Affiliate Marketing: 21 Tips And Strategies To Make More Money

Affiliate marketing can be an excellent way to earn passive income by promoting products and services you love and believe in. 

However, it’s more complicated than just signing up for a program and watching the money roll in. New affiliate marketers make many mistakes, which can cost them time, money, and potential earnings. 

In this ultimate guide to affiliate marketing, we’ll cover everything from finding the right affiliate programs to promoting products effectively and avoiding common mistakes. So, let’s start with the 11 mistakes you must avoid to become a successful affiliate marketer.

11 Affiliate Marketing Mistakes You Must Not Make

Affiliate marketing is a lucrative way to make money with your online business. But unfortunately, I am seeing bloggers making the most basic affiliate marketing mistakes.

We don’t want that to happen to you.

Affiliate marketing is one of the ways folks make money online without ever going through product creation and all that it involves.

All you do is identify a product, sign up for its affiliate program, promote it, generate sales, and get paid commissions.

Affiliate Marketing Sounds Easy?

Up to a point… however, it relies on one simple but essential factor – Traffic!

If you can’t drive targeted traffic you are going nowhere!

No point in sending a Fitness Offer to people who signed up to a blog about Knitting & Crochet and vice versa.

Likewise, if you Buy Traffic (pay-per-click or Facebook advertising) you need to know your audience and what motivates them!

In 2024 at least 60% of affiliates are using “blogging” as their primary method of “driving traffic” to their website.

But Affiliate Marketing has changed!

Sure, blogging still works and you should use it – but these days it requires a more sophisticated approach, better research, and above all better writing! Here is a list of some of the best affiliate programs for 2021 and beyond.

1) Many bloggers think they know Affiliate marketing already

This is one of the craziest reasons bloggers fail at making money with affiliate marketing. Once you think you ALREADY know something, you completely eliminate your chances to acquire new knowledge.

I know the Internet is full of free offers on Affiliate Marketing but many of these are obsolete. Those things that worked some years ago absolutely have no impact in today’s world of content marketing.

I clearly remember my early days when Article Marketing on EzineArticles and web 2.0 properties like Squidoo used to flourish. We worked with article spinning tools, stuffed articles with keywords, got links from spam sites, etc, and all that worked for a while. But times have changed.

In order to survive in today’s online marketing world, we have to be opened to new things and adapt to changes through learning. Seek out the best training you can find, ask for recommendations and BUY it!

At this stage in a post, you might quite rightly expect to see a recommendation for an Affiliate Marketing product – but we are not doing that here because as we said, products and techniques change regularly and what we recommend today may not be appropriate a year from now.

We will however recommend a Facebook Group that everyone should join if you are serious about Internet Marketing – Internet Marketing Super Friends. It is not just about affiliate marketing, there are lots of tips on everything to do with Internet Marketing and a real wealth of talent regularly posts.

Successful bloggers and affiliates are always learning – they never assume they know it all!

2) They promote products just for the money

This is the Ugly Side of affiliate marketing – promoting any product just for the commissions is unethical. For starters try every product you promote out yourself and ask yourself, would I buy this?

Now assuming you have found a product you want to support, how can you be confident that your readership will want to know about it?

For starters, from publishing articles on your blog you can do some useful market research.

=> Try to identify the articles on your blog with the highest number of social shares.
=> Identify the articles with the highest number of comments.
=> Identify the articles that are most linked to.
=> Identify the articles that drive the most clicks from search engines.

And of course, you can also find out what your readers need most by running a survey on your blog.

The more relevant the product you promote, the more your chances of generating sales and commissions.

3 – They don’t invest in required tools

There is no business you can successfully do online without investing in the right tools. For bloggers who want to succeed in affiliate marketing, there are a couple of tools you must get in order to positively affect your sales. Some of these tools include;

=> Premium web hosting for fast speed
=> Professional fast-loading theme
=> Premium product review plugins that support user-generated reviews
=> SEO tools – for example, Plugins like Yoast

And very importantly…

They don’t keep up to date with changes in the marketplace. Technology, SEO and Social Media are changing all the time – please accept that what works now, may work differently 6 months from now.

