If affiliate marketing feels harder than it should, chances are you’re making a few mistakes you don’t even realize are mistakes. And the frustrating part? Most affiliates repeat the same ones over and over. In this episode, I’m breaking down the most common affiliate marketing mistakes I see every day and what to do instead. This episode will show you how to fix the small things that make a big difference.
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Top Affiliate Program Mistakes
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
How to Get Affiliates to Trust You (So They Actually Promote You)
How to Get Affiliates to Actually Promote
How to Sell With Confidence (Not Desperation)
Is AI the End of Affiliate Marketing?
How to Grow Your Affiliate Program with Podcast Interviews
How to Fix the Biggest Affiliate Marketing Mistakes
Are you tired of making the same affiliate marketing mistakes over and over again? Well, in today’s episode, we’re diving headfirst into the world of affiliate marketing blunders and how to avoid them like a pro. This episode is not all doom and gloom, though, because I’m not just here to point out the problems. I’m also going to share my best tips and strategies to steer clear of these pitfalls and set yourself up for affiliate marketing success. So let’s jump in and discover how to sidestep the most common affiliate marketing mistakes. So, I’m not here to be a parent, but I am going to tell you up front, like, we all make mistakes.
Every one of these mistakes that I’m going to share with you today, I have made, and I know at least 10 others who’ve made these same mistakes as well. Okay? Mistakes are fine as long as we learn from them. So that’s why today we’re going to dive into some of the most common affiliate marketing mistakes that I see so many of us fall victim to. And then, more importantly, I want to talk about how to avoid them now, the mistakes.
I’m going to break these up into six parts here. The first part is these are mistakes in kind of the basics, right? Choosing the right products, choosing the right niches. The second part is mistakes in content creation and promotion. Part three is mistakes in link management.
Okay, kind of a boring topic, but an important one to cover. Part four is mistakes that are really around affiliate program selection, selecting the wrong programs. Then part five is mistakes in building and nurturing those relationships. And then lastly, mistakes in mindset. So again, six parts with anywhere from 2, 3, 4, 5 mistakes in each of these parts.
So let’s jump in with part one. So this is mistakes in choosing the right products and niches. The first mistake I see, I see this so often, is falling for the hype. Falling for the hype is so easy to get caught up in the hype. When you see a new product launch, you see a new so and so’s.
They’re doing an affiliate program and so you want to be a part of it. The problem with this is if you don’t do the research, you end up letting the excitement cloud your judgment. And so if you just rush into promoting a product without doing the proper Research number one, you could end up in a situation where just because somebody famous or a big company makes a product doesn’t mean it’s a good product. And you end up disappointing your audience. They buy it, goes well, but now they don’t trust you for the long term.
And so, you know, I asked a, friend of mine one time, he asked about a specific offer and he knew he could make about $30,000 promoting this thing versus about $20,000 promoting something else. And I said, okay, here’s my question though. Is this gonna best serve your audience? And he went on to explain why it wasn’t. And I said, okay, you’re gonna make $10,000 more.
And that’s awesome. In that month, he promotes about one affiliate offer a month. In that month he’s going to make $10,000 more. And I don’t want to dismiss that. He’s not a multimillionaire, but he makes about a half million dollars a year.
$10,000 is still a lot of money. That is a really nice vacation. That is a really sweet, like, you know, week long vacation at a, pretty nice place. So I don’t want to dismiss $10,000. There’s a lot you can do with that that’ll pay for like a week of college, you know, I mean, like, in all seriousness though, it’ll pay for a lot.
You know, it’s a third of a pretty decent car if I’m not mistaken. There’s a lot that $10,000. And I was like, that’s awesome. But long term, if you sell this and it doesn’t go well, how much are you going to lose over the course of the next? Just look at one year could cost you fifty to a hundred thousand dollars.
