Affiliate By Night

Three Easy Affiliate Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

In the world of affiliate marketing there are numerous mistakes and pitfalls that befall everyone. Many of them are ones that you learn a great deal from and make you a better affiliate in the long run – most mistakes should be a learning opportunity for you! Here are some easy mistakes we’ve made recently that you can avoid making to save you time and money, while still getting the learning benefit from our oversights.

1.    Proofreading is Essential

When creating a campaign recently, we had what we thought would be an awesome domain name for an offer we were looking to promote. We registered it, got a bunch of our content ready to put up and set up a PPC ad campaign to drive traffic to it. After looking everything over one last time to ensure it was ready to launch we realized that the only reason we got such a “great” domain name was that it had a big misspelling in it! Needless to say, while we could have proceeded with the improperly spelled domain name, it drastically changed how it tied in with our product promotion and we had to go back to the drawing board. Big waste of time there.

Also, when hurriedly throwing up an ad copy for an offer we were promoting, we didn’t put the destination URL in properly (again another minor typo) and were prepared to send traffic to the wrong site!

Luckily we were able to catch both errors before too much financial damage was done, but we should have been more careful from the get go and avoided any issues from the start. Make sure you look everything over twice before you have it go live to avoid these embarrassing and potentially costly mistakes

2.    Proper Tracking is a Must

As mentioned above, in the rush and excitement of getting new campaigns going we ran into several spelling errors that could have cost us big time had they not been caught. This next mistake was one that DID cost us because we didn’t set up our tracking correctly on one of biggest campaigns. Due to improper tracking, the statistics that would have told us which keywords/ad groups/demographics were performing well and which weren’t so we could optimize didn’t record. We didn’t pick up on it for several days and so while the overall campaign was still profitable we weren’t able to weed out the underperforming keywords for days and it dragged down profitability because of our error. Now we are always sure that our tracking is set up properly with the requisite links and proper spelling.

3.    Budgeting is Critical

While budgeting is critical to the success of all affiliate marketers, since no one want to be wasting their money or missing out on profits, it’s even more important for those of us with tight budgets and lower margins for error. This applies to not only budgeting for what you can afford to spend on affiliate marketing in general, but all the way down to your individual campaign budgets as well.

One big area where we were missing out on early was being afraid to use most of our budget on our most successful campaign in order to keep testing various other offers. Had we adjusted our budget for that one campaign upward and scaled back some of our other ones we would have gotten many more clicks, conversions and ultimately profit from it. When you have something that is working, make sure to capitalize on it immediately because the longevity of a campaign is not infinite and it’s important to budget properly in order to maximize your return.

As you can see, these were pretty silly mistakes to make, but ones we’ve clearly learned from and implemented procedures to make sure we are more careful and diligent in our work. We’ve grown a lot since we first started in this business and will continue to grow more as we gain experience and additional income to invest. Make sure to learn from our mistakes so that you can save yourself a lot of precious time and money.

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