4) They have no knowledge about the products they promote

This one is a close relation to promoting a product just for the money! How can you ever sell anything effectively without knowing the product? Would you buy a car from a salesperson who did not own a car?

As an affiliate marketer, the best affiliate sales I have ever made have come from a product I use myself. This is the best way to position you to make more money from an affiliate product.

If you promote a product you are using, you are going to promote it from the standpoint of a happy user. You will be able to demonstrate how it’s helped you out. Remember readers love stories and the story of how you found and fell in love with this product is one of the strongest persuasion strategies. (But remember it only works if it is authentic and genuine – I strongly discourage ‘made up’ stories.)

One More Tip:
Most product creators will produce a sales letter – professionally written by a skilled copywriter but remember, people buy from people, so I encourage you to add your own introduction (video is good) when promoting a product. Just saying ‘check this out’ rarely works – give people a reason why they should check this out!

5) They just do what others do

If you want to make extra sales, you have to distinguish yourself from other affiliates.

So many affiliates just do a Copy and Paste – don’t do that! Be an innovator – come up with an angle others have not.

Have you spotted a benefit that others have not? It might even only be a benefit for you and a few others, but add that benefit and chances someone else will see that as a benefit also.

Additionally – and this is very important, add your own STORY as to why you got involved with this product…

I recently read the success story of one mother who started online simply to make enough to pay for horse riding lessons for her daughter. This was of course targeting the Newbie Marketer and it also had that all-important ‘feel good’ feeling.

Other things you can do…

For instance;
=> Add a special bonus for your readers
=> Offer a special discount code from the product author
=> Get co-branded sales page from author

Successful Affiliates are innovators – always be looking to add value to the offer, in terms of either a special bonus or better still in my opinion – reveal an angle or a strategy that no one else is talking about…

6) They lack strategies that work

Now, this point is closely related to point 5 above. If you use your brain as an affiliate blogger, you can always come up with promotion strategies that others don’t have. Most affiliate marketing platforms today allow vendors to generate special coupon codes for their affiliates. The best part is that most vendors are ready at any time to get a unique code for you. With this in mind, you can always negotiate special deals for your readers.

One of the things I did in the past that generated some crazy sales is that I arranged a product-focused interview with a vendor on my blog. This enabled me to phrase questions that triggered appropriate answers to provoke more sales. You must always think of such new strategies and do things differently on order to make more affiliate sales.

7) They do feature-based reviews

Buyers want to know – WIIFM = What’s In It For Me?

Yet so many product reviews concentrate on the FEATURES rather than the BENEFITS.

As Theodore Levitt said “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want to buy a quarter-inch hole!”

And for those of us old enough to remember – Mr Levitt also said: “Kodak sells film, but they don’t advertise film; they advertise memories”

Get it?

Don’t concentrate on the features – focus on the benefits!

Remember…

Features Tell, Benefits Sell

The raison d’être of any affiliate product you promote should be to solve a problem. If that problem-solving capacity is not underlined in the review, you are missing the point of the product!

8) They neglect SEO

For most bloggers, without huge budgets, SEO is the single best source of targeted traffic. Yes, Social Media also works, but my experience is that SEO brings the most targeted traffic.

How to not neglect SEO?

=> Do keyword research before doing an affiliate product review
=> Target the right buying or problem-solving keyword in your review posts
=> Do proper OnPage SEO on your product review posts
=> Promote product review posts on social media to generate likes, tweets, and shares.
=> Create backlinks to product review posts
=> Check out the best SEO Tools

The more traffic from search engines you get to your review posts, the more the sales you are able to generate.

Remember SEO changes all the time – it is no longer about trying to fool search engines, (Black Hat) rather it is about working with search engines to provide information in the best possible format. On this subject make sure to check out Schema.org for a set of extensible schemas that enables webmasters to embed structured data on their web pages for use by search engines. This is the new SEO!

