It’s boggles my mind how many problems and errors affiliate marketers make. These errors, in my mind, are very basic mistakes that can easily be corrected. It only takes a little bit of industry knowledge and brain power to fix these problems, if you are able to identify what the problems are. Nobody is coming out right and saying what these major problems are that will stop an affiliate dead in his tracks. Affiliate networks also suffer from some common problems that can easily be fixed if they just know what those problems were in the first place. I think a big part of it is that a lot of people just aren’t aware of the ‘mistakes’ that they are actually making.

Common Mistakes of Affiliate Marketers

• Spending too much time “planning” out a marketing campaign, trying to create the 1 perfect campaign that’s going to work forever.
• Doing more planning than action taking. You can plan all day, if you don’t try things out you’re never going to succeed.
• Spending too much money too fast without learning anything. Constantly failing is a good thing and a learning process, but if you spend too much and don’t learn anything, people usually quit when they run out of cash.
• Not split testing. I can practically split test my way into success with a marketing campaign, even if I know nothing about a given niche and you should be trying that too.
• Promoting offers and running campaigns that their friends, affiliate managers, etc tell them to run. Do your own independent research, don’t just take the word of your competitors and affiliate managers (unless it’s an affiliate manager that has been mentioned or advertises on this blog, then you’re probably safe.)
• Hoping you’ll get lucky by copying something you see. Sure, copying can be a good way to get past the newbie phase, but believe me I’ve lost way more money copying than I have just doing something unique. 3 out of 4 ads you see online are not profitable, that’s a fact.

Common Mistakes of Affiliate Networks

• Not paying your affiliates on time (or at all!) This really pisses people off and I strongly discourage doing this. You’re going to have someone like me talking smack about your affiliate network which is going to cost you a lot more than the $5k you held from me with insufficient cause (true story, and both networks lost over 100k in business to date because they burned me out of 5k.)
• Constantly redirecting offers without listing what the backup offer is. I know that it happens and advertisers pull out and cap out, but at least tell your affiliates what the backup offer is if that happens, so they can have backup landing pages prepared for all the traffic they are buying and not just sending traffic to some random product with a totally different landing page that they aren’t prepared for! Is it really that hard to have a note what the backup offer would be for each product if something goes down. And don’t tell me that you can’t do that because you have 1 advertiser than runs all of your campaigns, that makes me think you are unstable.
• Telling me to buy traffic with no confidence what so ever that the source you are telling me to buy from will convert. This mostly applies to super affiliates when a network will realize you have a huge budget to do a big media buy or email drop, and they will try to get you to “take a chance” on something that probably won’t convert for you profitably, but might make them 5-10k in gross.
• Making me jump through hoops to run what I consider standard traffic source. They will blame it on the advertiser, but in reality if you are taking on an advertiser that ONLY allows one tiny specific form of traffic then you shouldn’t be pushing that offer in my face in the first place. I had a recent experience where the traffic could ONLY be run on Facebook. What!?
• Don’t spam me with generic emails with all of your hot offers. Instead, ask me what niches I’m interested in and send me targeted, personal emails. I might actually respond or take action if you get personal with it instead of spamming me. Who would have thought!?

If you want to learn the strategies that have made me 7 figures check out Marketing Oracles. It’s a site that I put together with Ian Fernando and Chris Guthrie. Collectively, It’s got all our top secrets that are too exclusive to be posted publicly and if you want to excel in the industry really fast, this is the place to check out.