Day 5 - WARNING: Are you making these affiliate marketing mistakes?

Hey {NAME}, Before we get started with today’s email, I want to remind you about the FREE Affiliate Marketing Masterclass I’m teaching on Tuesday, May 25th. In this training, you’ll learn how to successfully make affiliate marketing a part of your brand and generate revenue for your business. [Click here to instantly sign up!]( (It’s on May 25th at 11:00 am Pacific) Okay, onward to the good stuff... Welcome to the final day of the Affiliate Marketing Launch Plan email series! I hope you’ve enjoyed this series so far and feel empowered to launch your first affiliate marketing campaign. In reality, affiliate marketing is easy to do—but it’s also easy to do wrong. Anyone can grab a link and promote it from behind the scenes. But successful affiliate marketing that delivers value to you and your audience in the long term? That takes work. It also means knowing what not to do. Now, I’d like to give you some insight into what to avoid when it comes to affiliate marketing. Whether you’ve just started learning about affiliate marketing, or you’re already promoting other people’s products via affiliate links and want to make sure you’re going about it in the right way. In this email I’m going to share with you four rules to keep in mind for avoiding the dark side of affiliate marketing. The following are the four biggest traps to look out for, so that you’ll have an even greater chance to succeed, better serve your audience, generate an income, and build relationships with the creators of the products you’re promoting. Affiliate Marketing Mistake #1 - Promoting a product that doesn’t make sense for your audience. This usually happens when a marketer takes an income-first approach over a service-first approach. You should look for solutions that can help your audience—whether there’s an affiliate opportunity there or not. If there happens to be one, great. That’s a bonus. If there isn’t, but you know the product could still be helpful to your audience, it’s your responsibility to share it with them. Since the SPI brand is focused on helping entrepreneurs build engaged audiences, the products and services we promote are all things that support this focus: we recommend services that help people host their podcast (BuzzSprout), start an email list (ConvertKit), and organize a membership community (Circle). We also promote audio and video gear to help the audience create great content, and highlight books and courses to help people learn and improve their skills. Most of these products and services are things we recommend as an affiliate—but a good number of them are not. Even if we can’t form an affiliate relationship with a company, if their product is the best one for the SPI audience, we’re going to recommend it. Sometimes when a new company reaches out with an affiliate offer, we’ll look at the product and realize it’s obviously not a fit. In those cases, it’s easy to say, “No, thanks.” But when you’re just starting out, the promise of a commission can make it hard to see things clearly. You might think, “Wow, this opportunity is in front of me right now. Maybe I should say yes. What damage could it do?” The damage it could do is potentially huge: the destruction of the trust you’ve worked hard to build with your audience. That’s why my recommendation is to stay on the safe side by always offering and recommending products you’ve used before and understand, so you know exactly the kind of experience people will have with them. Affiliate Marketing Mistake #2 - Not keeping an eye on the quality of your audience’s experience. This next one is similar to #1, but it has more to do with how things can change after you start promoting what seems to be a great product that you know is a good fit for your audience. Let’s say you recently started promoting a new product, and it’s working out well. Everybody’s happy—you, your audience, and the company. But then the company gets acquired or merges with another company, and new management takes over. This situation creates a ripple through the entire company, affecting your audience’s customer support experience with the product. Sound unlikely? It’s happened to us before, with the web hosting company Bluehost. We still recommend Bluehost, and in fact, they’ve been one of our top affiliates over the years. But it hasn’t always been a smooth road. I began recommending Bluehost 10+ years ago, and was soon making a few thousand dollars a month from affiliate promotions. Even better, the company was taking great care of my audience. Everyone was happy. The next year, my monthly income continued to grow into the five-digit range. Things were looking good. But then in 2013, I started getting a few emails from people who weren’t too happy with Bluehost’s customer support, especially when they had issues with the service. The following year, things got a little better—the negative emails dropped off—but then they got worse again. At that point, I started to really pay attention. I decided to fly out to Utah to meet with the company and share my concerns with them directly. I met with the founders and told them, “Hey, this is not okay. This can’t happen.” The Bluehost team told me they were aware of the issues, and that they were making changes to address them. I said, “Okay, but these changes need to happen now.” Of course, with a big company like that, I understood changes can take time, but I wanted to do as much as I could to move them along. Thankfully, the Bluehost team took my words to heart and put together an action plan to address the issues. They also agreed to let me offer the SPI audience a special connection to a customer support person who could take care of them more quickly than the company’s traditional support channel. During my visit to Bluehost headquarters, I also kept in touch with the SPI audience about how my meeting was going, and what the Bluehost team was doing to improve things. I sent an email to the list about what was happening during my visit, and wrote about the experience in one of my Income Reports. Although this kind of situation may not occur with every company you partner with as an affiliate, you have to be prepared for it. Companies grow and evolve, and people come and go. You can’t assume that if things are going well, they always will. The lesson here, especially for affiliate relationships you’d like to maintain for the long term, is to keep close tabs on your audience’s experience with the product. In addition, you should cultivate relationships with the product owners, so they know how important your