9) They don’t promote products with recurring payments (and commissions)

Put simply when promoting products you have a choice of promoting a One Time Payment product or a product that requires a recurring payment (Software or membership usually). Of course, you will have a mixture of both but whenever possible I like promoting recurring payments that pay me commissions for the lifetime of the recurring payment. Payments are usually monthly but sometimes quarterly or yearly renewal options payout also.

To earn recurring permissions…

Identify membership sites in your niche that have affiliate programs and focus on promoting them to your audience. In addition, there are software and hosting companies that pay out recurring commissions.

10) They don’t have a targeted list

One of the mistakes I committed in my early days of blogging was that I started my blog without building a list.
It’s generally said, “the money is in the list” and that’s true to an extent. But if your list is poorly built, you are never going to see any money from it.

Something not so frequently mentioned is:

Not All Subscribers are Equal

Some subscribers just because of how they found you are more likely to buy than others…

In other words, quality usually beats quantity. I have seen bloggers be tempted to buy or rent lists but it should be avoided. I could go into great detail about why you should avoid it – but HubSpot has a pretty good blog post on it.

A targeted list of 1000 subscribers is better than a mix-up of 10000 subscribers. If you want more subscribers and more targeted traffic write posts directly related to your visitor’s problems – which demonstrate your knowledge and experience. Then when you have a product that solves those problems you have targeted subscribers who are more likely to convert to sales.

Recommended: Increase Earnings by Organizing Your Affiliate Information

11) They don’t focus on Content and Targeted traffic

To succeed in Affiliate Marketing you need:

=> Quality content
=> Targeted Traffic

As a blogger and an affiliate marketer, this matters more than anything else.

Yet, so many bloggers concentrate on things like design and the colors and size of fonts when really their priorities should be quality content and relevant search engine traffic.

There is no point in having the best theme and being hosted on the most robust server on planet earth, if you don’t have content that attracts readers who then subscribe to your list.

One Final Thought…

To succeed as an affiliate marketer you should always be learning – and this website has lots of resources for that.

In addition to links on list building and general blogging this website has lots of links on how to produce engaging content and content that gets shared.

To Your Affiliate Marketing Success,

Enstine Muki

Author Bio: Enstine Muki is an affiliate marketer and blogger. Follow him on Twitter

10 Top Tips For Affiliate Promotions

Now I appreciate some of you will be thinking — I don’t have much of a list or much of a following – so how can I go about promoting a affiliate products.

Well of course in theory the bigger the list you have, the more sales you will get – but let me make another point. Some of the most successful affiliates for the launch of PopUp Domination actually had relatively small lists, but what they had that more than made up for it was a very responsive list.

So you might ask how do you build a responsive list? There are a number of factors that matter – but the two I would highlight are:

1) Your reputation with the subscribers on your list. If you are someone who consistently offers your subscribers great value in the way of information and strategies, then they are more likely to read your emails and more importantly, take action based on your recommendation in those emails.

I have said it before, but I will say it again – only ever promote products you believe in and would buy yourself. The quickest way to lose that good reputation is to constantly be peddling and hyping STUFF – just because you might make a few commissions.

2) The second factor is of course your niche. I have a pretty responsive list but if I was to start promoting a course on Pay Per Click marketing, I can bet the response would not be so good. You see most of the people on my list are not using PPC – but rather are bloggers.

People (myself included) have often said the Money is in the List — well that is true, but the real fact is, that the money is in the responsiveness of the list!

OK, let’s get started:

1. Review The Product

Reviews have been one of the most powerful things I do for launches, for a lot of reasons, including:

• Proof I have the product and I’m not just promoting to make money.
• Proof it works.
• Long team sales from new readers coming to my site.
• SEO Rankings. Tip: Name your post something people will search in Google to find it.

