So, you may be wondering, why you aren’t making any money from affiliate marketing. Well, I got you covered.
There are so many things that could prevent you from making money from your affiliate marketing business. It could be that you’re not working long enough thus, giving up too quickly.
It could also be that you’re not providing enough value to your audience to first build trust and relationships with them before trying to sell to them or you’re probably targeting the wrong audiences.
Generally, If you’re struggling to make your first affiliate sale, it may be that you’re doing something wrong.
Table of Contents
Why You’re Not Making Sales As An Affiliate Marketer?
- You Are Not Providing Enough Valuable Information
- There’s Something Wrong With Your Product, Landing Page, Or Audience
- Your Site Is Not Looking Professional And Trustworthy
- You Are Sending Traffic Directly To A Product Sales Page
- Lack Of Consistency And Patience
- Lack Of Knowledge About Your Topic Or Niche
- You Are Targeting Multiple Niches At Once
- You Are Following The Wrong Advice
- Information Overload
- You Don’t Know About The Product You Promote
- Your Niche Isn’t In High Demand
- You Have A Bad or Broken Affiliate Links
- You Are Spending Too much Money On Advertisement
- You Are Expecting Quick Results
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate Marketing is a performance-based business model in which a company, brand, or organization pays or rewards an affiliate or publisher for each traffic, visitor, or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.
PS. I wrote another article where I went more in detail on what affiliate marketing is and how it works, Check it out here.
14 Reasons Why You’re Not Getting Affiliate Sales
Why you’re not making money with Affiliate Marketing? In my opinion, I think one of the main reasons why a lot of affiliate marketers struggle to make a sale from their affiliate marketing business is that they don’t actually know what takes to succeed in this business model.
A lot of them think that by throwing their affiliate link across social media, forums, etc, automatically, they’re going to make a sale.
Nope, it doesn’t work like that.
You need proper training and guidance to win in affiliate marketing. You can’t just be working on the wrong thing and expect good results.
1. You Are Not Providing Enough Valuable Information
A lot of people focus on making money to the extent that they even forget their audience’s needs or why they came to their site.
Remember, people don’t visit your site just to buy a product or service.
Rather they came there for a solution or an answer to their questions, problems, pains, or challenges they’re facing.
If all you focus solely on is trying to make money from your audience (selling to them) without providing any sort of value or solution to their problems.
Well, I can tell you from personal experience, you won’t go far.
Move from that state of mindset and become a CREATOR.
I mean, figure out what your audience’s biggest problems and pains are and provide a solution to that.
Taking this approach – they’ll start to see you as an expert, go-to-person for help, or a trusted source in your industry.
Positioning yourself in your industry as a trusted and reliable source will bring in more sales to your business than just spamming your audience with your affiliate link.
As you’ve built trust with your audience by only providing helpful information to them.
You can now offer additional solutions to their problems and that’s by recommending a product and service that YOU think will further help solve those problems for them.
IMPORTANT: I know you’re here to make money, but sometimes if you’re not an affiliate of the product that you think will help solve that particular problem for them.
You should still recommend that product to them.
Why?
Well, we’re trying to build strong and long-term trust and relationships with them. Which will even pay off much more in the future.
2. There’s Something Wrong With Your Product, Landing Page, Or Audience
Another reason “why you’re not getting affiliate sales” could be that the product you’re promoting is not relevant to your audience.
For instance, if you’re getting thousands of clicks to your affiliate link and you’re still not making any sales from that.
Well, that simply means you’re targeting the wrong audience.
By the way, getting clicks on your affiliate link is very important, meaning you have a higher chance of making a sale.
However, getting an irrelevant click to your offer is the problem.
So, to avoid that, make sure you target the right audience and promote the right offer to them.
Remember, you can’t promote ‘Dog food to Cat owners’, that’s not congruent with their needs and they are not going to buy that product.
Make sure you check those things if you’re struggling to make sales in your affiliate business.
3. Your Site Is Not Looking Professional And Trustworthy
I believe you have heard this saying before: “Don’t judge a book by its cover” Yes, that’s absolutely true but not in all cases.
Back in the day, you could set up your website and put any ugly design on it and your visitors would still buy whatever you were promoting or selling on that site.
Well, in today’s internet age, that doesn’t work anymore.
That said, ifyou want to build an affiliate website that will bring you more sales and profits, you need to have the following:
- You need to have a good-looking website (nice design)
- Your website needs to load quickly and faster
- Make sure your site is mobile-friendly
- Informative and easy-to-read content ( make your content easier to scan and read. Don’t have huge paragraphs)
- Use headlines and subheadlines to break up your content
- You need to be trustworthy (proof that you’re a real human being by showing your real face on the site front page and on the About ‘me’ page)
I want you to take note of this: If a visitor can’t trust your site, they aren’t going to buy anything you recommend on the site. They’ll see the site as somebody who is trying to make money from them.
