Are You A Newbie in Affiliate Marketing? Avoid These Mistakes

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Written by Tamara Jelic

Are You A Newbie in Affiliate Marketing? Avoid These Mistakes

We all started from somewhere in Affiliate marketing, right, and many of us didn’t actually follow the instructions people gave us because we thought we knew better – but guess what – we were kinda wrong because there are some rules you should follow, and here we are, narrowing them for you.

There will be no intro about how these mistakes were made by us and some of the people we know, let’s skip that for now and leave that for an upcoming podcast. And let’s start.

To start With The “Avoiding” List

There are some things you should AVOID, and we’ll just list them so copy this somewhere where you can read it occasionaly:

  • Don’t let this be your Last Shot
  • Don’t quit your job immediately
  • Do not let people discourage you (try not telling people about your plans for AM)
  • Avoid putting all your savings in this
  • Don’t oversee the profit numbers
  • Don’t limit your earnings potential
  • Avoid looking for a secret shortcut to getting everything done right

And before starting all of this – remember – do not quit your job, and if you don’t have a job, find it. You will need to invest yourself 100% – we are not saying there will be no social life, but it will be limited though.

What Not to Avoid

There are also some ground things you should do:

  • Test – test landing pages, creatives, traffic sources, traffic types, bids, everything!
  • Read – read blogs, forums, books, everything that is related to your niche, we recommend STM forum to start with and you will find your way from there
  • Start slow – work on your fundamentals, be patient and prepare your grounds before you decide your journey in AM
  • Always – always have a budget!

save money with coinis

Splitting All This In Details

Don’t just take the first offer you find put it everywhere and hope it will go well. You have to test several offers and many geos and verticals so you can get a hint of what might work.

Do not overtest and overuse sources, don’t test too many verticals and geos. For example, you are testing a new VPN offer you found – see the background of the offer – find forums where other affiliate marketers discuss where they have tested and what didn’t work for them.

High payouts are tempting

Don’t rush right? You got that – Just remember, the payout is just one part of the equation – you need to take other costs into consideration – you have to consider Conversion rate and Traffic Cost. This does not automatically mean that if the payout is high – the profit is high. No.

You will need to calculate your budget wisely and spread it around so you can test and optimize. For example, if some software installation the advertizer offers, gets you 20$ per install it will take you a lot of money to optimize it in order for it to work.

If you are not sure how to calculate if your campaigns are performing well, we got you. Read this blog about How to Calculate if Your Campaigns Are Making Money or nah.

To sum it up for this part – try with low-payout offers first – less than 3$ per conversion.

Everyone Loves Tier 1 – BUT

Tier 1 is mostly connected to English speaking countries or languages English is associated with, and everyone is searching for this type of traffic – which confirms that the competition is HIGH – which, again, means the traffic is more expensive.

So to start – go with Tier 3+ geos, like Africa and Asia. These countries might not have developed advertizing-wise as much as people in the Tier 1 countries. They are less tech-savvy in general – and the volumes are high, trust us.

Use Tools – Try Finding Free Tools For the beginning

Use stats tools, for evaluating landing pages, banners and offers, stats tools etc. This is good to choose the timing for your campaigns – first you collect data and then choose the direction.

In order not to lose money you need to know the timing for your campaign and this is where stats tools come in handy. There are plenty of tutorials online about how to choose the best stats tools, and here is an article where you can find all of them.

ROI vs. Profit

ROI – Return of investment

You will need to sacrifice ROI for your profits to make sense. For example if you see 200% ROI in your stats – but you see that you are spending 10$ to make 30$, you may think: WOW, but the truth is – this is not that impressive right. But a ROI of 20% might not be encouraging – but the profit of 1200$ for spending 1000 is not actually that bad.

So, first focus on maximizing profits in comparison to ROI. If this means avoiding some interesting campaigns that don’t have potential profit-wise, so let it be.

The Pareto Principle is A Real Thing

Meaning, 80% of the effects will usually come from 20% effort. Do not rush into action immediately.

