From drafting a list of missteps for a recent post My Biggest Mistakes During My First Year of Blogging, my list of blunders got so long that I was able to make a subsection just for affiliate marketing mistakes to avoid. This is definitely a bittersweet win-win as a Content Creator. Embrace those face-palm moments!. They’ll come in handy in due time.
First, what is affiliate marketing? For a more in-depth explanation (and handy recommendations for getting started), I highly recommend Neil Patel’s post Affiliate Marketing Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide. Summarized, affiliate marketing is earning a commission from companies or individuals that you have helped sell products or services for. For example, if I bought an item for $100 from your affiliate link and the commission rate was 5%, then the company that I bought that product from would pay you $5 for that sell. Repeat this a few times, and it can generate a nice secondary bit of income.
As simple as this may seem in theory, there are many ways that one can mess up their affiliate marketing strategy and end up wasting time and energy (and money) if done without some guidance. Listed below are some of my affiliate marketing mistakes to avoid. I hope that these tips help guide you toward better marketing decisions.
This blog may have affiliate links. This means that, at no extra cost to you, if you so choose to participate in some of the learning opportunities here, we at Kyrabe Stories may receive a commission as gratitude from the partnering companies. Thank you sincerely for your support and for your desire to learn and grow!
Affiliate Marketing Mistakes #1
Forgetting to review the FTC rules for advertising online
Fortunately, I caught this mistake before any serious legal issues could be brought up. If you clicked on this post, then chances are you are either helping to advertise products or services as a part of your income or you are interested in doing so in the near future…or you just like reading all of my content. For that, awwwww, I’m flattered.
Anyways, when it comes to affiliate marketing, we must disclose that we will get paid for certain links in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission, or FTC for short.
On blog posts, we need to add a disclosure, such as the one at the beginning of this post. On social media, we also need a short disclosure such as #Affiliate, #AffiliateLink, #Sponsored, etc. to allow our readers to know that we have been or will be compensated in some way for a product or service that we are promoting. This includes items given to us to review as well.
Trying to sum up the compliance of the FTC would require a multitude of other blog posts. For the sake of keeping this post at a tolerable length, I shall link some of the relevant pages below for you to refer to at your earliest convenience. If you need to ask yourself if a disclosure needs to be added, go ahead and add it. It’s better to have it there and not need it than vice versa.
The FTC’s Endorsement Guides: What People Are Asking
Disclosures 101 for Social Media Influencers
Affiliate Marketing Mistakes #2
Signing up for WAY too many affiliations at once
You are responsible for keeping track of every site you sign up for as well as where your links are linking back to. If something breaks, it also helps to know who the heck you’re supposed to contact!
When I first began to look into affiliate marketing, I was referred to various sites:
Just to name a few.
Check out Hubspot’s “43 of the Best Affiliate Programs That Pay the Highest Commission” for a longer list of recommendations.
I made the mistake of spending hours going down pages of company lists and just applying for whatever brands I might be interested in. I got accepted by most of them, yaaaay! However, I had no idea how I would promote their products in a way that would make sense. For example, I applied to about six different brands that created business cards knowing good and well that my behind would just go to either Staples or Office Depot to get mine done. That’s right, I shop at both.
I recommend testing out different affiliation platforms to see which you like best but only apply for the brands that you KNOW that you’re going to advertise immediately. Your dashboard can become cluttered so quickly from brands that you’re not focused on.
My advice would be to focus on 5-10 niche matching brands that you genuinely trust to become affiliates for. For example, Kyrabe Stories focuses on Personal and Professional Development along with affordable educational opportunities. Brands such as LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, Grammarly, Barnes & Noble, Udemy, Codecademy, and Audible provide affiliate links that are super relevant to most of the material that I post, and I can provide honest personal reviews on these brands and services.
Affiliate Marketing Mistakes #3
Not taking advantage of Pretty Links
Pretty Links is a plugin that allows you to customize the URL to something more appealing to share. For example, have you ever tried to copy the link to a web-page to share with a friend, but when you pasted the link, it looked like someone just lined up all the characters from a whole can of alphabet soup? Yeah, that’s not pretty at all. With Pretty Links, you can have your website URL just redirect to a different website. Just let your viewers know what it’s redirecting to as part of the URL (example listed below).