audience’s experience with the product is to everyone involved. Affiliate Marketing Mistake #3 - Not being honest about a product or promotion. When I recommend products, I’m always very honest about what the product can and can’t do. When you’re promoting your affiliate products, you need to make sure you set the right expectations for your audience. Otherwise, what happens? You lose the trust of the person to whom you recommended that product. You have to be careful, because if you make a mistake that skews your audience’s expectations, you might lose them for good. You need to be totally honest about what a product can and can’t do, and make sure you’re not recommending it to someone who’s not a good fit for it. What if you find yourself in a tricky situation where you’ve promoted a product to your audience, then realized later that it wasn’t what you thought it was? Thankfully, I have a special “rule” that comes in handy here. I call it the 8 Mile Rule. [SPOILER ALERT] If you’ve never seen the movie 8 Mile, Marshall Mathers (aka Eminem), plays the main character, a rapper named B-Rabbit. In the finale, B-Rabbit faces off against another rapper in a huge rap battle. B-Rabbit decides to rap about all the weird things about himself, things his opponent would likely call him out for in his rap. Why does he do this? By calling himself out first, he leaves his opponent without any ammunition to use against him. Do you see where I’m going with this? When you’re promoting an affiliate product, take the 8 Mile approach. If something goes wrong, be the first one to say something. If you make a mistake, own up to it. Perhaps you recommended a product you realized wasn’t a good fit for your audience. The quicker you can say, “I’m sorry. That product wasn’t the right fit for you. I hope you’ll give me the benefit of the doubt and stick around,” the more likely your audience will be willing to do that. Being honest fosters trust, even if the circumstances aren’t totally favorable. And if you’re being honest and serving your audience in a way that’s valuable to them, they’ll often jump at the chance to help you back. Affiliate Marketing Mistake #4 - Earning all of your income from affiliate marketing. Back when I started out—and this is still true today in some spaces—a lot of people were doing affiliate marketing by running promotions, not through a brand they’d created or trust they’d earned from an audience, but by using copywriting, targeting, and advertising techniques to get people to click on affiliate links. Many of those people used an affiliate marketing network as well. This is essentially a service that allows you to sign up and choose from a huge number of products you can promote. Once you pick a product, you get a link you can share with as many people as possible. Because most people who go this route don’t already have a brand established, they have to resort to advertising—things like Google Adwords—to get their link in front of people. But there are still two main ways you can go wrong with this model. First, as soon as you stop putting effort into it, the income stops flowing. It’s not passive. Second, because it doesn’t require you to build a brand, it means it’s not unique to you. Just about anyone could leapfrog you if they master the copywriting and targeting required to be successful with it! That’s why I recommend that you take the time to build your own brand and grow an audience you can serve. Build that audience’s trust in you as the go-to resource in your area of expertise, not just someone they don’t know who’s only serving them ads. So, as your final task in the Affiliate Marketing Launch Plan, I want you to think forward a bit. - What’s your backup plan in case something goes wrong down the road with the product you want to promote? - How do you plan to continue building your brand and how will affiliate marketing play a role? Spend a few minutes outlining your thoughts, and give yourself a pat on the back! You just completed the Affiliate Marketing Launch Plan! I’m so glad you showed up these last several days, and I hope you feel ready to launch your first affiliate marketing campaign! Now, let’s take it a step further than just launching a single affiliate marketing campaign... If you want to create a successful affiliate marketing program for your business, join me LIVE on Tuesday, May 25th at 11am Pacific for my free Affiliate Marketing Masterclass, How to Monetize the Brand You've Built (Without Being Salesy or Sleazy). You'll get my best advice on how to get started with affiliate marketing, and now that you have a program, how to make the most of your campaigns. You'll Learn: - The three key differences between a successful affiliate marketing campaign and an ineffective campaign. - How to maximize your campaign so that you can get clicks and generate income. - Two dead simple strategies for finding affiliate products to promote to your audience. - A 5-point product test to determine if it's worth your time to promote a particular product (so that you stop wasting time on the wrong products). - The #1 strategy for increasing your affiliate marketing campaign results. - The rules of affiliate marketing, especially when it comes to Amazon.com product promotion (so you don't get in trouble or lose your account). - How to increase your earnings once you find a product that seems to be working for you. - And a special bonus! Get a sample recipe from my Affiliate Marketing Recipe Book that you can take home with you (so you can copy the steps of one of my own successful promotions for yourself). The best part is, you’ll get to come hang out with me and a bunch of other entrepreneurs to learn about affiliate marketing! The energy in these trainings is amazing and we always have a blast, so I hope you’ll join us! [Click here to instantly sign up!]( I’ll see you Tuesday! Cheers, Pat P.S. I’m so glad you’re here, but there’s a chance you may have joined this email course right as we’re wrapping it up and may have missed the first four emails! If that’s the case, no problem, just click the links below to grab those important lessons right now … - [Day 1 - What affiliate marketing is and how to get started with my “opposite” method (Affiliate Marketing Launch Plan)]( - [Day 2 - The Soft Pitch Pipeline: Affiliate Marketing for People Who Don’t Like Being Sales-y]( - [Day 3 - The 3 Types of Affiliate Marketing (and the ONLY one I endorse)]( - [Day 4 - Behind the curtain of an extremely successful affiliate marketing campaign]( [Unsubscribe]( | [Update your profile]( | 10531 4S Commons Drive, Suite 524, San Diego, CA 92127