As an affiliate marketer, your job is to persuade site visitors to purchase the products that you are marketing. This may seem simple enough, but there are three common affiliate marketing mistakes that can truly hinder your chances of success. These mistakes are: poor web-copy, using the wrong tone and the lack of optimized content. If you’d like to increase your chances of achieving an additional stream of income through affiliate marketing, learn from these common mistakes.

Poor Copy

As you may recall, the very first sentence of this article reads “As an affiliate marketer, your job is to persuade people to purchase the products that you are marketing.” For arguments sake, let’s say that you have stumbled upon a product page for an e-book that looks as if it has been written by your 12 year old niece. The spelling and grammatical errors are abundant, and the page has no defined purpose. Would you trust these people with your credit card information? Chances are you wouldn’t. When writing web copy for the products that you are marketing, don’t make any errors. Don’t give your visitors a reason not to trust you; they are skeptical enough as it is. Affiliate marketing is dependant on high quality copy writing. The simple way to increase your conversion rate is by writing copy that sells. Literally.

Wrong Tone

Assuming that you have conducted the proper research, you should know your target demographic. If you are marketing an e-book titled “How to Perform Kickass Sk8board Tricks,” you are clearly going to have to use a down to earth tone when writing your copy. The key to writing effective copy is speaking to your demographic like you understand them. If you are a 60 year old computer technician, humble your speech to that of your 17 year old grandson. One of the biggest mistakes newbie affiliate marketers make is using the wrong tone. They think: the more pretentious my tone, the better… it will make me sound smarter. First off, if you truly are a dumbass and you try to up your speech to that of an English professor, it will not sound natural. You would probably reference the thesaurus one too many times, and your copy will look choppy. Secondly, even if you are an English professor, if your target demographic is high school aged boys, your large vocabulary will serve no use. A smart affiliate marketer doesn’t belittle their buyers or confuse their buyers. They get into the buyers' minds and convince them to purchase the item.

Lacking Optimization

Last but certainly not least, is search engine optimization. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a marketer’s best friend. SEO is a method of plugging the proper keywords into web content, in order to receive targeted traffic. If applied correctly, SEO can land your affiliate marketing pages on the first page of Google when someone makes a relevant search. Wouldn’t it be great to have buyers come to you instead of having to send unsolicited emails to hunt them down? SEO makes that possible. Optimizing your web copy to meet the standards of Google is probably the smartest marketing move you can make. There is an abundance of information about SEO on the web, but to master the art will take a significant time commitment. If you are too lazy to devote time (or just suffer from ADD), your best bet is to hire an experienced web writer that specializes in SEO.