9 Harmful Affiliate Marketing Don’ts

Affiliate marketing is readily one of the most convenient ways to make money online. The reason most online marketers never fail to add it to their portfolio. However, not many marketers get to make it real good with affiliate marketing for many and varied reasons. Some of these reasons hinge on the fact that many affiliate marketers tend to do certain things they should ideally not do. Some of these things do help to ruin most of their affiliate marketing efforts, the reason it becomes difficult for many of them to do great in the business. For instance, many affiliate marketers tend to focus more on the wrong aspects of affiliate marketing and end up losing some potential earnings because they don’t really know what they’re doing. Here are some of the things you should never do if you want to make some appreciable success out of your affiliate marketing activities.

1. Don’t Fail to Research your Competition

As an affiliate, it is required that you promote products/services by way of affiliate links. It is of utmost importance therefore to know what your competition is doing. You must through detailed research know at all times what your competition is up to. Make sure you know your competition well enough and how they are promoting. The aim is to do better than what they are doing that is working for them. If for instance they have more links than you do pointing towards their website/blog posts, then your chances of making money are going to be slim when compared to them. To match up, you will need at least as many affiliate marketing links that they have in order for your content/blog posts to be sufficiently competitive. You really need to stand out from the crowd if you want more people to visit your website/blog post and to buy anything via your affiliate links.

2. Don’t Fail to Know the Product/Service you Promote

It is a truism in marketing that you cannot effective sell any product you don’t know well enough. Not knowing well enough the product you are promoting via your affiliate links is a recipe for failure. This is why you must know what you’re promoting and why people should buy it if you want your affiliate marketing efforts to yield good results. If you don’t know much about the product you are promoting, how then can you expect to effectively market it to others?

3. Don’t Ignore Search Engine Optimization, SEO

SEO is extremely important if you want your website to rank high in the SERPs of search engines. SEO helps online searchers to locate you on the web. If people can’t find your content/blog posts, you can’t expect such people to buy anything via your affiliate links. Many bloggers tend focus more on other aspects of their websites but ignore SEO completely. That is one huge marketing mistake that could cause them to lose out on a lot of money. Without the right SEO on your blog content, it is lost completely in the deep sea of the internet. Affiliate marketers can therefore not afford to ignore SEO of their content.

4. Don’t Rely Only on Affiliate Traffic

For your affiliate marketing efforts to have the right traction and be successful, it is hugely important that you don’t rely on only one source of traffic. The more traffic sources to your website, the better for your affiliate marketing efforts. If you limit yourself to one traffic source, you lose out on traffic/visitors to your website and consequently your earnings. Taking advantage of many web resources/channels particularly social media to promote your content helps to diversify your traffic sources and it is good for traffic.

5. Don’t Pick Quantity over Quality

In affiliate marketing, you should never sell your visitors short. Always give them the best on offer. Promoting quality links is preferable to the quantity of links. Don’t focus on how many affiliate links to have on your content. It is better to focus more on the quality of those links. Too many poor links on your content can earn you a penalty from search engines. Too many poor links makes your content to look like spam and search engines hate spam. Your content cannot rank high in SERPs if search engines see it as spam. If your blog content does not rank high, it is difficult for many people to see it and as such, many people won’t buy products through your affiliate links.

6. Don’t Spam with Affiliate Links

Search engines are usually very sensitive to spam and there is always a very thin line between sending out affiliate links to people and spamming them. Never make the mistake of trying to send out too many affiliate marketing emails at a time thinking that doing so will help you to get more leads/customers. If you do, you risk sanctions from search engines if they classify your content as spam.
 
7. Don’t Fail to Have a Plan

In affiliate marketing just like any other business, if you fail to plan, you are planning to fail. You must have a workable plan in place if you want your affiliate marketing efforts to be successful. Just like any other human activity, if you don’t know what you’re doing or where you’re going, you go nowhere fast. You cannot expect people who visit your content/blog posts to buy anything via your affiliate link if you don’t have a plan in place to lure them to do so. In affiliate marketing, planning and good strategy matter a lot. It is of paramount important to always have a good plan in place to help you make money via your affiliate links. You must know what you are doing before your content/blog posts can expect to rank highly in search engines. If they don’t, it will be pretty difficult if not impossible for many people to visit your website and do business with you.

8. Don’t Fail to Identify Target Groups

If you market content, your audience is your primary market. To market effectively to your audience, it must be properly identified and segmented. If you don’t, you’ll be making one common mistake many bloggers and content marketers make by not identifying their target groups when they do affiliate marketing. If you don’t know who your target group is, then how are you supposed to sell anything via an affiliate link? If you want people to buy anything via an affiliate link, it is of paramount important that you identify your target market very distinctly. You must know who you’re marketing to and how they are going to respond to your content if you expect them to buy anything. If you don’t, most of your marketing efforts particularly via affiliate links will yield very little or no results at all.

9. Don’t Copy-Paste Other Affiliates

If you have the habit of copying and pasting content from other affiliates, you risk penalties from search engines. For this reason, if you want to be really successful with affiliate marketing, then it’s important that you regularly create your own unique content and post consistently. If you copy-paste other people’s work, you risk being found out easily. That can lead to more sanctions including outright bans from some websites/services altogether. The rule is to regularly create your own unique content if you want people to buy anything via your affiliate links. Doing so helps you to grow your brand authority and influence and your audience grows in tandem.

