5 Critical Pitfalls in Affiliate Marketing (Are You Making These Mistakes?!) | The Growth Booth #92

Welcome to The Growth Booth. This is episode number 92, where today we're talking about affiliate marketing. What I want to do is laser focus in on five of the most common mistakes that I see affiliate marketers making when they're building affiliate marketing businesses.

Now, I've been doing affiliate marketing since 2005. I've made many, many mistakes over the years, including every single one of the five mistakes that I'll be sharing with you here today. However, with all of those years of experience, and having taught thousands of people, I've seen over and over again, people tend to make the same mistakes. The five that I'm going to be highlighting to you here today are easy things that you can avoid.

Now, affiliate marketing is where you can sell someone else's product. You can earn a commission or a payment of some kind, in the process of doing that. It's a business model that I love. I've been doing it for a very long time. I've earned a lot of money from it. We've also had many, many people come to our courses related to affiliate marketing and build life-changing businesses. So in this episode, I really want to talk about the importance of strategy and transparency in affiliate marketing. And as I say, I'll dive into some of the biggest mistakes that I see people making.

The first one, and I see this over and over again, comes back to I think people just trying to make a quick buck at the expense of a long-term relationship with their audience. What I see happening is people promote products that don't align with their audience or the brand that they are developing. I think when you're building a relationship and an audience, it's really about integrity and trust. You really only have one chance to get this right. If someone breaks your trust, it's hard to forgive that. It's almost impossible to recover trust with a business that has broken your trust, so it's better to make sure you are building integrity and trust and never breaking that.

I've seen a lot of people in the online marketing space sell products that sometimes I might not necessarily believe in. There was a huge wave of people selling different products related to crypto over the past few years, and this is one example where we didn't jump on that bandwagon. It would have been a really easy thing for us to sell honestly, because there was a lot of excitement around it, but I didn't promote it, all the different multiple different crypto products out there, because I didn't have that much experience in crypto and I wasn't 100% convinced that it would be a good way for our subscribers to invest their money by putting it into crypto.

In hindsight, it's a good thing that we didn't jump on this bandwagon because a lot of people have been hurt financially in a big way by putting a lot of money they couldn't afford to spend into crypto. This is not a knock against crypto. I'm just saying that the relationship that I've built up with my subscriber base is not based around crypto. For the most part, it's based around e-commerce. It's based around affiliate marketing. It's based around building an online business. I personally didn't feel qualified to be recommending people jump into an opportunity around crypto. It's not a niche that we've ever promoted. Maybe we will in the future, but right now it hasn't felt right because I haven't had the personal experience or know-how to be able to really get in behind that. 

On a much bigger scale, we've seen lots of famous people really sort of break this rule and promote products that don't align with their audience. Kim Kardashian is one of them. She got in a bit of trouble a while ago for promoting morning sickness pills for pregnancy, and she did that, for one, that didn't really align with her audience at the time. Secondly, she didn't provide any disclosure or any information around the safety and the side effects, and what ultimately ended up happening was the FDA, that's the Food and Drug Administration who set the different regulations for food and drugs and medications in the United States, ended up issuing a warning letter. This was a high-profile incident where the influencer Kim Kardashian was doing something that was beyond the regulations and the requirements weren't met. So there are legal ramifications as well for sometimes when you get in behind something that you don't know all that much about.

I think a couple of takeaways here, one is be aware of and be compliant with the different regular regulations that are out there. For most of us as affiliate marketers, this is really, really simple. I think that there are a bunch of things that you can do to make sure that you don't fall into this trap of promoting products that don't align with your audience. One thing you can do is to know your audience from the outset – this should be fairly simple. I mean, if you've built up an audience, then chances are why they've opted in to your mailing list, why they're following you on social media, and so on and so forth.

The second thing you can do is test a product that you're recommending before you actually recommend it, or at minimum, make sure you know of firsthand other people's experiences who have used the product, so you can at least speak with more credibility around it. Make sure you stay true to your brand. I mean, don't sell yourself out by going after a quick buck just because it's easy. In the long run, you're going to have a much better relationship. Also, I should say, better profits by making sure you stick with what is aligned with your brand. Transparency is the key. If you believe in a product, but think it might be slightly off-brand as an example, then you can just be open about that you can communicate that to your list, or you can say something like, "Look, this is not a product that I've got personal experience with, but it looks really promising. Check it out." And then also, avoid these trend traps. Just because something is trending doesn't mean that it's a good fit for your brand or audience. I would say that that was the case with crypto over the past few years for our audience.