So you may not notice it because it means only a few people less are going to buy each time. But it means that next promo that would have made you 25,000 is only going to make you 20,000. And the next one instead of 20 is only going to make you 17. And over time you’re going to lose a lot more money than you made. So rushing into this, promoting your product without doing the proper research can not only fail when it doesn’t resonate with your audience, but it can fail if it’s not a great product, if it’s not going to serve your audience.
So you need to look at things and do the research, maybe go through the course or use the product and study the competition, see those things. So don’t fall for the hype. The second thing is kind of ties in. If you ignore your audience’s needs, if you ignore your audience’s preferences, you’re going to fail. I mean, your audience is the heart and soul, the heart and soul ultimately of, anything with building a platform.
The heart and soul of my podcast is you, the listener. The heart and soul of my emails, of the content I put in my emails is the people on my list, individuals on my list. That’s why I never say my list. You know, it’s like I don’t refer to them as my list. It’s individuals on the list.
They are people. The heart and soul of social media is the people who follow you. And your audience is the heart and soul of everything affiliate marketing related. If you don’t understand their needs and preferences, you can end up promoting some products that just do not align with them. So survey them, engage with them.
I like to periodically. I don’t do nearly as many as I used to, but I like to periodically just engage with them. Maybe get on zoom and talk to them for 10 minutes and M I’ll coach them through a specific situation. What I’m giving is the coaching. What I’m getting is learning more about them.
And we can do these things and just, even just asking a simple question, maybe it’s just one question. Ask one question and get 500 responses. You will learn a lot so that you understand what they’re looking for. this is the importance again of connecting with your audience. That’s one of the reasons why, you know, at the end of every episode I invite people to text me.
260-217-4619 by the way, one of the reasons why I do that, yes, it is to serve. Please don’t misunderstand me. I want you to text me if you’ve got questions, big takeaways from the episode, all the stuff that I always say at the end of each episode. But I get as much out of it because I’m learning what you really need, what problems are you having, what struggles are you facing, what obstacles are you encountering? And I learned this stuff and that helps me to refine my avatar.
In my free report, 75 Powerful Lead Magnets, I show you exactly what types of lead magnets actually convert and lead to explosive list growth. Grab your copy here!
Speaking of avatar, by the way, go grab our avatar creation guide. It’s free. Go to mattmcwilliams.com avatar and you will avoid a lot of these problems on the front end. If you actually decide who your audience is, you’ll avoid this.
The third mistake I see here in this kind of part one here, choosing the right products and niches, choosing too many products at once. I mean I. I get it. There are so many opportunities out there. But promoting too many products at once, not only can it confuse your audience, but it can confuse you.
And you’re gonna go, we’ll talk about this later. But you’re gonna go half in on three things. And half in on three things doesn’t equal all in on one. Believe it or not, you think, well, half plus half plus half. Last time I checked in math class was 1.
- Not in affiliate marketing. So the key here is start with one product, start with one promotion, and really hone in on that one. You know, work through all the kinks, like we’ll talk about in this episode, the things like creating a promo plan and things like that. Work through the kinks with that one.
Now, if you’re more advanced, yeah, promoting two things in a very short period of time is totally doable. But this is a mistake. I just see so many people make. They’re like, okay, I’m gonna do affiliate marketing. And what they think is promoting 20 things in 60 days is better than promoting three things in 60 days.
And it’s usually not. Now, I’m not saying you only need to promote one thing for 60 days. I’m saying promote one thing for a week or two and then move on to the next thing and then the next thing. The fourth mistake here is not paying attention to seasonal trends. Seasonal.
What is the word I’m looking for? Ebbs and flows within product sales. Not paying attention to demands, not paying attention to just the trends that are going on that aren’t necessarily seasonal. You know, every year we release an update, the Ultimate Guide to Holiday Affiliate Promotions. And I’ll link to that in the show notes.
