Note: Affiliate links may be used in this post. When you buy through my affiliate links I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Full disclosure here.
Major Affiliate Marketing Mistakes to Avoid
Are you making these common affiliate marketing mistakes? Find out below!
Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to make money with a blog. The basic premise of affiliate marketing is that you earn a commission every time someone clicks one of your affiliate links and makes a purchase through it.
You can write blog posts, include affiliate links in them, and earn passive income from those blog posts for months or years to come. Simple, right?
Well, yes and no. The concept of affiliate marketing is simple.
All you need is your own blog to get started. You don’t need to create a product to sell; you’re making money by promoting existing products. Joining affiliate programs is free, and it’s not too hard to get approved.
But there’s more to affiliate marketing than just inserting affiliate links at random into your blog content. You need to have a cohesive strategy.
Are You Making These Common Affiliate Marketing Mistakes?
A lot of bloggers are just making wild guesses when it comes to affiliate marketing. They definitely don’t have a cohesive strategy in place.
The five mistakes below are some of the most common ones I see.
If you’re making any of these affiliate marketing mistakes yourself, it could be the reason why you aren’t earning much money from affiliate marketing yet.
Once you understand these mistakes and know how to fix them and avoid them, you’ll start to see more affiliate sales coming through with consistency.
Here’s a look at the biggest affiliate marketing mistakes that bloggers make:
1. Not understanding search intent
When using affiliate links in your content, you need to first understand search intent. This is the why behind someone clicking on your blog post.
If they aren’t already in a buying mindset, your affiliate links won’t convert.
For example, let’s say you have a travel blog with a variety of content on it. Someone who finds your blog posts on the topics of “best time to visit Paris” or “beautiful beaches around the world” probably isn’t in a buying mindset.
They’re not ready to book anything right now — they’re just searching for ideas and inspiration. If you have affiliate links to hotels and tours in these types of blog posts, you probably won’t ever make any sales from them.
Instead, you want to target people further along in the travel planning process.
Someone searching for “best hotels with Eiffel Tower views in Paris” or “best snorkeling tours in Maui” is ready to make a purchase right now. This is when affiliate links to hotels and tours will convert into affiliate sales.
Regardless of your blog niche, you need to understand search intent. Blog posts that target readers with buying intent will always convert better.
2. Forgetting to update your content
Another mistake that many bloggers make is forgetting to update their affiliate content! This is something that is so easy to fix, but if you neglect to do it, you could be leaving significant money on the table.
One issue with affiliate marketing is that from time to time, a product could be discontinued and your affiliate link will no longer work, or an affiliate program might move platforms and you forget to update your links.
There are a couple of easy solutions to these sorts of issues.
The first is using a free WordPress plugin like Broken Link Checker that will periodically scan every link on your website and notify you if one is returning an error page. This makes it simple for you to go in and update the broken affiliate link to a similar product with a working link. No tedious manual checking required!
Similarly, you should also get the free WordPress plugin Pretty Links. This lets you create a custom affiliate link on your own domain. Now, you can’t use this for something like the Amazon affiliate program, where Amazon generates a unique affiliate link for every single product, but it works for single affiliate programs.
For example, I recommend my web hosting company Bluehost a lot on Blogging Her Way. If you hover over that affiliate link, you’ll see it actually says “www.bloggingherway.com/bluehost” which is my custom Pretty Link.
If you click that link, it redirects to my affiliate link. And if that affiliate link were to ever change, I could just update it in the Pretty Links settings, but my own custom link would stay the same. That way, I wouldn’t have to go through and manually update every single old, outdated affiliate link across my whole website.
3. Not providing valuable, problem-solving content
This goes hand in hand with what I talked about in the first entry on this list. You need to understand search intent and write valuable, problem-solving content.
Some types of blog posts simply convert better than others.
That’s why I created my online course Posts to Profits to walk you through the 15 types of affiliate blog posts that actually convert into sales.
So many bloggers just write blog posts about themselves or their lives or any random topic that pops into their heads. That’s fine if you’re just blogging as a hobby and don’t care about making money from it. But if you’re putting affiliate links into those types of blog posts expecting to make sales, you’re going to be disappointed. Because that’s not the kind of content that converts.
Instead, you need to be focused on writing content that’s helpful, valuable, and solves a problem or answers a question for your reader.
Let’s say you are a mom and you have a mom targeted at new and expecting moms. You might write a blog post about your experience giving birth — that’s fine, but it’s not the kind of content that’s good for affiliate marketing.
If you wanted to make money from a similar blog post, you could approach it from the angle of “what to pack in a hospital bag for birth.”
You could still incorporate some of your personal story and experiences into this, but the main focus is on helping your audience. You could then have a list of hospital bag essentials and use affiliate links for each one.
4. Your content doesn’t feel authentic
Another big issue that can hinder your success with affiliate marketing in a major way is creating affiliate content that doesn’t feel authentic.
It’s really obvious when someone is trying to make a quick buck online and doesn’t actually use or have experience with the product they’re recommending.
Here on Blogging Her Way, I’m an affiliate for many blogging-related products like web hosting, WordPress themes, software, online courses, and more. I only recommend products I’ve personally used and love, and I think it shows.
On my travel blog, I try to highlight hotels I’ve stayed at or tours and travel experiences I’ve booked whenever possible. There are also many cases where I research and recommend other options I haven’t personally tried, but this still works because I’ve established myself as a trustworthy travel expert.
It’s important to build trust with your audience, because that’s the only way they will actually take your recommendations and use your affiliate links.
5. Not using enough affiliate links
Finally, a surprising mistake that bloggers make is not using enough affiliate links in their content. Now, there’s a delicate balance to strike here.
You don’t want to come off as spammy by including too many affiliate links, or appear pushy by aggressively encouraging people to make a purchase.
But at the same time, many bloggers don’t do enough to promote their affiliate links because they’re scared of coming off as too sales-y or annoying.
As long as you are writing high-quality content that is genuinely helpful or valuable to your readers, you shouldn’t worry about this. It’s important to make sure your affiliate links are highlighted in your content in multiple ways.
For example, if you’re writing a gift guide about the “best gifts for college students” that contains affiliate links to products on Amazon, you could incorporate your affiliate links in several different ways. For each item on the list, you can include a bolded text link, then embed a clickable image of the product, then have a “Buy now on Amazon” button with your affiliate links.
Having multiple links or calls to action might seem like overkill, but it’s really not. Doing this actually helps to increase your conversions a lot!
Don’t Make These Affiliate Marketing Mistakes
So these are some of the biggest affiliate marketing mistakes to avoid!
Once you can identify these mistakes and correct them, you’ll be on your way to making more money with affiliate marketing as a blogger.
If you’re looking for more help, check out my online course Posts to Profits.
This course will walk you through the 15 types of blog posts that you should write if you want to make money from affiliate marketing, with real-life examples from my travel blog (that I don’t share publicly anywhere else!)
Click here to learn more about Posts to Profits and join now!
More Affiliate Marketing Resources
Looking for more tips and guides on affiliate marketing? Check out these posts: