﻿Why do so many people who get started with affiliate marketing fail and how
to make sure you’re not one of them? We’ve got the answer in this video.
Hi there! It’s Josh from Printful’s marketing team! On our channel, we usually share tips on
how to run a successful ecommerce store. But in this video, we want to take a closer look
at another passive income option you have with Printful—affiliate marketing.
We’ve teamed up with two seasoned affiliate marketers to bring you a list of mistakes
to avoid on your road to affiliate marketing success. Cinquanta Cox-Smith—author, podcaster,
and entrepreneur with more than 10 years of experience in teaching the ins and outs
of the print-on-demand industry. And Ryan Houge—a seasoned ecommerce affiliate who,
through his online courses, podcast, and successful YouTube channel, shares how he’s
managed to build his passive income portfolio that in 2020 made over $170K in profit.
Before we jump into the mistake countdown, if you’re new to Printful, who we are,
and how our Affiliate Program works, I’ll leave links to some helpful videos in the
description below. Be sure to take a look at them after this video!
Now let’s dive in! Mistake number one—Thinking
that affiliate marketing is easy. If you’re watching this, you’ve probably
scrolled past many YouTube videos and blog articles with headlines that promise
you’ll “Get rich with affiliate marketing fast” or “Learn everything to be successful
with Affiliate marketing in three minutes”. And you’ve also clicked on a bunch of them,
right? No doubt, the majority of the information at the core of these videos and articles offers
valuable insights into affiliate marketing, but the promise of instant profit is a hard oversell.
Most people who start with affiliate marketing and hold the expectation of “getting rich
fast” end up disappointed and give up too soon. That’s the key phrase here—giving up too soon.
You don’t have to be a part of that bunch. It’s all about managing your expectations from the
start. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to scare you away from becoming an affiliate marketer. But
it does take industry knowledge, patience, and working on a proper content strategy to get it
right. Depending on what you’re promoting, it might take more than just getting people to click
your affiliate link for you to make profit. Let’s look at Printful’s Affiliate Program as an
example. The Printful Affiliate Program requires affiliates to understand how print-on-demand
works, how to create and sell Printful products. If you’re a Printful affiliate, you’re teaching
your viewers how to start their own ecommerce business. It takes time to educate people. And
it also takes time for your audience to set up a store, create products, and start selling
for you to receive commissions. So you might start seeing results in a month or two.
At face value, affiliate marketing is an attractive business model because it offers
affiliates a chance to get something for nothing. But you don't want to overlook two things. First,
how hard it is to organically build an audience. If you're not doing it organically, you're most
likely paying for ad placements to get in front of people. And second, after you've built an
audience, do you have their trust? Are they going to trust you enough to try the tools, services,
or products that you're an affiliate for? So you really want to focus on those two things.
So when it comes down to managing your expectations, remember that building
an audience takes time. You have to see if the content you're sharing and the services you’re
promoting reach the audience you’ve intended. Be patient and invest time into building that
trust with your audience. Mistake number two—Focusing
on selling rather than helping. And that leads to the second mistake—focusing
on selling rather than educating your audience about products and services you’re promoting.
It might seem at first that the more services you promote, the faster and easier it’ll be to reap
the benefits of your affiliate marketing efforts. But the hard truth is that people don’t want to be
sold to, they want their problems solved. They’re looking for genuine insights and help. So to keep
them interested in your content, you have to show that you understand the product or service
and can talk from personal experience. Cinquinta: Video tip;
Mistake that I made early on in my affiliate career was signing up for every and any affiliate
company website. It did not matter if I didn't use the product or if I had no prior knowledge,
I wanted the money. Money was the root of my failure. And I would gather
all (affiliate promotions) into one blog post. Huge mistake. That definitely left my audience
about what my niche was. Was I a beauty influencer or was I into home goods and home furnishing? They
had no clue. So now I only sign up for affiliate links for programs that I have true interest in,
I've used their service. It definitely makes sharing the companies and affiliate links
more genuine and it already provides a connection with my audience because they've seen me use the
product for years. So I would suggest for you to avoid signing up for any and every affiliate
program. Yes, companies will reach out to you but I would be very selective in this process.
The money looks good but are you truly going to enjoy promoting the product? When people come
to you with their questions, are you going to be knowledgeable enough about the platform and secure
that affiliate sign-up? Mistake number
three—Publishing low-quality content Mistake number three is publishing
low-quality content. As an affiliate, the content you
create is your product. There are many platforms and formats for sharing affiliate content, but, as
our experts mentioned before, it’s not enough to just post an affiliate link on your social media
accounts and hope to see commissions rolling in. Creating high-quality content is not about taking
professional photos or videos, but about creating content that is consistent with your niche, easy
to understand and follow. So before you start, you have to research your competition. See what
other affiliates in the same niche are doing and check their stats—video views, comments, likes,
shares, page visits, and so on. It’ll give you a good understanding of what works. Then create
a plan of what you could share to add value to the information already available on the web.
You want to focus on publishing quality content at all times and being respectful
of your audience's time. Time is becoming more and more valuable. We're being spread thinner and
thinner. And attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, as you would imagine. So you really
want to deliver value to your audience and do it in an efficient manner. I love focusing on
action-oriented content. Whenever I create videos in the ecommerce space , I like to provide
step-by-step actionable content whenever I can.
When I'm creating videos about the software or sites I use, different print-on-demand services,
I make sure that my tutorials and videos are easy to understand for anyone from the age of
five to an adult who's in their prime - grandma, grandad, aunty, uncle - can understand it.