And this is specific to promoting things in the last five, six weeks of the year, when for some industries, that’s 50, 60, 70% of their sales. For people who are in niches where seasonal things matter more, they can make or break your entire year. And if you ignore those trends and if you ignore what’s going on, you end up ignoring those spikes in demands and commissions. So pay attention. Are there any seasonal shifts?
And then you want to tailor your content and promotions accordingly? I always ask with clients whether we’re running their affiliate program or if I’m going to be promoting something as an affiliate. Hey, are there any just built in spikes? And a lot of people will say, well, we’re pretty much even for 11 months out of the year, but we spike in January with New Year’s resolutions. Okay, that’s good to know.
Or they’ll say, yeah, we spike when the kids get out .comof school a little bit. Or we spike when the kids are going back to school. Or yeah, we have a little bit of a bump around Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Some industries, it’s not as pronounced. Obviously if you’re in the health and fitness industry, 50% of your entire year can come in January.
We know that if you’re in a gift industry, 50, 60% of your entire year can come from right before Thanksgiving through about December 23rd. We know that stuff. Some of them it’s a little bit less pronounced. But, we have one particular client where about 20% of their sales comes in one month of the year. And you go, okay, well that’s not a huge thing.
Well, I mean 80% of their sales come in 11 months of the year and 20% in one. That is a, what’s not for. We have to take advantage of that. If we’re going to run a promotion, it makes sense to run it then. Because if we can increase sales.
So if we were going to make say, let’s just say they were going to do a hundred thousand dollars in that month or in that one month. Right. If we can increase sales in that month by 20%, we’re at 120,000. It’s a pretty big increase. To go up $20,000 versus 20% in the other month, might only produce $12,000 increase or so.
So we focus our efforts around that month. And you need to know that as an affiliate, all, right. The second part is common mistakes that are really around content creation and marketing, promotion. The first one, not having a plan, Whatever you do, create a plan and stick to it long enough to find out what works. So go grab our affiliate promo plan guide.
Go grab that matmcwilliams.com forward/promo plan. Go grab that guide. That’ll walk you through how to create a promo plan. And the big mistake here is not that you don’t follow the plan perfectly, but that you don’t even have one and you’re literally trying to make it up as you go.
What I find is typically we’ll tweak the plan anywhere from 10 to 40%, but that means at least 60% is planned in advance. I know what I’m going to be sending via email each day. I know what we’re doing, social media wise, I know what we’re doing, you know, at such and such point. And even if I decide to tweak it, I at least have a starting Point for that. So not having a plan is a huge mistake.The solution there is have a plan, Go grab the template. Mattmcwaims.com promoplan we’ll put that in the show notes. Go grab that and then use it. The second mistake is low quality content.
You’ve all heard the expression content is king and quality matters, right? We see this so often is we put in all this effort into our own stuff, whether it be the podcast or our own writing, our own emails, our own blog posts, our own sales copy, our own sales pictures, pages and videos, and then we pack it in on an affiliate promotion. We just take the swipe copy and copy it and send it. Do not do that. That’s not what swipe copy’s for.
Or we see so many people, they’re like, oh, I’m going to create a review post. I’m going to. And then it’s just stuffed with keywords, there’s no value and things like that. Or I’m going to kind of take what they give me and post generic images on social media. Is that what you normally post?
Do you normally post kind of mediocre images on social media or do you post really good ones? Are you always posting selfies? And then all of a sudden when you do a promotion, you’re giving them some sort of a. You’re posting a banner ad, basically, that doesn’t work. So think about this.
How do you put the same effort into your affiliate promotions as you do the content you’re creating for your own stuff? How do you make it feel the same? How do you make it stay on brand and not just be kind of mediocre? Keyword stuff, reviews, ugly, you know, images that don’t fit your brand, Things like that take the time, right? take the time to make it seem as close to your own stuff as you normally would do.
