Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to make money online for several reasons. It allows you to start making money without creating your own product, handling order fulfillment, dealing with customer complaints, and a host of other complicated business issues. With all that being said, many people start their affiliate journey off and quickly find themselves asking, why am I not making money with my affiliate marketing efforts?

In this article, we are going to break down some of the most common reasons that could be holding you back from earning money or maximizing the profits you are making in your affiliate marketing business, no matter the niche or offer…

Let’s Level Set Our Definition Of Affiliate Marketing

Before we break down the reason’s you aren’t making money with affiliate marketing, let’s make sure we are all describing the same thing when it comes to what affiliate marketing is.

Hopefully, we are already on the same page when I say, affiliate marketing is not a get rich quick scheme or a pyramid scheme…

So, what is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is the simple act of sending traffic and more importantly referring sales to another company’s or person’s product in exchange for a commission. The commission structure will obviously vary from product to product, but at the end of the day, you as the affiliate marketer are tasked with one thing, referring customers to the product.

Now that we are on the same page with what affiliate marketing actually is, we can get into understanding what it takes to be successful, and conversely things that could be holding you back from making money with affiliate marketing…

What Are The Critical Components Of Successful Affiliate Marketing?

To better understand and self-diagnose the most common reasons you probably aren’t making money with your affiliate marketing business, it’s important we understand critical elements of affiliate marketing.

These are independent of niche, you should think of them as must-haves to online sales and marketing.

Once you understand these overarching umbrella principles the common reasons your affiliate marketing business isn’t making money will make much more sense.

So, here are the critical components of successful affiliate marketing…

Understand The Market

One of the first places affiliate marketers or marketers, in general, go wrong is that they don’t fully understand their market.

This isn’t to be confused with the niche. Niche is part of understanding your market.

Go, back to our definition of affiliate marketing, you are connecting potential customers with goods and services they need.

Don’t skip over the most important word in that last sentence…Customers.

The market you are serving is comprised of real people, with specific wants and needs. They have problems they are trying to solve or desires they are trying to fulfill.

If you are going to be a successful affiliate marketer, you need to understand your potential customers as well if not better than the company whose product you are promoting.

That edge is precisely what will allow you to position your offers in front of the right people to ensure you have a “Market Match.”

We can go into a deep dive on understanding markets, and I probably will in another blog post.

Actionable Takeaway: Right now the best advice I can give you is to put your market first, do your best to understand them and what they want, and you will already be ahead of 90% of affiliate marketers.

FREE Resources To Help You Understand Your Market Better

If you want more help understanding how to find your dream customer and how to stand out from the crowd, then check out Dot Com Secrets. You can get the book FREE Here.

7 Market-Related Reasons You Aren’t Making Money With Affiliate Marketing

Ok, now that you understand the importance of Market Understanding as a pilar to affiliate marketing success, let’s take a look at specific market understanding problems that could be holding you back from cashing in…

• Don’t understand fully understand your market’s problem(s): one of the biggest advantages of understanding your market is knowing what problems they are trying to solve. If you don’t fully understand the problem, you will likely lead them to a sub-optimal solution.
• Not understanding how segments of the market interpret or prioritize the problem: If you managed to pinpoint the true problem, some marketers fail to understand how different segments of your market see the problem. So, you approach all segments or groups of people with a broad brush or in general terms.
• You make assumptions without testing your hook: Once you fully understand your market, we can make an educated guess as to how they will react in certain situations, or in front of certain offers. But, until we have a tried and tested approach to engage that audience, we should test our assumptions to find the best hook possible.
• You try to be too clever with your approach or try to trick your market into wanting the affiliate offer: Don’t get too cute when it comes to getting your traffic to the offer, if you are putting the right hook in front of the right customer, it will be a waste of time and resources to try and trick uninterested parties into an offer they don’t want.
• Deceptive marketing tactics or unrealistic promises: Remember there are people on the other side of your offers, and you should never try to deceive them or make false claims to try and make a buck. Your credibility is all you have, so make sure you hold that trust sacred.
• You haven’t established market trust: Depending on what you are marketing, the level of knowledge, like, and trust you need to establish will vary. But, one element that is always needed is trust. So, no matter the platform or content, if you establish trust you will be far more successful in the long run. This is why building an audience in a certain niche, or becoming an authority has a snowball effect on your online income. As you establish trust, your affiliate marketing success and income will also snowball.

Targeted-Traffic Control

Once you understand your market, it will become far easier for you to understand where your customers are online.

This is critical to understand.

Another way to say this is, that not all traffic is created equal.

It is far easier to fish for a specific market customer on a platform that serves that already serves that market.

If you want to stick with a fish cliche, understanding where your customers are is the equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel,

Versus the alternative…

Trolling the pacific ocean without a fish finder.

Once you understand where your customers are then it’s a matter of pulling the right levers to control steady traffic to your affiliate marketing offer.

Actionable Takeaway: The internet is a big place, understand your market to narrow down where your potential customers are hanging out, and then it’s a matter of simply turning on the faucet of target traffic.