Now the second mistake that I see a lot of people making with regards to affiliate marketing is relying solely on one traffic source or platform. This is not just with affiliate marketing, but it's with any kind of online business, I see people often have all their eggs in one basket, and far too many times I've seen that basket break. I think the best thing you can do is diversify your traffic sources because if you've got all your eggs in one basket, if you're relying on traffic from just one source, and then that source changes, maybe the platform changes, maybe the algorithm that you're using changes, maybe there's some unexpected issue, maybe your advertising account gets shut down or something, then no traffic, you're out of business.

Now, a multi-channel approach, in my opinion, is just a no brainer. I like to think of this as sort of being everywhere, it works particularly well if you've got content marketing as part of your strategy, because content is something that you can leverage from a search engine optimization standpoint, from a social media standpoint, from an email marketing standpoint, from a paid ad standpoint, and more. In fact, this podcast that I've put together, The Growth Booth, is an example of that, because we have a blog post for every single podcast episode, every single podcast episode is also shared on video sites such as YouTube, it's shared on audio websites such as Spotify, Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, it's shared on social media. So for every 30-minute episode, I'm getting a lot of mileage out of the content. It's shared around in a lot of different places. I think the more you can do this and the more you can build a multi-channel approach to affiliate marketing or whatever project you're doing, the better you're going to be in the long run.

The third mistake that I've made, I've made certainly and I've seen a lot of other people make, is not disclosing the affiliate relationship that you have with the products that you might be selling to your audience. So from a simple blog or niche website where you've got a blog post about products that you might be selling, could be absolutely any kind of a product, if you're selling products as an affiliate, maybe you've got Amazon links in there, then you need to have some kind of disclosure in a clear place where people can see that there is a relationship there and that you may be compensated for purchases they ultimately end up making after people visit your website. One of the ways that I do this as I put a little blurb at the top of blog posts, and it might say something along the lines of "We may earn a commission for purchases made using our links on this website. Please see our disclosure for more information," that kind of a thing, and then having that link to a professionally written disclosure page on your website can go a long way to making sure that you tick the boxes.

This failure to disclose an affiliate relationship is something that the FTC, Federal Trade Commission, in the United States is pretty strict about, and they do actually enforce it. There are millions of websites out there, and I think the probably the majority of them don't do a good job of this. Doesn't mean that you shouldn't do the job of it though, especially when it's so easy to put a little disclosure statement in and link it to a disclosure page on your website. In fact, if you're someone who's using Chat GPT, you can probably get some good information out of that. Ask Chat GPT about relevant disclosures for an affiliate website and text for a disclosure page. You'll probably be a lot better off than if you hadn't done that, so I think this is a really easy thing to fix.

Now, the fourth mistake that I've made, and I've seen a lot of other people make over the years is ignoring the data and not split testing or optimizing conversion. If you think about it, if you've got a 1% conversion rate on your webpage, you get 100 visitors, that means that you're going to get one of those people buying something leading to a commission or a sale, whatever that may be. If you make $100 from that conversion, then every 100 visitors, you're making $100. If you can improve that conversion rate from 1% to 1.5%, that's a 50% gain. All of a sudden, for every 100 visitors that come to your website, you're not making $100, you're making $150. If you think about this on a bigger level, instead of making $10,000 in a month, you'll make $15,000 in a month. Improving the conversion rate is often one of the easiest and fastest and certainly cheapest things to do. I'll tell you what, it's a lot cheaper most of the time, to improve conversion rate than it is to increase traffic by 50%.