Another mistake here is just not taking advantage of multiple content formats. Oh, well, I’m going to send three emails. Okay. I’m only going to do social media. Well, that doesn’t work.We’ll talk about this later when I talk about going all in. But you got to do everything. Use your podcast, use social media, use video, use your blog, use your email and reach different people. You know, I have people that follow me on social media that are not on my email list. I have people on my email list that don’t follow me on social media.
I have people that I text with, mentioned that earlier, that I text with, that are not on my email. They’re not on my Email list. The reality is only half the people in my audience listen to this podcast. Well, I can’t just abandon the other half. That’d be ridiculous.
So I want to talk about affiliate offers on all content formats that I can. I, probably. Admittedly, I don’t use the podcast enough. So here’s the new slash. Maybe over the next year, I’m going to do one or two more episodes where I talk about an affiliate product.
I’ve got to do that. It’s the smart thing to do for me. And it’ll be good content. Of course, we’ll make it really positive content, something you get value out of. Another big mistake here is just not following basic SEO best practices. All right, SEO is search engine optimization. If you don’t know that, it is so important. And so if you’re going to write a review post, you need to be updated on SEO trends. You need to optimize your content. We’ve got the guide.
We’ve got a review post guide that we’ve updated. I, don’t know, every six months for the past five, six years. We keep it updated with the latest SEO trends and all that stuff. So if you want to go grab that and you should go grab the Review post guide. Mattmcwilliams.com review post. We will link to that in the show notes as well. So go grab that and you will know how to optimize for the search engines. It basically shows you how do you rank high on Google for certain M product reviews and convert. That’s the important thing.
If all you do is rank high. We talked about this keyword stuffing and whatnot. If all you do is rank high, but it. The content reads terribly, you’re not going to convert into sales. And if all you do is have a great converting post, but it’s on the second page of Google, nobody’s going to see it.The tree falls in the forest, Nobody’s there to hear it, doesn’t make a sound. So we want to go grab that guide. Make sure you do. I’ll put the link in the show notes for that. All right, last mistake here.
Not thinking about mobile. Guys, how much of the Internet do you access on your phone versus computer? I know for me it’s actually pretty low. I’m on the low end because I’m an Internet marketer, so I prefer to use my double monitor or triple monitor now. Triple monitor setup or, you know, and the keyboard.I don’t like typing with my thumbs and yada yada. But the reality is most People are accessing the Internet on their phone, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve made this mistake. We created a great page. We’ve done, blah, blah, blah, looks great on desktop. Boom.
Let’s roll with it. Oh, crap. Two days later. Oh, guys, this looks horrible on Safari on my phone. Oh, yeah, we forgot to, do the mobile part. Oops. Don’t make that mistake. Make sure you always check in mobile. I like to use a tool called browser Shots. It’s free.I think it’s browsershots. org I’m not looking at it right now, but I’m pretty sure, just Google Browser Shots and you can see what your page looks like in hundreds of different browsers. Now what I do is I check the top five and I make sure. Because I’ve got, Whatever. I don’t even know what kind of phone I have.
I know it’s an Apple, it’s an iPhone. That much I know. Where is it? Let’s see. So my phone is an Apple, it’s iPhone 14, and it’s got whatever the latest iOS is because I just updated it the other day.Okay, so because of that, I know what it looks like on mine, but what does it look like on an Android using Chrome? What does it look like on an iPhone9? I don’t necessarily care what it looks like on an iPhone 6, because that is like 0. 001% of the population. But what does it look like five generations ago on Safari?
What does it look like on the bigger ones? The. What are they? The. This is the pro. I think they’re called the whatever plus. You sound like, I’m not like one of those, like, smartphone nerds. I don’t even know what the new one is. It’s probably, like, something and. But the bigger ones, the max.
That’s what they’re called, I think. What does it look like on there? Does it look a little bit different? What does it look like in the sideways mode, Landscape mode? What does it look like that you need to know those things because sometimes it can really look awful. And if it does, well, you need to fix that. So that’s part two. Part three is about link management. See, there’s mistakes in link management here. The first one is using your ugly affiliate link.