Here are some of my recommended tools to make your site look professional and attractive to visitors:
- Bluehost – Hosting plays an important role in terms of making your site load quickly for your visitors. If your site is taking longer to load, people are going to bounce back and if that happens, they won’t visit your site again anytime they see it in the search engines. In the hosting industry, Bluehost is considered to be one of the best in terms of making your site load faster for your users. Bluehost is user-friendly for beginners and very affordable.
- Divi Theme – A theme helps make your site look beautiful and attractive to visitors and also plays a huge role in making your site load faster. Have you ever visited any website and said wow what a beautiful design? Yeah! That website might be using a Divi theme. If you want a professional, well-looking website, Divi is your best bet.
- Thrive Theme – The Thrive theme is also another amazing theme with tons of marketing tools. If you’re a marketer, the thrive theme is your best bet. They have marketing tools that allow you to capture your visitors’ email addresses and follow up with them through an autoresponder. When you use the Thrive theme, there’s no need to pay for extra email software.
4. You Are Sending Traffic Directly To A Product Sales Page
Online, people buy from people they know, like, and trust.
In affiliate marketing, it’s very hard to make sales until you’ve built some sort of TRUST and RELATIONSHIP with the person you’re trying to sell to (your potential customers).
That said, one of the best methods for building trust with your ideal customers and getting them to buy from you over and over again is to identify their biggest problems and provide solutions to those problems.
By providing a solution to their problem, over time, they’ll start to see you as an expert or go to-person for help or advice.
And even want to learn more about you and what products or services you recommend.
Now, when sending them to your recommendations – you don’t want to send them directly to a raw affiliate link.
Bridge a gap between the product’s sales page and first:
- Capture their email addresses.
- Then introduce yourself and talk a little about the product and how it going to help them, before
- Then send them to the actual product sales page or checkout page.
Why should I capture the visitors’ email addresses?
Well, in case they don’t buy the product at that first exposure, which the majority of them are not going to do.
Now… You have a chance to remarket that same product to them over and over again through emails until they decide to buy it.
5. Lack Of Consistency And Patience
Making money online, especially with affiliate marketing takes a good amount of time, hard work, effort, consistent posting of quality content, and a lot of networking, or relationship-building.
However, despite all that you’re not going to get the reward right away.
It’s going to take several months or even years of hard work and consistency before you can start seeing any kind of results.
And this is where I see a lot of people ‘jump off the ship before reaching the harbor’ (they give up or quit along the way before they even see any kind of success).
If you approach affiliate marketing as a quick way of making money online, well, you’re making huge mistakes.
There is nothing like get-rich-quick online. Everything takes time.
This is the reality a lot of people don’t realize and if they’re into this business model for a few months or even a year.
And they’re not making any money they get frustrated or discouraged.
And start complaining why they’re not making any money from their affiliate business and then give up
Well, as I said earlier, it takes time to make money with affiliate marketing.
Keep working, keep posting good content, be consistent, and above all be patient.
Let me tell you a quick story when I first started my affiliate marketing journey – I didn’t get results right away.
It took me three (3) solid years before I was able to make my first sale $100.
During those moments I felt like giving up, however, I always remembered WHY I started this in the first place, and that has helped me keep going no matter the challenges.
I’ve come to realize that, sometimes, knowing the reason behind why you started something is very important.
It helps and motivates you to fight through the tough times.
Now, for you, I don’t know how long it’s going to take you to start making money from your affiliate business.
But I can promise you that if you don’t quit or give up along the way, over time, you’ll surely start to generate sales. I’m speaking from experience.
6. Lack Of Knowledge About Your Topic Or Niche
Affiliate marketing is a broad topic and it’s very competitive these days. To make money from this industry, you need to make sure you stand out from the crowd.
And to do that, you need to have in-depth knowledge about your niche.
Why?
So that you can be able to create high-quality content that’ll outrank your competitors in the search engines.
Online content is said to be king and without it, you’re going nowhere.
Your success in affiliate marketing requires more in-depth informative content.
If you can’t create content that will outrank your competitor in the search engines or content that speaks directly to your target audience.
Guess what?
You won’t get traffic and if you don’t get traffic, you won’t make money.
So, to make money from affiliate marketing, you should first take time to gather some proper knowledge about it (what is it about, how it works, do’s and don’ts, pros and cons, etc.), before rushing into things.
If you want my advice, find a good affiliate marketing mentor to learn from.
I mean someone who’s already successful with what you’re doing and learn directly from them.
Or more importantly, if you have the funds you can enroll in a good quality affiliate marketing training course that will not only teach you the foundations of affiliate marketing but the in-depth about the subject.
7. You Are Targeting Multiple Niches At Once
A lot of people think marketing their product to diverse interests is going to dramatically increase their site traffic and income.