Here is a couple of FREE Traffic Resources:

• If you want more information on how to get unlimited traffic to your affiliate marketing offer, I would recommend checking out Traffic Secrets, you can GET A FREE COPY HERE.
• Free 24 Hour Ranking System Course– How To put your affiliate offers on the front page of Google for Free using Youtube, Plus Live, weekly Traffic Coaching

7 Traffic-Related Mistakes You May Need To Fix Before You Start Making Consistent Money With Affiliate Marketing…

• You are fishing in the wrong pond: This one sounds simple but you would be surprised how many people don’t fully understand the demographics of the platform they are marketing on. Let’s put it this way, would you dive headfirst into TikTok offering a Medicare plan? For those of you too young to know, Medicare is a health insurance plan available in the united states when you turn 65. Not exactly the people flooding TikTok to make dance-off videos. So, I can’t stress this enough, find where your customers hang out and it will be far easier to consistently get bites on the hook. 
• Your tactics don’t match the platform: Are you on a search-based platform, like youtube or google, or are you on an interruption-based platform like Facebook. It makes a difference in how you engage your customers.
• Your platform expectations aren’t realistic:  You need to understand how long it takes to get traction with your particular platform.  If you want instant results then you will either need to be a master of going viral right out of the gate or more likely use a paid method. Understand what your goals and expectations are and make sure your traffic source matches. 
• One man’s quality content is another man’s spam:  Each platform has its own level of comfort with affiliate marketing, and more specifically how links are shared.  Make sure you understand what passes the quality mustard on the platform you are using.  For instance, Reddit is notorious for hating spammers, so you need to ensure you are providing lots of value before doing any self-promotion. 
• Trying to master too many traffic sources at once: Often times affiliate marketers are so starved for consistent traffic to their offers, that they think the solution is spreading their efforts wide to multiple platforms. But, in reality, a much better strategy is picking a platform, mastering it, being consistent with it, and driving as much traffic as you can before moving on to another one. 
• Direct linking when a bridge page is more appropriate: Depending on your platform you may be able to direct link to an offer, but for a lot of platforms you need to send your traffic to a bridge or landing page. Make sure you not only understand the rules of the platform by also what works best for the traffic coming from it. 

• Treating all traffic the same: This one kind of ties into the one above.  Just because your customers come from the same platform, it doesn’t mean they are at the same point in the buying journey, or sales funnel.  So, you will want to make sure to set up bridge pages, or content to warm traffic that is earlier in the funnel to help them convert on the back end.

Picking The Right Offer

Once you have a true understanding of your market and where they reside online, most of the hard part has been done.

However, there is one last critical component to affiliate marketing success and that’s making sure you put the right product or service offer in front of your customers.

You need to make sure that you are running your traffic or referring your potential customers to an offer that converts or all the work you’ve already done will be wasted.

Think of it as you’ve put in all this time and effort to understand your customer’s needs and wants, you’ve tracked them down where they hang out, (In a non-creepy, stalker kind of way of course)

And you’ve gotten them to follow you or your recommendation, but…

When they get to the final destination the product or service you’ve led them to, just doesn’t capture their attention, compel them to take action, or make it easy for them to make the transaction.

At this point, there really isn’t anything you can do to make the company convert better, so you want to make sure you pick your offers wisely from the start.

You can do something to help you ensure that traffic isn’t one and done, but we will get into a little later.

Actionable Takeaway: Before you start driving traffic willy-nilly, make sure the product you are going to promote meets a few of the following criteria.

• It’s something that your market needs and wants
• The order process is simple
• The site is trustworthy
• It has a track record for conversions

7 Offer-Related Problems That Are Keeping Money Out Of Your Affiliate Pocket…

In this section, we will look at gaps in the affiliate offer itself that could be holding your financial success back.

• Your offer isn’t compelling enough to the market: This is something you really want to vet prior to setting up your affiliate marketing funnel. But, you want to make sure that the value proposition that your product or service offers your market, is so strong that it’s a no-brainer. Just ask yourself if I’ve pinpointed my perfect customer and really understand what they need, could they feasibly not want this?
• The sales page is confusing: Remember, in marketing a confused buyer takes no action. So, make sure they offer page is easy to understand and navigate to ensure conversions are maximized.
• The affiliate product has no upsells or sales funnel: Making a front-end sale feels great and means you’ve already done a lot right, but if you have a product that offers up-sells, or recurring commissions, your revenue will stack up and snowball much faster. It will also, raise the average order value and long-term commissions, opening up the door to scaling paid traffic.
• They sell the solution and not the need: This offer issue is really all about the sales copy. Hopefully, you’ve got the potential buyer all warmed-up and ready to buy, but even in those cases, poor sales copy can kill a potential sale. Make sure the sales copy sells the need and how the product and service are going to benefit the customer towards that need.
• No, follow up plan: If you send a customer to a product that has a way to capture and follow up with leads, you will have much better success in the long run. They should use email marketing and retargeting to try and salvage any customers that didn’t buy on the first visit because the majority won’t. That’s a fact.
• No affiliate resources: The best affiliate offers will provide their affiliates with content and resources that make it easier to market their products. So, if you have a choice choose the affiliate product that offers you resources like landing pages, email swipes, and giveaways.
• Not creating a complete offer stack: Once you’ve found a great offer, it doesn’t need to stop there. Often times there are opportunities to stack additional offers in the sales cycle to that same customer. They don’t have to be built in by one program. So, if you can build yourself a platform, like an email list, you can then provide multiple offers to the same customers to dramatically increase affiliate revenues.

Wrap-Up

Re-read this article a few times until you fully understand the concepts. Then take a look at your affiliate marketing funnel and start to inspect which of the areas might be holding you back, Market knowledge, Traffic, or Offers.

One by one, take a look at the steps in your customer’s journey and see where you can improve those steps to close the gaps we’ve talked about to increase your success.

You don’t have to be perfect, but the more you perfect all these areas the faster you should start making consistent affiliate marketing commissions.

If you want some great FREE affiliate marketing training, take a look at the FREE 100 Day Affiliate Boot Camp, which will take you through 100 days of turning your affiliate marketing hobby into a full-time income.