All right, this is the simplest one. If you use the long ugly affiliate link, you know, that’s like, is referred. com, forward slash, ref ID equals and blah. And it has your ID and a bunch of other stuff, and it just Looks ugly. It’s a turn off. It appears spammy. So here’s the thing. Use Pretty Link. I will put a link to it in the show notes. You don’t need to pay for the paid version, just use the free version. That’s all I’ve ever used. Cause it’s all I’ve ever needed. And you use this. And now you have. Remember I said earlier mattmcwilliams.com promoplan that redirects to a, ugly affiliate or not affiliate link, but an ugly link that’s got a bunch of stuff in it. But I can also say mattmcwams.com ClickFunnels that redirects to my Ugly ClickFunnels affiliate link. Mattmcwilliams.com ConvertKit redirects to my Ugly ConvertKit link.
And the other reason I love this is you can change links on the fly. So if, let’s just say ConvertKit, they switch affiliate systems and my link changes. I just go in one place. I don’t have to change it in 200 podcast episodes. I don’t have to change it on 14 YouTube videos and 17 blog posts.I change it in one place, the Pretty Link plugin in WordPress and it changes everywhere. What if, and I’ve talked about this probably like 400 episodes ago, what if I decide, hypothetically, two years from now I no longer want to promote ConvertKit? It could happen. I love them, I think they’re the best. But let’s just say they change something and I’m like, nope, I want nothing to do with them.
I can’t stand them. I’m going to, I’m going to change. Now what I do is I create a page that says, I no longer recommend this product and here’s why. And I go through the reasons. Now I recommend such and such product.I go into Pretty Link and I change that link. So I’m not going to use ConvertKit as the example, but it’s like if I’m promoting whatever and then I switch it. Now instead of that link going nowhere, it doesn’t go nowhere, it goes to a page that explains, hey you, you watched me talk about this in a video and I said all these nice things, but now we’re gonna, we’re gonna recommend this other thing. The next mistake is a big one. And we talked about this two episodes ago.
Not disclosing affiliate relationships. Clearly the FTC has released new guidelines. You have to be transparent. That’s a big part of building trust with your audience. If you fail to Disclose.Not only are you going to be in legal hot water, but you’ve also really lowered your credibility and your trust. So go listen to that episode. It was just two episodes ago about the new FTC guidelines. I won’t belabor that point here. Then the third one is not tracking what works.
Not tracking what works. Make sure you are tracking different links that you use in different places and look at the results. Make sure that you don’t just use one affiliate link for email and social media. Make, you know, use a different link. Use pretty link.
So you could say these are not real links for the record, but if I was promoting, let’s just say I’m going to promote a widget and we’ll call it the XYZ Widget. That’s the name of the company. XYZ Widget. I’m going to have mattmcwilliams.com XYZ widget and that’s going to be what I use on, on the podcast because it’s easy to remember. But on social media, I might just do like XYZ Widge or XYZ Company. And then an email. You don’t see the. The link. We hyperlink it.
So it could be anything. But I’ll still have it tracked differently. And then in the back end of the system, in the affiliate system, I’m going to, if I’m able to. Some systems don’t allow you to do this. There are some pretty lame systems out there. But if you are able to track it differently, set up a different tracking parameter. In the affiliate system, a lot of times you just have to append the URL like click funnels and FusionSoft, first promoter. Other systems, WP affiliate post, affiliate Pro. All those allow you to append the link. And now I know, okay, I got 42 sales from Instagram and 71 from email and only two from Twitter and one from Facebook, just as an example.
And I got. Hypothetically, this is probably not gonna be the case, but I got zero from the podcast. Well, man, I spent a lot of time on the podcast. I wasted a lot of time on there and didn’t even make any sales. Well, how would I know that instead of just, oh, I made 120 sales. Where did they come from? I don’t know. You have no idea. So you can get as granular as you want. You could use a separate link for each email.