You want to of course do a write-up on the product and include screenshots and a video would be a great addition.

One great example of a review was by David Risley for my launch. He was able to sell over 100 copies of my plugin by writing a post, adding images and a video then emailing it to his list.

ANOTHER TIP: Not sure when product launches are happening? Visit your competition and the gurus in your industry and sign up for their list. If there is a product being launched, they will be promoting!

Then you can go about getting involved, usually, you can find the affiliate page is linked to in the footer of the sales page. If not, Google the name of the product + affiliate.

2. Email Pre-launch

For a long time, I was against emailing pre-launches because I thought I would lose a whole load of my list to someone else. However this isn’t the case, your readers will not unsubscribe just because they opt-ed into someone else’s list. In fact, they probably already are on dozens of other lists already. As long as you provide value, your subscribers will stay with you!

Emailing pre-launch is great because it builds momentum and interest.

The problem with emailing a direct sales page is that people have no idea why they need to look at the product in the first place. It’s a lot easier to tempt them in with a free video or download from the pre-launch so that they can learn about the product and why they so desperately need it.

It’s also a good opportunity to build trust and the fact is, most of the time, your readers don’t realize you are promoting a squeeze page because you’re making money from it.

3. Follow Up

Often you have 3 or even more opportunity to email, blog, Facebook, Tweet, etc… a launch:

• Launch Day
• 24 Hours Till Close/Price Increase
• Reopen for 24 hours/Webinar

I have even promoted a launch where they suggested you emailed as many as 12 times!

We all know email is the most important thing you could be using right now, that’s why all the big marketers do so much to build a list.

It’s simple, you build a list, and then at any given time you can email your subscribers a product launch and cash in. For me, it literally is the closest thing to printing money. I have friends who travel the world and live off just emailing promotions to their list.

A lot of people don’t mind sending promotions, heck if I minded, I wouldn’t be on half the lists I’m on. If you want more information on list building, check this post out!

4. Interview The Creator

Typically product owners will be mega busy coming up to their launch, however, this is pure gold as well.

I often interview people before they launch their products. This way, when they launch and all the thousands of people are research in Google about the product and who created it, they see my website. Then once they check out the interview, they end up buying through my affiliate link.

5. Split Test Emails

I have many different lists, something I recommend everyone does.

What I do is email one of my lists (for example my Retireat21 subscribers) a new promotion/product launch.

When I do this I use two different Subject Lines in the email I’m sending out and then whichever SUBJECT LINE gets the best open rate – I roll out and use on the rest of my lists.

I mean if your email doesn’t get opened – you may as well not have sent it!.

This is a very simple split test (there are a lot more complicated split tests you can do another day) and I have been blown away with how beneficial it has been to me. I used to just use one subject line — sometimes I nailed it and got lots of OPENs but other times I did not.

At least with this simple split test, I’m assuring myself a lot more open with the majority of my list by testing on part of the list first.

The other advantage of emailing a smaller list first is that you can discover if the OFFER is converting. If I get bad results with my initial mailing using two different subject lines, I may well not roll out across all my lists.

6. Promote The Right Product

There is no point in me promoting a Pay Per Click product to my readers and buyers because I have never talked about PPC and more of my subscribers are probably not interested in it.

You want to promote something with broad appeal to the subscribers on your list.

Let’s take, for example, PopUp Domination – this is software that could be used on just about every website because it will make the website owner more money. That means that just about everyone in the internet marketing industry can promote it. Bloggers, Social Media People, PPC guys, Product Creators — all of them need a product like PopUp Domination.

The advantage to me of course is, that I have a very wide range of people who I can approach as potential affiliates – even though in many instances it would not make sense for me to promote their product in return because my subscribers are not interested in their specific niche.

That is what I mean by BROAD. Of course, there are lots of people who will say to go NICHE and sub-niche. That works as well – I am just pointing out that with PopUp Domination we deliberately went BROAD.

