My Biggest Affiliate Marketing Mistake

Every affiliate makes mistakes. When you are new to this field, it’s easy to make mistakes. But one of the biggest mistakes that I made when entering this business was not doing my homework. I entered markets that I shouldn’t have, and I failed to do a proper market research to understand the dynamics of markets. When you choose a market, you should pay more attention to those little things that could go wrong. Don’t just think about how fat your pay check will be.

Take the credit card market. The players in this industry are highly regulated, and you should be extra careful entering in this market. These companies will ask you to make changes to your pages on a consistent basis. And they threaten to remove you every time you miss the smallest little thing. These guys can’t afford to have you misrepresent their offers, and that is why this market is such a pain in the butt. Let’s say you have a blog and you keep blogging about these credit cards. Something that you wrote years ago could come back to haunt you here. That’s right. Many credit card companies don’t care when you wrote your post. If they can see it, they are going to ask you to remove it.

What if you wrote a piece on top 5 credit cards years ago? You may have to remove one or two of those top 5 cards if you are warned by your affiliate manager. Then you are left with only 3 cards. You see the problem? You have to do major edits to fix the headaches caused by credit card companies. And this stuff is not exclusive to the credit industry. You are going to see it in most highly regulated industries. If you ask me, do yourself a favor and do a proper market research to make sure what you are getting yourself into. Getting $100 per credit card is nice, but the amount of work you have to go through to comply is a big turn off!