And so you could actually tell, wow, I promoted the webinar and I got a hundred people to register and I made 10 sales. And then from There on, all the other emails they sent, I only made seven sales. So I made 10 from the webinar, seven from everything else. What does that tell you? Maybe you learn a lesson that, wow, maybe I need to promote the webinar more.Because if I’d gotten twice as many people to go to the webinar, I could have made 20 sales from that and maybe I wouldn’t even had to do anything else. I don’t know. You’ll learn these things. So track what works, use data, and focus on what brings the best results. Part four is all about mistakes in program selection.
The first mistake here is just promoting kind of scammy, unreliable programs. I, sort of touched on this earlier. But like Google the affiliate program, if somebody has said something bad about the affiliate program, it’s probably easy to find. And just because one person, two people said something bad, especially if there’s a huge affiliate program, don’t worry about that. But if there is a wholesale badmouthing of a, of an affiliate program, you might want to not join, you might want to just avoid it.
So read reviews on their program. Read reviews about the company. Did they get 3. 8 stars out of five are, people complaining about the customer service? And it’s not just the product’s mediocre, but it’s like their customer service is rude.Do you want to be associated with that? So make sure you take time to look that up and see how companies rate. The second big mistake here is just not reading the terms and conditions. Guys, I see this so often like the devil is in the details. I see this so often with affiliates, they don’t read the terms and then they do something that, that gets them into hot water and they didn’t know.
Some companies allow trademark bidding, some companies don’t. I don’t necessarily. I’m agnostic about that because sometimes it’s a good idea and sometimes it’s a bad idea. But here’s the thing. I’m going to enforce the terms, though.If I recommend to the program that they not allow it, I’m going to enforce it. So you need to know that. You need to know, when do you get paid? When, when do you get paid? Because for budgeting purposes, if you’re going to go, say, spend a thousand dollars on ads, be nice to know if it took 60 days to get paid.
I don’t think you should take 60 days to get paid as an affiliate program, but okay. But if you do, if that’s what your, that affiliate program does, you just need to know that. So know the terms. Take the time to read the terms, read the rules, and ask them, like, hey, is there anything I need to know? Ask the affiliate manager.
Is there anything I need to know about promoting this? What am I allowed to do and not do? And then the last mistake here is this goes kind of against what I said earlier, but sticking to a single program. Yeah, I said promote one, but not for freaking ever. Do not limit yourself to just one affiliate program or even two.
Diversification is important. So diversify. Look for different programs, look for different products, look for different price points, look for different. If you’re promoting courses, try to have some things like gender diversity in there. If you have a diverse audience. My audience is 50. 50. Literally, it’s like 5149 female. If you got an audience that’s 99% male, you don’t need gender diversity. Let’s be honest.
But maybe you need diversity in some other things in the sense of, you know, you’re always promoting just supplements. Well, how about a course? Or you’re always promoting just exercise? Well, how about diet? You’re always promoting just time management.
How about something else in the productivity niche and venture out a little bit, find some things that are a little bit outside of your niche and see how you do with those. One of my favorite affiliate programs is Blake Brewer’s program. It’s called Legacy Letter Challenge. Blake teaches people how to write a legacy letter. So it’s only for parents, but how to write a letter that would outlive you.
And it’s kind of like that thing that you want to live forever from you to your children. And he teaches people how to do that. And it is done well in, you know, you think, oh, that’s the parenting niche. Yeah, it’s done great in the parenting niche, but it’s also done well in the personal growth niche. It’s done well in the entrepreneur niche.
And so reach out a little bit, try some things. If you’re interested in promoting Blake, by the way, send me a text. Just shoot me a text at 260-217-4619. I will introduce you to his affiliate manager, and you can promote Blake. Cause, I mean, it’s got a great webinar. It converts really well. But my point in there is, like, we did a webinar with Tom woods recently. Did over a hundred sales. Tom’s not in the parenting niche, but he was like, you know what? That might resonate with my audience.