7. As an Affiliate Promotion – Offer a BONUS!

This is one of the most important things you can do when promoting someone’s product – ADD A BONUS for all the buyers who buy via your affiliate link.

A lot of people follow most people in the industry, so by you offering a free consult, review, product, download, etc.. you will stand out and they will choose to buy via your affiliate link, over someone else’s.

Recently when promoting a product launch by Gideon Shalwick, I put together a special bonus offer for people who bought via my link. This proved to work quite well because several people commented that they bought via my link because of my bonus offer.

James Schramko mentioned how he built a business around offering a bonus for each product he promoted in an interview with Yaro Starak, click here to see it!

8. Use It In a Tutorial

Depending on what you are promoting, you can sometimes use it in a tutorial, for example, Aweber. I can teach people how to make money with email marketing and promote Aweber as my choice of email software.

I have found this to work very well!

9. For Successful Affiliate Promotions – Use All Of Your Resources

There are so many ways to get the message out, some people simply overlook them, you can:

• Blog about the product
• Tweet/Facebook about it
• Build a review site (someone did this to PopUp Domination and they were one of our top affiliates)
• Email your mailing list
• Buy advertising

10. For Successful Affiliate Promotions – Think Outside Of The Box

Just Ask!

Sometimes, the best thing you can do contacts the product creator and ask them what they can do to improve the deal for your readers.

Here are a few of the things they can offer you:

• $1 Trial Offers
• Special Landing Pages
• Webinars (these convert like crazy, just ask Lewis Howes)
• Discounted Price
• Special Bundles
• Coupon Codes

At the end of the day, product creators rely on affiliates to make their launches a success, so they will at least listen to what you have to say.

Read more: Making Money with Email Marketing and an Autoresponder Series

Increase Earnings by Organizing Your Affiliate Information

How many times have one of the following situations happened to you?

• You’re about to write a post and mention an affiliate product, then have to spend time to look for the affiliate link for it.
• You’re in need of a new banner for an affiliate product, but have no clue where to get it.
• You’re curious about your earnings for an affiliate product that isn’t under the umbrella of a major network, so you have to search for the affiliate site login, figure out your username, reset your password, and so forth.
• You’re watching your Twitter stream and see someone asking for opinions on an affiliate product that you wrote a review for sometime last year, so now you have to find that review post.
• You’re just shy of your next payout on SamCart and want to do a little push on all of the affiliate products you have under that network, but their promo materials are spread out all over the place.

While some of these things don’t take a lot of time, I’d bet there have been situations where you passed including that affiliate link, banner, checking your stats, tweeting your review post, or making several product pushes because you were too busy to mess around with tracking the information down.

To avoid this kind of problem in the future, why not get all of your affiliate marketing information all in one place? My favorite way to organize is simply using Google Docs. It’s free with your Google Account, and it’s accessible wherever you go, from your desktop at work to your laptop at home or your iPad to your Android when on the go without messing around with USB drives or wishing you were on a different device.

The Ultimate Affiliate Marketing Organizer

The following are important pieces of information I have in my Google Spreadsheet to organize my affiliate marketing resources.

Product Name – Simply the affiliate product name.

Contact (name, email, twitter) – I find that it’s best to keep track of who to contact when you have questions or concerns about a particular affiliate product or program. Most are happy to help you if it means you’re going to promoting their product! I’d also suggest following your favorite affiliate product creators on Twitter – it’s a great way to see if there are any updates to the products, sales, etc. coming that they might not have notified their affiliates about via email.

Niche – If you do affiliate marketing for more than one niche, then this will allow you to filter your programs just for one particular niche when promoting via blog posts, Twitter, and other avenues.

Type – Chances are, your affiliate products are made up of eBooks, events, membership programs, courses, plugins, themes, applications, and so forth. I like having mine distinguished that way if I’m specifically wanting to write a post on top WordPress plugins or themes, I can just filter those types in my spreadsheet.

