MBA1546 3 Big Affiliate Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

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Hey oh. Welcome to the $100 MBA show, the business podcast that serves as your personal business coach every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn the three biggest affiliate marketing mistakes to avoid. Whether you're a hardcore affiliate marketer or you like to promote a product that you like, from time to time, there are certain things you must not do or it can cost you your business, your reputation and your audience, the people that you rely on most. Many people get into affiliate marketing because it's a great way to earn an income, even a side income. If you generate great content with your blog or you have an audience that you can email or tweet to, they rely on your recommendations. But you can do it wrong. And if you make these mistakes, they can be irreversible. So in today's lesson, I want to show you the three biggest mistakes to avoid when it comes to affiliate marketing so you can steer clear. Let's get into it let's get down to business. Affiliate marketing really exploded about a few years ago and it actually really became popular in the blogging community. First Health bloggers, business bloggers, personal finance bloggers. They would grow an audience. They would write great articles, but they would also make a lot of money through affiliate marketing, through recommendations, through their resources page, through joint ventures, through joint webinars. They would support a product launch. They would support a sale, a promotion, and make reoccurring commissions. The thing about affiliate marketing is that you can get momentum pretty easily, but things can get out of control very quickly. You can fall into these big mistakes very easily without noticing. And this is why I want to highlight them before they happen. So let me jump into the number one mistake you can make when it comes to affiliate marketing, and that's not being picky. You have to be picky when it comes to affiliate marketing. You can't promote every single product that you come across that looks like a good commission. The best affiliate marketers that have been around for a while only support a few items, a few products, a few brands throughout the year doesn't mean that they don't talk about these brands that often. It just means that they don't support that many products. Many affiliate marketers will support 15, 20, 25, 30 different products and will sell these products to their email list, to their audience constantly. Okay? And what this does is it exhausts their lists, right? It also dilutes your recommendation. If you think everything's great, then it's really not a recommendation. And it really doesn't allow you to really focus on certain products and highlight why they're good and offer great bonuses and tutorials on how to use them. The best affiliates do this and they win. So in my opinion, you should not be promoting more than six products in a given year. That doesn't mean, again, that you do not talk about these products that often. You can run promotions and sales and promote these six products a couple times a month. You can dedicate two months for each product throughout the year. Let me give you a practical example. I'm not a big time affiliate marketer. We have brands that support this podcast as sponsors. But in terms of emailing our email list and doing webinars and really pushing a product with our affiliate link to make a commission, we've only actually done this a handful of times. I believe only three times in my over 15 years of online business experience. But in those three times, because I don't do this that often, I've had huge wins, huge gains, and has been incredibly successful for me and obviously the company I'm affiliated with. And every time I've done it, even though I'm not a big affiliate marketer. This is not what I do. Right. Only did it three times in 15 years. Every time we are the top affiliate for that launch, for that brand. And it's because people trust our recommendations, because we don't give a recommendation willy nilly. Now I'm not saying you have to be as conservative as we are, because that's just not where we make our money. This is not our business model. We really create products and services and that's how we make our money. But the point is, less is more. So be picky. Mistake number two, not providing any other content other than your affiliate offers. There are so many affiliate marketers where every single time they send an email, create a post, create a video, anything, it is somehow intertwined with some affiliate offer. There's no pure content to help the audience. The number one asset for every business is your audience. So you have serve them, you have to feed them, you have to give them great content, you have to give them great value. You got to give them great workshops, great videos with no strings attached so you can attract new people and nurture the ones that you have. So I believe in a 4 to 1 ratio, you should have at least four pieces of content or four communications with your list or with your audience for every one. Affiliate communication, affiliate offer. When somebody gets an email from you, they shouldn't just assume, oh, this is so and so. This has got to be some sort of affiliate sale they're doing. The assumption should be, this should be valuable. This should be a great post I should check out. I need a bookmark. This, I need to read this later. I need to watch this video later. I need to watch this now. So that when you do send an offer, they actually read it. If you're an affiliate marketer, you're in the content marketing business, you should be creating great, great content. You're putting a lot out there. You're writing tutorials, you're writing reviews, step by step guides. So that way you can attract people that would be attracted to the products that you offer, the products that you endors. So you're in the media business, you're actually providing great, great content constantly and you're serving those great readers, great viewers, great audience that you have with this content and then saying, hey, if you like what I wrote about this, you're gonna love this product that I recommend. Four to one ratio is my recommendation. Big mistake number three, not being a customer yourself. One of the biggest mistakes affiliate marketers can do is to endorse a product they don't use themselves that they don't actually consume and pay for. If you're recommending a product, you should be using it and you should be using it to the point where your customers know you're using it. And this is going to also help you with, number one, being picky, right? If you're only going to be an affiliate with the products that you use, you're going to be very picky. So if you're going to be an affiliate of an email marketing service, you better be using it for all the emails you're sending out. If you're going to be affiliate for some physical product that you bought off Amazon and you're using your Amazon Associates account, you better have that product and talk about it and give it a full review. If you want people to trust your recommendations, they got to be able to trust you and trust the fact that you actually believe in this product, that you actually have it and you're using it and consuming it and getting a return on investment with it. That's the whole point. If you are the person who's saying, hey, buy this product, don't actually have it, and are actually not showing the benefits of it or the benefits of being an owner of this product, then the actual recommendation is not going to resonate. It's just not going to. What's going to happen is that an affiliate of the same product you're trying to push another affiliate is going to actually get the sale because they're giving more. They're showing how they're using it, they're showing their expertise with it, they're helping people get started with it because they're so familiar with that product or service. That's a true endorsement and that's going to close more sales. It also allows you to be transparent and more authentic so only endorse products you actually use.

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To wrap up today's lesson, affiliate marketing is very tempting to get into. It seems like a great way to sell products that are successful, to leverage an audience that you built and be able to make recurring revenue with the efforts that you put in. But just like every type of business, there are ways to do it wrong. Okay? So I want you to take these three big mistakes to avoid to heart. These are hard things not to do right. These are hard things to kind of follow. Because, hey, it's easy not to be picky. It's easy to just continue to email your list with offer after offer with no value, with no content that can help them. It's easy to recommend any product regardless if you use it or not. It's hard to use products and to be well acquainted with them before you actually sell it. But there's a reason why it's easy. It's not the right way to do it. It's a shortcut. It's going to get you into trouble. Guys, I hope today's episode was helpful. If it was, let me know in an itunes rating and review. I'd love to hear what you think of the show. We read every single review and we have a little thing called Free Ride Friday. It's a weekly random draw we do. Just listen in on Friday to see if you won. We do a random draw with all the reviews that we received and somebody wins a free ride for one of our programs. Lifetime access to one of our full fledged courses. It's that simple. It's our way to say thanks for showing us love on itunes. So go ahead and drop us an itunes rating review today. Before I go, I want to leave you with this business is all about trust. If you can build trust with your audience, keep that trust and keep it strong and growing as the years go by, you will have a thriving business, whether it's affiliate marketing or otherwise. Once you start doing things that will jeopardize your trust, you are walking on thin ice and you're asking for trouble. You're asking to lose everything you've built. Why would you want to do that? So make sure you don't. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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