In my opinion, this is a bad strategy – I know back in the day, we had sites that generally talked about multiple things on their blog and were very successful.
However, these days those things don’t work anymore.
Why?
The thing is, nowadays, if people have multiple interests, they don’t go to blogs that literally talk about all of those interests.
Rather, they find one that’s specialized in each.
NB: Though, you might be able to build a successful general-interest blog, however, you can’t build that blog to authority and make a lot of affiliate sales.
If you want my advice, focus on one topic or niche until you have a significant number of users and success with that niche before moving to another thing.
8. You Are Following The Wrong Advice
Nowadays, there are a bunch of so-called ‘gurus’ teaching people all kinds of get-rich-quick methods, hacks, and strategies for earning money online.
Some of these ‘gurus’ promise they can show you a strategy where you can easily earn $1,000 a day with affiliate marketing without doing anything.
For some, they said, they can show you a method where you can set your affiliate site and leave it for a while and you’ll start making money.
And amazingly a lot of people follow those lies blindly which leads them nowhere.
The truth is, if that method really works or earns them money why are they giving it away for free?
It doesn’t make sense, don’t fall for those lies.
Here is the thing, there’s nothing like easy get-rich-quick or click a button and make money kind of stuff online.
These are all strategies those ‘gurus’ use to grab your attention so that they can get you to buy their expensive useless courses.
Oh! One funny thing is that most of their courses are outdated material and you can find most of them on YouTube or blogs for free.
Following those courses will only lead you down the wrong path.
MY RECOMMENDATION:
- Find someone who has repeated success with affiliate marketing and is making multiple 6-figures per month from affiliate marketing.
- Someone who shows you real proof of their success.
- Someone who’s real, who knows exactly what he or she is talking about.
- Someone who you can relate with.
And learn from them or if they have a course, you can enroll in it and learn their proven method.
Here are some of my best places to learn affiliate marketing for free:
- Retired Influencer
- Smart Passive Income
- Charles Ngo
- Affilorama
And you will be surprised that most of the so-called guru’s advice you’re following is nothing but useless.
9. Information Overload
One of the reasons “why affiliate marketing does not work” for some people is that they are overwhelmed with so much information.
And this gets a lot of them confused and don’t actually know what action to take or focus on to achieve success.
And most of the time, the majority of these people end up moving from one method to another and not actually making any money from their business.
I want you to take note of this: No matter how, you need to start at some point, find one method or program, test it out yourself, and stick with it.
Moving from one thing to another is not going to help, it’ll only delay your success and eventually lead you to failure.
10. You Don’t Know About The Product You Promote
Nowadays people just search for any product or service online and start promoting it to earn commission without really knowing anything about the product.
They think if they write some thin information about the product and place their affiliate link within the post, that’s it.
Well, to be honest with you, your visitors didn’t come to your site just to read a summary of information about a product and buy it.
It could be that they’ve already read some information about the product from another site or somewhere but they weren’t satisfied with that that’s why they came to your site.
Give them that extra information and they will thank you by purchasing the product through you.
IMPORTANT! Take time to learn about the product you’re an affiliate for.
If you ask for my advice, I suggest you buy the product, use it, and test it out yourself to have more experience or knowledge about it.
This will help you be able to write unique, high-quality, in-depth reviews about the product.
TAKE NOTE! In your review, don’t just talk only about the good side of the product, talk also about the bad side as well.
People love it when you’re being honest.
Why?
It shows that you’re not trying to deceive them to buy the product through but rather, you’re just trying to help them know more about the product.
And in doing so, some people will simply want to purchase the product through you because of your honesty.
11. Your Niche Isn’t In High Demand
If you’re in a niche where people are not constantly searching for products to buy. It’ll be very hard for you to sell your product or service in that niche.
To avoid that, find a niche where the demand for products is high.
A niche that has a ton of people constantly looking for products to buy regularly.
That said, there are tons of high-demand niches out there an example of some of these niches are:
- Health – in this niche, people are always looking for ways to be healthier, build muscle, or lose weight. And they’re constantly looking for products to help them achieve that.
- Wealth – People are always looking for ways to increase their finances. They want a program that will teach them how to do that.
- Relationship – People are constantly having challenges with their relationship either in marriage or something else and they’re looking for tips, books, and advice to help them solve the damage made in those areas.
These three niches are called evergreen niches meaning people are constantly looking for products to buy in these niches year after year.
If you have any knowledge or know of a product that you think can help people solve their problems and pains in these areas.
You can build a profitable business around one of these areas by recommending products to people or just providing solutions to people’s needs.
- PS. I wrote another article where I share with you some of the profitable affiliate marketing niches online. Check it out!
12. You Have Bad or Broken Links
If you have a broken link and your visitors click on it, it’s not going to lead them anywhere and if that happens, you’re missing out on some important chances of making sales.