Mistake number four—Ignoring SEO basics Creating quality content is at the core of
successful affiliate marketing. But just like with anything you put out
on the internet—if no one finds it, it might as well not be there. So mistake number four
we have to talk about is ignoring SEO basics. SEO or search engine optimization is the process
of making sure your content is organically discoverable on the platforms you’re posting.
You want to always focus on good SEO, whether you're selling a product on Amazon or Shopify
or you're just publishing YouTube videos. We're always competing for the top of search.
Top of the search is where you're going to get the most visibility. And everything is a function of
getting visibility. If you're on page two, nobody probably knows about you, regardless if you're
selling something or doing affiliate marketing. We need to assist the algorithms in understanding our
content. It's going to vary platform to platform, but you really want to make sure that you have
good and accurate titles with relevant keywords. Titles typically carry the most weight when it
comes to ranking your content in search. Any time you can provide backend tags, for example,
YouTube videos allow you to put 500 characters of backend tags that people don't see on the
frontend. So our viewers don't even know they're there, but we're assisting the algorithm and
hopefully getting indexed on additional keywords that maybe didn't show up in the title.
Make sure to research the best SEO practices for the type of content you’re creating and
platforms you’re posting on. In the long run this will help you avoid spending a lot of
money on advertising your content and will boost your visibility in your niche.
Mistake number five—Not creating an email list or a Facebook group
An affiliate marketing sales funnel is a defined path that a consumer takes before
purchasing a product or service. It includes different steps for potential customers
so that they can easily move towards purchasing the core product thus generating your affiliate
sales. Basic affiliate funnel looks like this: 1. You link a product or service on your blog,
YouTube, or Social media channel, create content about it and start promoting
2. Your audience clicks on your affiliate link, visits the promoted product or service website,
and makes a purchase. 3. You earn a commission
But in a lot of cases the funnel is more complicated. People might need time to consider
if what you’re promoting is really for them, maybe they want to get more information about
the product or service. That’s where creating an email list or a Facebook group comes in.
It’s a chance for you to remarket your affiliate product. Either by sending out newsletters with
additional information or creating discussions or informative posts in your Facebook group.
You want to remain in contact with your audience. I don't mean you have to be in
constant contact, for example, emailing them every day. In my opinion, you don't need to do that. But
you do want the ability to email them. It's one thing to say: “Hey, email your audience every day
and constantly remind them that you're there”. You don't have to do that. But I like to remind people
on my YouTube videos to subscribe to my channel. Every now and then I tell them that if they're
enjoying the content, there's a bell icon they can click and YouTube will notify them every time
I release a new video. Little things like that. Remember, you are competing with a million other
things when it comes to your audience and their attention. They can watch your video or
they can do literally anything else. Step one is that they need to know your video, email,
or your product exists. You want as many touch points as you can get. I'm a big fan of email,
because it's safe to say that just about everyone has an email address. Facebook groups would rank
as a close second. While not everyone's on Facebook, it has a billion daily active users.
And Facebook shifted their algorithm to favor groups and content that's shared in a group
that one is in. So when you log into Facebook, you're more likely to see a discussion that's
generating a lot of user engagement at the top of your newsfeed. And again- you're competing
for that top of search, or the top of the newsfeed. And Facebook is assisting people
to find your way back into your Facebook group. It's another great way to maintain multiple touch
points with your audience. It also helps you build trust in your audience's eyes, especially if you
can provide them with quality content. Mistake number six—Not testing
your affiliate links You’d be surprised with how often
affiliates lose potential commissions because they haven’t tested their affiliate links. And it’s not
difficult to make an error—accidentally deleting a character from the link while copy-pasting it or
not adding a space before it if using emojis. It’s simple—if your audience can’t click through your
link, all the effort you’ve invested in your affiliate content and strategy won’t matter.
I've shared before about this one huge mistake I made of having a broken affiliate link. Not only
in one or two places, but just about everywhere - on my website, description links under my YouTube
videos, and even in my podcast description. This mistake probably cost me a whole lot of clicks,
money, and getting new people over to Printful. I'm grateful for the folks at Printful who
reached out to me to help me fix this mistake because it definitely saved me a lot of trouble
in my affiliate journey. So one tip I have for you is to double, triple check your affiliate links
and make sure everything is working properly so you can gain your affiliate income and people
are able to sign up to Printful. I'm very used to testing my stuff. But I also use
link shortening services to make my affiliate links more attractive. A lot of affiliate links
are long, they've got random characters in the URL. Some people might not want to click them
because the links can look weird. If you use link shortening services like Bitly,
you can sign up for free, make more attractive affiliate links, and name them yourself. You
can actually write in words that are relevant to the product or service you're promoting.
So, that’s a wrap on our list of the most common affiliate marketing mistakes. To sum it all up:
Remember that it might take a while to see results from your affiliate marketing efforts.
Choose to promote products and services you use. You’ll earn people’s trust if you share content
that helps them solve their problems and gives them insights from your first-hand experiences.
Don’t rely on just posting your affiliate links, but do your research
on the product or service you’re promoting and create quality content around it.
Don’t forget to make your content SEO friendly. Make sure to keep your audience coming back
to you by creating multiple touch points through an email list or a Facebook group.
And finally—don’t forget to test your affiliate links.
We hope this video will help you on your affiliate marketing journey! And
huge thanks to Cinquinta and Ryan for sharing their expert tips. Make sure to
check out and follow their channels, I’ll link them in the description.
Are you an affiliate marketer? What mistakes have you encountered? Do you have any tips on
affiliate marketing? Leave them in the comments! If you liked this video, remember to subscribe,
like, and hit the bell icon to get notifications when we post new videos!