5 Mistakes Content Creators Make with Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing and content creation go hand in hand. Without content, there is simply no way to provide value to an audience or a reason for someone to visit your site. And for most site owners and bloggers, without affiliate marketing, there isn’t a way for your content to generate revenue or have a reliable means of monetization.

However, to think that you can find success and make money by throwing some simple content together and placing a bunch of affiliate links in it, you would definitely be wrong. In fact, relying on just content creation and affiliate marketing is now more competitive than ever before.

To help with this process, today we will take a look at five common mistakes content creators are making when trying to monetize their content with affiliate marketing. If you are currently making any of the mistakes, we highly recommend you implement our recommendations asap.

1 – Creating Content Just for SEO and Google Traffic

If you are a site owner and creating content in an attempt to rank in Google and bring free traffic to your site, it’s probably not going to work. There are now more than a billion active sites on the internet today and many of them are coming out with new content daily. The highest ranking sites in Google have hundreds or thousands of backlinks, and well established content that has continually been shared on social media, updated and also provides real value to an audience.

Even with this being said, SEO is still one of the most powerful and effective ways to drive high quality traffic to your site. If this is still the route you want to go, it’s important to have a highly targeted and effective SEO and link building plan in place.

2 – Not Studying Your Target Audience and Top Ranking Competitors

With the concept of creating content and getting free traffic from Google in mind, it’s also important to think about why you are creating your content, who your target audience and also who your top competitors are. By knowing the answers to these questions now, it can save you a lot of time and frustration later on, while also speeding up the ROI process.

As mentioned, the organic landscape in Google is extremely valuable and very competitive. It’s not just about the content, it’s also about the backlinking and promotion strategy you will need to  have in place. Sites that are ranking at the top of Google are usually spending a lot of time and money on their content creation and marketing… not just to get there, but to also stay there.

This means you will need to study not only who your target audience is, but also the type of content, word count, keywords and everything else that you top ranking competitors are doing to help rank their sites at the top of Google.

3 – Just Creating Content without Real Value or Purpose

The first two mistakes that we pointed out are both extremely important, but an even bigger mistake is to simply create content just for the sake of putting something out. This is especially true if you are trying to make money with affiliate links in your content. In most cases, more isn’t better. Longer and more valuable content is better.

You have to look at it like this… most people are using the internet for one of three reasons. They are either looking for information, to be entertained, or to buy something.

If your content isn’t providing value and catering to the needs of the end user, then your content will likely just get lost on the internet and serve no purpose. Content creation and marketing is extremely hard, simply because there is already so much out there. The best content takes time, is well-prepared and has all of these elements in place.

4 – Missing Call to Actions Throughout Your Content

This mistake can not be stressed enough. You must have multiple call to actions throughout your articles and site content.

Keeping in mind that your content needs to cater to your audience through any of the three needs listed in the previous point, you also need to tell your audience what to do and how to do it–which is often as simple as telling them to “click here”.

The call to action of your content should be the affiliate offer you are trying to promote. Your content should focus on the problem that your audience is having, and your call to action should be the solution they need to act on.

5 – Not Using Remarketing and Social Media to Increase Conversions

One last recommendation for anyone focusing their efforts on content creation. Google is great for search traffic and getting free organic rankings, but it’s also extremely competitive. Most people are going to leave your site and never come back. This is a sad truth and just a way of life on the internet.

However, if you take advantage of pixel tracking, cookies, and remarketing through Google Ads and Facebook Ads, you can show ads to those visitors that have left and maybe get them to return and take action one last time. The benefit here is that the quality of the traffic is much higher, but also much lower in costs to re-acquire.

Take the time to run through each of the common mistakes and recommendations above to make sure you aren’t falling into any of these traps. Content and affiliate marketing work side by side, but they also need to be done correctly to create a winning partnership.

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