Network – Most of your affiliate products may fall under major networks like SamCart, E-junkie, ShareASale, and other major affiliate networks, but you can also include links to those that have their own proprietary network.

Vendor ID – Clickbank, for example, has a Vendor ID for different affiliate programs which you can see in reporting. It’s good to have as a quick reference when you’re looking through your earnings reports.

Login & Password – Nothing is more frustrating than having to find login information. I wouldn’t suggest putting your full password in an online document, but instead maybe hints to your password as some networks require funky passwords with caps and special characters while others limit you to a certain amount and specific types of characters.

Product Price – If you are an affiliate for more than one eBook and have the chance to promote just one for a particular occasion, this might help you decide which to choose based on the audience. If you think they’re big spenders, go with the highest priced item. If not, go with the lowest priced one.

Minimum & Maximum Commission – When you’re looking to increase your earnings, the amount you’ll make off a product will definitely influence your decision on how much promotion to do for the product. The more you could make, the more you will probably want to promote it!

Promo Materials, Login & Password – While affiliate products on ShareASale have their banners and suggested text links on that affiliate network, products on other networks such as Clickbank and E-junkie tend to have offsite promotion material links. Some of these are available to the public while others are behind a separate login. Finding these materials (banners, swipe files, etc.) has always driven me insane, so having the links all in one place can be a lifesaver!

Affiliate Link (full & Bit.ly) – Depending on where you want to share your affiliate link, you might want to grab the full thing or just one that you have customized on Bit.ly or another URL shortener of your choice. Note that you’ll also want to follow affiliate program emails religiously and periodically check up on your affiliate links as some products might change affiliate networks. Nothing bites worse than making a sale and then losing the commission simply because the new affiliate network can’t track the old links (but can conveniently still make the sale).

Blog Link – If you use plugins like Ninja Affiliate for WordPress that converts your affiliate links to something more customized, then you can stick that customized URL here.

Review Post (full & Bit.ly) – If you have a review post for a product, you’re more likely to make more income from it. Hence, you’ll want to link to the full URL for the review post in your writing and occasionally reshare the shortened one on Twitter. This will help you keep track of those links.

Video – Videos make for great promotional content – especially if your video shows how easy a particular affiliate product is to use, such as setting up a plugin or WordPress theme. Keep your video links handy to push in a post or share with someone asking questions about a particular product and be sure that your review post link is in the video description.

Minimum Payout – Just something nice to know if you want to figure out how far you need to go to get paid again.

Earnings – Want to know how successful you are with your affiliate programs? Then track your earnings! Networks like Clickbank will let you run earnings reports from the last year, and E-junkie will let you see affiliate-specific earnings from the past few years (mine goes back through 2006). This will give you a good idea which products your audience loves and which ones, no matter how much you push them, are just not making enough income to be worth it.

Updated – This friendly column will remind you if it’s about time to check your earnings, links, etc. to make sure there’s nothing new you need to know about.

Get This Spreadsheet on Google Docs

If you’re not in the mood to create this spreadsheet from scratch, never fear! You can view the Google Docs’ spreadsheet online. If you are signed into your Google account, simply use the File > Save option to save it to your documents and start filling it in with your information.

Excel and Open Office Versions

If you don’t have Google Docs, or would prefer to save it on your local machine, go to the Google Docs version and use the File > Download As to save it as your desired file type. I’d suggest Open Office or Excel if possible for functionality.

Filtering

In the Google Docs version, you don’t need to do anything – just use the arrows on each column to sort / filter. If you download it in another version, be sure to add the Filter back to the header row so you can sort / filter specific information using the arrows. In Microsoft Excel 2007, select the first row and use the Filter option on the Home tab under Sort & Filter. In Open Office Calc, select the first row and use the AutoFilter option under Data > Filter in the menu bar.

Your Affiliate Marketing Organizer

Do you use a similar spreadsheet or other ways to organize your affiliate marketing logins and program information? Is there anything you would add to this spreadsheet? Please share your thoughts in the comments!