If you're looking at getting bang for your buck on the changes and the tweaks that you make, improving the conversion rate is one of the easiest places that you can look at improving. There are lots of ways that you can split test and gather data, it starts with gathering data. Google Analytics is a really good place to start. You can do split testing for free inside of Google Analytics. You've got paid tools like VWO.com, Visual Website Optimizer, and they're not cheap, but I mean, if they're the kind of thing that will allow you to run some tests in the short term, to be able to lock in maybe a doubling of your conversion rate, then it would be money well spent, and come back to you 100X over probably in the long run. So lots of good options out there. I mean, if you do a Google search for ways to split test, you'll find things and you'll also find tools that are platform-specific. So if you've got a WordPress website, there are tools out there that work for WordPress, specifically, and Google Analytics will work on pretty much any platform at all anyway, so that's a really good one to start with.

Now, the fifth mistake that I see people make, and this is more than a mistake, it's a missed opportunity, and that is to build genuine relationships with affiliate managers and networks. You might be thinking, well, why? "Why would I want to spend time doing that?" What I've found over the years, is by having a relationship with JV managers, affiliate managers at the different networks where I sell products, oftentimes I get access to better offers, I oftentimes get a better commission rate. So just by having that relationship and just asking, "Hey, can I get a commission bump?" it may be my commission goes from 50% to 60%, and that's just because I've got a relationship with the affiliate managers. Sometimes I can get better fees as well. These are all things that add up. Sometimes I can even get promotions from the different platforms where products are sold. I think you never really know what unexpected upsides you could have by fostering a good relationship.

Now, one thing that we've spoken about, shared a little bit over the years is our relationship with ClickBank, and we've become the number one vendor on Clickbank and we've done a large number of sales on Clickbank over the years. As part of that, we've been able to foster a relationship, but even when I was just getting started, I had an affiliate manager at Clickbank who I could reach out to, and I did reach out to them. I got to know them and I shared what I was doing and the niches that I was in, and they were able to give me some new offers that I didn't know about, offers that had better metrics, better conversion rates. Just by asking, just by making that relationship, I probably saw want to say about a 40%, 50% bump in my profits from different websites that I had that I was working on back at the time, and this was when I was I didn't have I certainly didn't have the claim to fame of having done being the largest vendor on Clickbank at that point in time. I was just getting started. You can build these connections by meeting in person. You can jump on Zoom calls. Sometimes, these platforms attend different marketing events, you can get to them with the objective of being able to hang out and meet the different JV managers that are there, affiliate managers. When I say JV manager, I'm talking about joint venture manager. It's just another way of saying affiliate manager. There's really no downside to actually doing this.

So to recap on these five mistakes, and hopefully you don't fall into any of these, or if you aren't making these mistakes, they're all pretty simple to fix:

Don't promote products that don't align with the audience. It might give you a short-term win maybe, but most likely, all that's going to do is destroy the relationship that you've got and hurt the lifetime value that you're able to provide to your customers.

Don't rely solely on one traffic source. Just think about this as putting all your eggs in one basket. That's not a good idea. It's so easy to syndicate content out to lots of different places these days, and not just content, but have a multifaceted approach to generating traffic.

If you're not disclosing affiliate relationships to your audience, this is a really easy fix, you can put a simple disclosure statement on each page on your website and you put a disclosure, a link to a disclosure page on like the footer of your website as well. It's a really easy fix, and at least then, you know you're being compliant. I will add that adding these kinds of disclosure statements, I have never ever seen that that hurts conversions. In fact, I actually feel like it helps because it makes it crystal clear what the situation is. You're not hiding or pretending that you don't have an affiliate relationship. You're just saying, "Hey, I've got an affiliate relationship and I could make a commission," and it means you're being open, upfront, and honest with your audience. I've never seen a drop in conversions because of doing that.

If you're not using data and split testing to optimize conversions, then you're missing out on another opportunity. This is without doubt, one of the big mistakes that I made early on, was I just didn't split test and I left a lot of money on the table.

The fifth one there was failing to build genuine relationships with affiliate managers and networks.

Okay, so five mistakes that I've made, five mistakes that I've seen a lot of other people making as they're building affiliate marketing businesses, and also not just affiliate marketing businesses. Now that's a wrap for this episode. You can watch the video of this over on YouTube, you can get the show notes by going to thegrowthbooth.com, navigate into episode number 92. If you do head over to thegrowthbooth.com, also make sure that you sign up, subscribe to the email sequence. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube so that you can get updates when we release new content and new episodes. That's a wrap for this week. I'll see you in the next episode of The Growth Booth. Bye for now.