Let’s try something there. Part five here is just mistakes in Building and nurturing those relationships. The first one is neglecting your email list. I’m not saying that this is a super common mistake, but I see it a lot. When people get to a certain level, their list is a certain size, and then it just gets smaller week after week, or even doesn’t even have to be a big list, but they get to a point where I can make a couple thousand dollars a month and then they just.
And then next thing you know, it’s down to 1900, 1800 and so on. So if you need help growing your list, check out List Launch Challenge. I’ll put a link to that in the show notes. But my point here is do not neglect your email list once you build it. Keep it growing even. I mean, I tell people all the time, like, I’m fine if we grow by 1/10 of 1% a month. Like, I just want to grow. I just want it to be a little bit bigger the first of next month than it was the first of this month. That’s all I care about. And then I want to obviously make sure that I’m, I’m, not letting them go cold.
That’s why we have a system. Like, you’re going to get at least two emails a week from me depending upon how you’re tagged and segmented and what offers you’re interested in, all that you could get more. But like, we’re consistent. You’re going to get two a week at least, pretty much on the same day and time. So we’re going to be consistent so that we’re not neglecting you.
And then the second mistake in here is just not engaging with your audience. Same thing, right? Not engaging with your audience. People comment and you don’t respond. People tell, they tag you on social media, you don’t respond.
They text you, you don’t respond. They email, you don’t respond. That’s not a relationship. You want to build a relationship with your audience that leads to loyalty and trust. That’s how you increase the likelihood of conversions. You’ve got to engage with your audience and make sure at the very least you’re responding to them. And then the last part here is mistakes in mindset. The first one that I think of is just impatience, lack of persistent, not being patient. Success does not happen overnight. You gotta be patient. You gotta be persever. Perseverant. Is that a word? I don’t know. Why, that just sounds weird.
You’ve gotta persevere. How about that consistency? So don’t be discouraged. Like the reality Is when you’re starting out, you’re probably gonna suck at a few things. You’re probably gonna make every one of these mistakes. You’re probably going to suck at some stuff, and that’s okay. Don’t be discouraged by the slow progress. Keep pushing forward. I promise you, you will reap the rewards. That’s exactly what happened with me.
Tired of having a small (or no) email list? It’s time to start growing your fast and easy! Join our List Launch Challenge now and watch our subscribe count soar!
I’ve shared my story my first time. While I actually view it as a huge success, I only made $588. In retrospect, reality is now, if I put that much effort into an affiliate promo and only made $580, I would be like, this sucks. But at the time, it was huge. Fast forward just six or seven later, and I won my first affiliate competition with over $10,000 in commissions.
A couple later, I did almost 14,000. And those types of things got me on the right path. And they, like, kind of made a name for myself. Next mistake here is just not going all in. I, touched on this earlier, but not going all in when we studied what separates kind of those mediocre affiliates from the ones that really stand out, Specifically those who have smaller lists.
Like somebody with a list of, say, 10,000 outperforming a list, somebody with a list of 100,000 plus. How does that happen? Because they go all in. They talk about on their podcast, they talk about on social media, they email about it, they text about it, et cetera, et cetera. Like, mentally, they are all in. They treat the affiliate promotion like their own product launch. So this mindset of I’m going all in, all in is super important. And that’s why I’ve talked about it on a handful of episodes before. But it is super, super important. This is the biggest thing we saw when we looked at those affiliates.
We’d see somebody in who finished in second place, and they, had a list of 14,000 people. The first place affiliate only beat them by three sales of the list of a quarter of a million. The third place affiliate had 80,000. The fourth place affiliate had 110,000. Or they only send 600 leads, but they convert 54 of them versus somebody else who sends 2,000 leads and converts 60.
