ ‘Yes! Give me all the recent updates’ or Try one month FREE now’ to speak your viewer’s minds.
  • Make responsive buttons/button placement.
  • Adding verbs
  • Creating urgency

Do: Disclose the Arrangement

Most affiliate programs like Amazon require you to have a disclosure on your website. This could be in the form of a statement at the top of a blog post like this one:

However, what’s more important is to stay honest with your opinions. For example, if you are an Amazon affiliate and a product is overrated, or you’ve had a bad experience with it, mention that.

Write as you talk to your friend. You wouldn’t want her to make a bad purchase, especially when you know that she trusts you with your opinions, right?

What did you like about the product? What could have been improved? Is there any research done on that product? What are others saying? 

If your audience notices that you rave about every product you mention, people will eventually stop trusting you. This way, although you will be able to make a few good purchases initially, you won’t have success for much longer.

In the end, your job as an affiliate marketer is to leverage your popularity in the right way and ensure you are the first person people count on before making any purchases.

Because let’s face it, when it comes to your writing efforts, everything boils down to what your audience wants, not your affiliate partners.

Don’t: Go Overboard with Affiliate links and Pop-Ups

Your goal with ads and pop-ups is to get purchases. Either from the affiliate links or Google Adwords.

However, going overboard with both of them can backfire in no time.

So for affiliate links, try to use a few highly trustworthy brands that you can truly vouch for. As for ad banners, keep it to the minimum so you aren’t driving attention away from the blog and the product itself.

Don’t: Only Market Popular Products Or Services

Sure, it is necessary to cover all the trending topics, services, and products on your blog and social media. But it is equally important to talk about underrated products to add more credibility to your opinion.

Not just that, using underrated products help you a) sound more knowledgeable in your niche b) have fewer competitions and more traffic on your website.

This way, you get to have a higher chance of ranking high on Google and ensure you always stand above the rest. When you are competing against other well-known bloggers and affiliate marketers, it will be your products that will distinguish you from everyone.

Thus, go the extra mile, get real stats, look up their past customers, and choose the products you are marketing and be the knight in shining armor for all the customers out there.

Do: Organize your campaigns

As an affiliate marketer, you have tremendous opportunities to promote the products on various platforms.

However, mindless advertising campaigns can actually do more harm than good. You could be sending thousands of bucks on expensive Facebook ads and see all your money going down the drain after a few months.

Why?

This is mainly because:

  • You didn’t measure the success rate of each campaign and improvised the next one
  • You didn’t analyze the consumer behavior
  • You failed to optimize your ads according to current customer behavior/trends

That said, make sure you keep track of all your campaigns and pump one better ad than the other. 

Don’t: Rush to Promoting Affiliate Products

This is where most marketers go wrong.

Marketers, especially with email affiliate marketing, rush to promote their products and lose subscribers with their first few emails.

Remember, you are first an influencer and then a marketer.

So take it slow, generate awareness, build trust, and slowly work towards providing solutions with your affiliate links to help you have sustainable growth.

When marketers start their affiliate marketing with high expectations and fast growth, they often give up after a few months.

I get it, there is nothing wrong with having positive visualizations, but you also need to understand that you won’t make a good income with the first few campaigns.

Luckily, with consistency and Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound (SMART) goals, you can surely kickstart a successful journey to making a fortune with affiliate marketing.

Good luck!

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