Now, fair warning: some social media sites such as Facebook will not allow you to create ads with the use of Pretty Links. To prevent you from having to post a URL with 50 random characters attached, you will need to see if the affiliate platform has a function to customize the slug of the company’s URL to your brand’s name.
My Constant Contact affiliate link from the Impact Affiliate Platform:
constant-contact.ibfwsl.net/KyrabeStories <— the “slug” is KyrabeStories
My Constant Contact Pretty Link from Bluehost:
http://kyrabestories.com/ConstantContact <— the “slug” is ConstantContact
Don’t both of these links feel a lot safer to click on than a super long URL that looks like it just regurgitated alphabet soup? If you have a website host like Bluehost, check your Plugin Editor first to see if Pretty Links is already a part of your plan.
Affiliate Marketing Mistakes #4
Not checking my tracking code prior to publishing my post
I still want to cry over this one. There’s a book called “Stories that Stick” by Kindra Hall that I highly recommend reading. She explained how pitching a product or service is more effective whenever you can tie a personal story to it. Perfect for Kyrabe Stories, right? So, I gave it a shot.
During a Facebook campaign for Constant Contact, an email marketing provider, I told the story of how I was struggling to learn how to blog and my learning curve of crafting newsletters. I thought it was a basic experience, but it worked! I had over a thousand interactions and more shares than I had expected! When I checked the Facebook analytics, I had a huge click-through rate! Yippee! It worked!
Then a few days later, I checked my analytics on the Impact Affiliate page.
Nothing.
Wait, what now!? Maybe it just takes a bit for the program to update.
Nothing.
Maybe the site is under maintenance. Yeah, there’s a notification. Maybe the maintenance is preventing the update.
Next day. Nothing.
FINALLY, I contacted Impact to figure out what was going on. My Facebook analytics was showing continuous interactions, but my Impact analytics wasn’t showing anything from the last few days! When the Impact Support team responded back, they notified me that there wasn’t anything reported for my account and to check to see if my tracking code matched what was being used in the promotion.
I checked…and guess what?
THEY DIDN’T FREAKIN’ MATCH!!!
I had tried customizing the URL but forgot to save the darn thing! So ALL of that interaction was null and void for my account! If anyone decided to sign up for Constant Contact from my story, I will NEVER know!! Pardon me while I go whine about this experience again in a dark corner…agggggghhhh!
Affiliate Marketing Mistakes #5
Depending on the default ad images to show
Guess what more and more people are starting to install on their laptops and phones…
That’s right: Ad Blockers!
This at first didn’t seem like too big of a deal. Then I realized that for the ads that I manually placed into specific spots for direct references like the Book Recommendations and the Services & Tech Recommendations page, these ad images won’t show at all! They’re both just pages full of text! I didn’t realize this until my fiance, Stevenn, pulled up the pages from his Ad Blocker browser and OMG it was horrific to see the truth!
Noooooooo!
Those blank spaces are where the ad’s images were supposed to be! I’ve promoted these pages like crazy but never stopped to consider how the pages look to someone with an Ad Blocker activated! No wonder I didn’t get many interactions from the pages!
I discovered, albeit way later than I would have preferred, a way around this dilemma. Simply add an image to where the ad would have been, then add the affiliate link to the image. Yes, this will require a bit more digging around. In some cases, you might need to reach out to the affiliate company and ask if they can provide some of their thumbnails to you. Despite these extra steps, it’s still better than having these voided gaps on your page where a relevant affiliate ad was supposed to be.
That’s what I’ll be working on fixing soon…
Now let’s hear from you!
Have you been making money from affiliate marketing? In your view, what are some other affiliate marketing mistakes to avoid? I’d love to read your stories in the comments below.
Are you interested in getting started in affiliate marketing? I highly recommend enrolling in Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing. This is the course I took not too long ago. I wish I had taken the course a lot earlier once I realized the multitude of mistakes that I was still making. It would have saved me a lot of time, energy, and yes money too.
And as always, remember to live and learn from one story at a time.
Take care,
Kyndall Bennett from Kyrabe Stories
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