Why Internet Spam is Bad for Business

First let us establish firmly why spam is bad for you and your online business. If you habitually spam, here are some of the numerous risks you are taking:

-    You risk a ban in some sites.
-    Some individuals can stop following you.
-    Some will even block you from commenting.
-    You can be blocked from entire ISPs.
-    You risk getting “unfriended” on social media.
-    You can be included on spam lists that prevent your e-mail from getting through to most e-mail servers.
-    In some jurisdictions, you risk even monetary fines.
-    In some others, you can receive criminal sentences for breaking the laws prohibiting spam.


 
When many online marketers open their e-mail boxes daily and see numerous unsolicited commercial advertisements therein, very many usually get pissed off as a result. Even though they are aware that the Internet is largely free for all and its use is widespread, spamming on it is some form of abuse. The real reason why spam is repulsive to many! Right now, there is no total restriction on commercial use of the Internet but there still exists some form of restrictions on unsolicited commercial electronic messages. Unsolicited commercial electronic messages constitute spam which in many climes is regulated by law.

Let’s face it, unsolicited commercial e-mail or other communication in any form is always very annoying. Inspite of the restrictions, it is still going on regardless. Now, what if there are no restrictions at all? That scenario can best be imagined. Here is what is likely though. Without restriction, spam mails could come in such huge numbers as to render your other communication completely useless as to be capable of shutting down your e-mail or forum server altogether. If you work online, that scenario can put you out of business completely, albeit temporarily.

Even with all the negative consequences, surprisingly many Internet users still routinely spam.  You then wonder whether such people are not aware that spam manages to get many Internet users mad most of the time. Here are the consequences/ course of action immediately available to those who get mad because of spam. When people get mad, there is always a quick resort to reporting such spammers to their ISPs or other organizations or to the government authorities. That done, what follows may be as bad as losing Internet service or even facing civil and criminal penalties depending on the laws/regulations and the climes. That no doubt is really bad news for any Internet Business. 


 

Negative Consequences of Internet Spam

 Spamming being unsolicited communication on the Internet apart from being an irritant can precipitate many and varied consequences for spammers. No serious business person likes to sperm or be spammed. This is because the consequences of spam can extend much farther than losing the attention of some customers or even prospects. You can expect to get into a profitable business relationship with anyone by starting as an irritant or at worst a nuisance. Businesses don’t thrive on nuisance values so you’ve got to be very careful what messages you put out on the Internet and the results you expect from such messages. Negative results from spam messages can in certain circumstances be very bad for business. Spamming can really be a much more serious matter over and above the adverse effect it has on your marketing efforts. Below are some of the negative consequences you risk with spam messages on the Internet.

-    You risk a ban in some sites.
-    Some individuals can stop following you.
-    Some will even block you from commenting.
-    You can be blocked from entire ISPs.
-    You risk getting “unfriended” on social media.
-    You can be included on spam lists that prevent your e-mail from getting through to most e-mail servers.
-    In some jurisdictions, you risk even monetary fines.
-    In some others, you can receive criminal sentences for breaking the laws prohibiting spam.

Experienced marketers have since discovered that spam can have many adverse consequences in varying degrees. Short of being banned from a particular site altogether, spammy comments may cause particular individuals to despise intensely. A consequence of which some will stop following you or even block your comments altogether! How do you expect to acquire customers and retain them if avoidable and careless spam messages from you manage to piss them off most of the time? The people you piss off with your spam might actually be people who may be quite eager to know more about your business and may even be willing to do business with you down the road. One inappropriate spam message can block any such opportunities for ever. Can you now see why posting a spammy comment or sending a spammy message can be a real handicap for your marketing efforts? For serious minded marketers, spamming is a real business risk not worth taking.

Even with all the negative consequences, many Internet users still routinely spam. Why must this be so? The reason lies with the diversity of use and the coverage. We know that the Internet covers the entire world. That on its own comes with so many diverse rules and regulations on the subject matter. In reality particularly in many advanced countries, each state or province within each country can have different laws. That creates a scenario of potentially many different laws in many different jurisdictions pertaining to spam. Depending on the service contract, there are conditions when you may even lose your Internet service or having your domain blocked due to spam. That kind of scenario if it happens is really bad news for any Internet Business. Why then do people still risk with spams if it can be that bad for business?

 

Do You Know What Internet Spam Is?

Everyone gets to hear the word spam on the Internet but not everyone really knows what spam is. Even though there appears to be many definitions of spam, simply put, spam is uninvited and unwanted electronic communication on others. Many internet users once believed that spam related primarily to e-mail communications only. That thinking has changed with time. Because the Internet has evolved many new and practical ways to communicate effectively, so also have spam rules evolved in tandem to cover these many new situations as they evolve. One very clear thinking in Internet business right now is that spam is not a good thing. To many marketers and even consumers, spam is simply bad news.

Many online marketing experts generally agree that there are many ways to spam. They say that you can spam not only by sending unsolicited commercial e-mail but by posting unwanted comments on blogs or social media postings. Really? Many of us do these things very casually on social media without giving any conscious thought to the consequences. That by sending even unsolicited text (SMS) messages to others, we are actually spamming. Even in huge, well-established and very popular marketing/trading sites like Ebay, Amazon and TripleClicks, people spam even in their forums while providing reviews of products on the sites.

With e-mail, spam and spamming are fairly easy and straightforward to explain even to a newbie. It is generally accepted about e-mails that spam occurs when someone receives annoying and generally irritating mails they did not ask for. This is more so when such mails emanate from people or organizations that they neither know nor have requested to do business with. More often than not, many of such mails are usually from people or organizations trying to sell them stuff that they neither need nor want. Extending that thought to social media, blogs, and virtually any other opportunity one has to type content seen by the public, spam clearly presents as something that is designed to sell something or promote something that is a distraction to the intended subject of the conversation. Simple! No serious business person cherishes any form of distractions particularly online.