Top Five Affiliate Marketing Mistakes to Avoid
As compliance becomes more heavily enforced within the financial loans and lead generation sphere, it’s more important now than ever that Affiliates avoid committing the same mistakes as they have in years past. What was once lenient is now objectively strict – and for good reason. Without the proper boundaries in place, everyone in the industry would suffer. Consumers need their protection, companies need their assurance, and Affiliates need their payouts. In order to protect every party’s best interest, clear guidelines must be set in place. Yet, breeching the rules of compliance isn’t the only mistake that gets in the way of establishing a thriving lead generation campaign. In this article, we’ll highlight the top five affiliate marketing mistakes that Affiliates should avoid at all costs.
Affiliate Marketing Mistake #1: Using Bad Trigger Words
In every industry, there are taboo words and phrases that should be avoided for compliance reasons. The short-term loans industry is no different. Claiming the wrong things will not only harm the consumer, but also compromise your lead generation businesses. To be safe, avoid making the following claims on your landing pages and websites: “guaranteed approval!,” “no credit checks!,” and “bad credit accepted!”
Affiliate Marketing Mistake #2: Not Creating New Content
By creating new articles and updating your website content often, you keep things fresh for new visitors and web crawlers alike. When consumers visit your website and see that the last article was written half a year ago, the natural assumption is that the service is somehow on hiatus. We understand that writing fresh content on a weekly basis can be a hindrance for many who aren’t particularly fond of writing. To overcome that obstacle, simply refresh one of your older articles and publish it as new. Be careful to not create duplicate content. Either create enough changes to these archived articles that they aren’t word-for-word, or give them a light edit and repost as a brand new article.
Affiliate Marketing Mistake #3: Stuffing Too Many Keywords
The act of keyword stuffing only makes it tricky for everyone involved: web visitors will have a difficult time reading through your keyword-stuffed content, while web crawlers might penalize your website for this aggressive SEO strategy. On the other hand, writing broad content without mentioning important keywords is not good for your SEO, either. The best approach is to simply mention the keywords as they naturally come up in writing, but write with purpose. Plan ahead of time what topic or niche to focus on, what kind of headline copy you want, and roughly how many keywords/key phrases you want to mention in your body content.
Affiliate Marketing Mistake #4: Ignoring Backlinks
Backlinks are the core of attracting new qualified leads, earning more credibility as a voice in the industry, and boosting your overall page rankings on the search engines. Once you hit your goal of attaining however many backlinks, don’t stop there. One can never have too many high quality sites linking to your page! The key is to focus on gaining high quality backlinks because quality matters much more than quantity in this arena. When authoritative websites link to your site, it tells Google and new web visitors that your page is high quality and trustworthy as well. In the financial loans niche, trustworthiness is everything.
Affiliate Marketing Mistake #5: Weighing Down the Website
Another common mistake that we’ve seen is over-packing the website with fancy animations, high quality images, and plugins that slow the site speed down. Nothing is worth slowing down your website speed because it’s a huge component of user experience. When a website takes too long to load because of design, coding, or content issues, the Affiliate loses his or her potential leads. There are millions of other fast-loading pages out there, so consumers can be understandably impatient. The faster your page loads, the more likely your visitors will stick around. Luckily, with Zero Parallel, you don’t have to sacrifice aesthetics for page loading speed. We provide our Affiliates with beautiful, highly optimized templates that are fast and mobile friendly for high conversions.
With all that said, if you’ve committed a few (or all) of these mistakes, it’s most likely not the end of the world. You can still make the appropriate changes before it’s too late. For more tips and tricks on the most effective lead generation strategies, check out the rest of our blog or sign up as an Affiliate with Zero Parallel to speak directly with an industry expert today.