There are a whole lot of things that can cause a broken link:
It could be that the affiliate product you link to has been discontinued or is no longer available in the marketplace or they have shut down their account.
So, what do I have to do?
There are some tracking tools or plugins that can help indicate anytime you have a broken link.
13. You Are Spending Too Much Money On Advertisement
I often heard people saying “you need to spend money to make money”, yes that’s absolutely true but not when you’re just starting out.
Running paid ads is not a great way to go when you’re just starting and not making any decent income in your business.
You can easily lose your money and not get a return on your investment.
Especially if you don’t have any proper knowledge about it – how it works, how to run it to get the most out of it, and so on.
So in short – don’t try paid ads if you don’t have good knowledge about it.
And also if you’re not making any serious money yet from your business.
Instead you want to use social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok to build your followers.
and over time you can start to generate decent income simply by recommending offers to your followers.
14. You Are Expecting Quick Results
Affiliate marketing is a real business, and just like any kind of business, it needs time to grow.
Your success in affiliate marketing is not going to happen overnight, it’s going to take longer than you expect.
However, your success will eventually come if you keep doing the work and don’t quit.
Success in affiliate marketing is based on two factors:
- Traffic
- Trust and relationships
Both of these factors take a fair amount of time and tremendous work to achieve.
TRAFFIC: A search engine like (Google), is not going to trust you when your site is new.
So, for that matter, they’ll not send traffic right away to your content on a new site.
It’ll take about 8 – 9 months or even a year before they’ll start trickling in a few traffic to your site.
TRUST: People are not going to buy your offer until you build some sort of trust with them.
They want to know if you’re not scamming them.
And for them to trust you and eventually purchase from you, it’s going to take time.
Here is what I want you to do if you’re in that stage:
You should just focus on helping your audience by simply providing VALUES that help solve their problems. Don’t try to sell to them at that stage.
If you take that approach over time, the money will honestly follow.
FAQ!
CAN YOU REALLY MAKE MONEY FROM AFFILIATE MARKETING?
Yes, you can make money from affiliate marketing. However, it takes time and it’s going to take a lot more work than you can expect.
You need to focus on creating more detailed and valuable content for your audience to consume in order to build trust with them.
If you’re just promoting your affiliate link without providing any real value to your audience, guess what?
They’re not going to TRUST you and if they don’t trust you, they won’t buy anything you recommend.
Remember, your audiences are not that stupid. They can easily sense when you’re just trying to help them.
So, rather than just trying to get them to buy your product.
Try this approach INSTEAD…
Try to put your audience’s needs first by adding value to their lives to build trust and relationships with them.
And when you establish that TRUST with them, over time, you’ll start to see results.
However…
To be honest with you, building that trust with them, it’s going to take you a fair amount of time and a lot of work to achieve.
But guess what?
Once you’ve built that trust with them and keep it.
There’s nothing that can stop you from making money online with affiliate marketing.
How To Make Money In Affiliate Marketing
- Create Quality Content. Produce fresh valuable, high-quality, relevant, and interesting content for your audience to consume and they’ll keep coming back to your site for more once they find you.
- Promote Quality Products. Don’t just promote any kind of offer to your audience just for the purpose of making a commission. Your affiliate offer must address or solve your audience’s needs, problems, or pains.
- Driving Targeted Traffic To Your Offer. In affiliate marketing, if you don’t get traffic, you’re not going to make any money. However, don’t just drive any kind of traffic to your offer but rather leverage quality traffic sources to attract qualified, targeted audiences to your offer. In simple terms, make sure your traffic is highly targeted.
PS: I wrote another article where I go more into how to make money from affiliate marketing. Check it out!
How Do I Get My First Affiliate Sale?
If you can drive targeted traffic to your affiliate links, you can get your first affiliate sales. One of the most prominent ways to drive targeted and unique traffic to your affiliate link and is by creating paid advertising campaigns.
What Is Bad About Affiliate Marketing?
In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is an amazing business model or industry for anyone looking to make money online.
However, there are some people who approach this industry with the wrong mindset. They think it is an easy get-rich-quick model, which typically it is not.
Affiliate marketing is a long-term legitimate online business that is based on providing value to a customer in order to build trust with them before recommending a product to them.
And a lot of people are not willing to do that. And in the end, they end up saying it’s a scam.
That’s It Folks!
Affiliate marketing is an amazing way of earning money online, however, the only thing that prevents people from making money with this business model is that they’re approaching it the wrong way.
They’re either promoting the wrong product, targeting the wrong audience, or generally, not promoting their product the right way.
if you approach affiliate marketing the wrong way, you’ll struggle to make money from it.
- Find a good niche
- Site up a compelling website
- Produce helpful information
- Promote a product you believe in or have used before
- Build trust with your audience
- Be patient.
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