Yeah, they converted a few more, but they had three times, four times as many leads. What’s that difference? The biggest one is just that mental state of I’m going all in. I’m going to warm up my audience for 10 days before I’m going to promote as soon as I can, and I’m going to mail every day and I’m going to make sure I hit the unopened and then the non clicks and I’m going to put in a little bit of extra work. I’m going to hustle.
Because that little bit of extra hustle, like the difference between going all in and going half in, work wise is you’re going to work twice as much, but you’re going to get four to ten times the results in terms of financials. So, I mean, that’s the thing. If anything, I do. If I can work two times as much, if I could record twice as many podcasts and get, say, five times the results, I would do in a heartbeat. Absolutely. I would do in a heartbeat. I’d find everything I could do and do twice as much to make five times as much money. So don’t make that mistake. Go all in every time. And then the last one sort of ties in is just.
Fear of unsubscribes. What? If I promote this affiliate offer, I’m going to get unsubscribes. My unsubscribes go up. And here’s the thingI’ve studied this left and right. If I send out a blog post, if I send out a podcast episode, if I send out an email that gives them a free report, from me, something free, I get 20 to 30 unsubscribes. If I send out an affiliate offer, I get 21 to 32 unsubscribes. It’s like one or two more. If somebody unsubscribes from my list because they don’t like what I promoted, were they ever going to be of value to me?
I don’t mean this in like a metaphysical, spiritual, esoteric way. Whatever. Like, are they of value to God? That’s not what I mean. I mean to me, in business, were they ever going to buy anything from me? Probably not. And so these unsubscribes, this list size becomes a vanity number. I know people with 5,000 people in list who make over $50,000 a month for their business. And I know people with 50,000 people on their list who make less than $10,000 a month. Why?
Because they’re not actually promoting, but they’re growing their list. I’ll, grow my list. My double. My list is double in a year. How much is your revenue grown? Oh, only by 10%. Yeah, you’re doing something wrong there, having this fear of unsubscribes. Oh, I, you know, I hear I had three people unsubscribe. How many unsubscribed last week when you sent a blog post. Oh come to think of it.
Also three yeah, it’s not that you did a promotion and if somebody, if they do because you did a promotion, what’s the value of the email subscriber? Cuz how are you ever going to make money off of them? It’s a vanity number, so don’t worry about unsubscribes. So as we wrap up here, I’ll say what I said before. You know, mistakes are part of the journey.
Learning from them is what sets you apart. So I would love to hear from you which of these mistakes resonates most with you or which one’s been the biggest problem for you? What’s your biggest takeaway from this episode? Shoot me a text. I’ve mentioned it earlier. Anytime. 260-217-4619 I’d love to hear from you. And remember all the links are in the show notes is why we got that. We have the avatar creation guide, the affiliate promo plan, the review post guide, that ultimate guide to holiday affiliate promotions. Just as the example there list launch challenge, pre link.
Probably something else that I’ve forgotten. They’re all in the show notes. You can go check those out. And lastly, make sure you hit subscribe because you do not want to miss the next episode. It’s a good one. I’m. I’ve got a really special guest on. I’m not going to tell you who it is though. I’m just going to tell you. It’s a really special guest and we are going to be talking about how to turn failure into success.
I had the absolute privilege, my new friend of one of the best podcasters in the world. One of the top podcasts in the world. We’re going to talk about his journey, how he took transform setbacks into opportunities, built one of the top podcast personal brands on the Internet. This episode is a masterclass in resilience and innovation. Ultimately, the art of really just embracing failure is a catalyst to success.
So I’m super excited about this next episode. Make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss it, okay? Just go do that right now. Hit subscribe. You don’t want to miss the next episode. I’ll see you then. Thank you so much for listening today. Remember to check out all of our deep dives into affiliate marketing at TheAffiliateGuide TV. And if you have a question, ask it at AskTheAffiliateGuide.com who knows, maybe you even be featured on an upcoming episode.And lastly, if you haven’t yet, make sure to leave a rating and review wherever you’re listening to this episode. See you soon.