Some affiliate marketers spend way too much time on some other details than finding a good offer that will pay off – for example, they spend too much time on creatives or landers. Or they give up and try another offer without scaling the previous one properly.

Don’t Be Overprotective

There will always be someone who will try copying your stuff, or campaigns. You might not think you are special, since there are soooo many affiliates around the globe. This is kinda inevitable, so don’t waste your energy worrying about this and focus on improvement.

You will figure everything about protecting yourself when you become a super affiliate, don’t worry.

Networking is Important

This subtitle should tell it all. We understand you might want to be a one man show but, when you network, you stay in the loop of what is going on in the industry, as well as what changes might be coming up.

Not to mention, that people from our team, who have been working solo for a long time, had reported that when they were rising as affiliate marketing stars :)), they had a ton of questions. So, networking helped them in many ways.

Ideas are everywhere. You might hear someone talking about some great idea and get inspired for your own. Keep your ears opened.

Be open for collabs on projects. Working together with someone who is successful in this industry can help you grow as well. You can get data faster, you might be better than that person in some aspect, the other one might be faster in some etc. you get the point.

Coinis, Royalada and Dao Ad at Affiliate World Bangkok 2019

Get tickets for conferences, there are special offers if you book them earlier. Our advice is to go well prepared. There will be time for parties, just focus on business first. Now it is not the time due to the coronavirus and stuff, but there are groups on Linkedin, forums like STM forum, etc. that have many rooms opened for any topic which is related to affiliate marketing.

Careless Mistakes Mistakes Mistakes

Many of them right, but first of all – DON’T RUSH.

  • Make sure you check if your link is working properly and if it leads to a proper page, and if the right landing pages and offers are reached properly
  • Specify correct targeting at the traffic source. Mark the correct geos
  • Read emails your affiliate networks send you, they don’t send them because they are bored
  • Read this blog, we didn’t write it because we are bored
  • Don’t run too many campaigns
  • And don’t forget: try not borrowing money to start your Affiliate Marketing business.

Start With Highly Trusted Networks

There will always be risks for you to lose money when you are working with networks. Before joining a network, check STM forum or similar trusted platforms and groups for Affiliate Marketing, and check out their reviews and reputation.

Once you see good results, try switching to shorter payment terms, negotiate to lower your deposits.

Quicker Solution if You are A Website Owner

If a solution is quicker, it does not necessarily mean it is worse. If you do not have money, but you do have traffic and good content, we are here to help. Register on Coinis Publisher Platform and mark which kind of ads would you like to run.

You don’t have to worry about the type of ads and device that the user is using, because our platform is so smart, it does categorizes the distribution itself. Here is the whole article for website owners who are affiliate marketing newbies. Try:

Push Notifications – Push notifications are, as you may know, clickable messages – roughly, and they can reach your users even if the user is not active on your website or app. Learn more about Push here.

push notification gif

Native Ads – Native ads look like regular blog posts, and no one will even notice that they’re reading ads. The CTR is very high, while ads blend along with your content. Learn more about Native Ads here.

In-Page Push – This looks like normal push notifications, but it is placed on the website instead of the browser, as we got used to with regular push notifications. The benefits of In-page push is that it works on absolutely every device, every browser, the user doesn’t have to subscribe, and there is no option to unsubscribe. Learn more about In-page push here.

Smartlink Ads – this is a new tab redirect on a desired action or page on your website. This means you control where you will place this smartlink. Learn more here.

Conclusion

So, this is for now. We will be updating this article occasionally since the Affiliate Marketing industry is changing fast.

Let us know about your opinion, and if you would add something for our newbies. Also, did you make some mistakes we mentioned above? What was your best lesson so far?

Ping us we love to chat!

Tamara Jelic

Tamara Jelic

Head Of Business Development at Coinis Ltd

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Part-time researcher, part-time marketing enthusiast. Wanted to be a teacher, ended up working for the best ad tech company in Eastern Europe.

See all entries by this author