1. Your niche could be too narrow
Affiliate Marketing Maybe creating a niche site about…. seemed like a good idea at the time. But if you see no one online writing about what you are, chances are there aren’t many people who are interested.
Sure, there can be exceptions definitely and in some cases, if you get on the first page of Google for that niche, you can make a nice little income. But these cases aren’t something you can rely on.
The thing about competitive niches is, they are competitive for a reason. There is money to be made. And often there are there are still ways you can target sub areas within a niche and carve your own place within it.
2.You don’t really have a niche.
This can be an issue too. If your blog or website targets a tone of different topics, it’s going to take a long time to gain traction.
Especially if you’re relying on Google for rankings – as Google likes to be clear what a website is about. Once it knows, it will rank content accordingly. But if the topics of your site keep changing, then Google will be confused about your content and how to place you.
Some of the most successful websites end up targeting lots of different topics. But if you are looking to see some sort of results within a small-time frame, having a well-defined niche is a good idea.
3. Your readers are at the wrong stage of the buying cycle.
You should be aware of where your readers may be in the buyers cycle.
Are they ready and waiting with their wallets out? Or are they still in the research stage? — Or are they just looking to solve a problem, that doesn’t require them to buy anything anyway?
You could have a blog or website that is purely
4. Your site looks bad and scam like – no one trusts you.
Some blogs just don’t look trustworthy!
If you visit a site that’s full of flashing banners and calls to action bullying you into buying tonnes of different products, you’re immediately going to feel that the site isn’t trustworthy and that you’re only after one thing…. to make money, at whatever cost!
I encourage website owners to share a photo of them on their site and info about them and to keep anything too loud and sales-y to a minimu
You don’t want to overwhelm your new visitors, before they’ve even had a chance to do anything.
Another thing I can’t stand is a million pop ups. Sure, one pop up is OK… but any more than that and it just becomes annoying.
5. Your affiliate links aren’t being tracked/are broken.
If you were once getting sales and they’ve disappeared.
You may want to check your affiliate links. Affiliate networks and other programs will often not tell you when a product has stopped, or a product has changed.
This can particularly be the case with programs like Amazon and Etsy, where products will regularly come and go.
You need to check the links fairly regularly and change them when necessary.
6. You are not creating regular content.
Google likes active sites that are updated regularly.
If you are not creating regular content and are relying on Google for traffic, your rankings will slowly but eventually start to go down.
Google also likes consistency.
So, it’s better to publish a post several days a week and set your days to so… rather than writing 7 posts one week and zero posts for the next three weeks.
7. You’re expecting too much.
Because so many people online act as though you can easily make many thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars a month from affiliate marketing, that can be what people expect.
If you go into it with realistic expectations, (earning a bit of extra pocket money a month, after a few months and building from there…) then you’re going to be far more likely to stick with it.
I mean, if you can make $50 a month, what is to stop you from building that to $500, or $5000 over time?
Once you get your initial sales, you can start looking at what is working and what you should concentrate on.
Useful Post: How to make your first affiliate sale online
8. Your content isn’t compelling enough.
You definitely do not have to be an amazing writer to be an affiliate marketer, but you probably need to be a fairly good communicator.
I’ve seen people become successful without English being their first language, (for example;) but I have noticed that their personality seems to shine through their writing and they have an authenticity about their style, which I think is key.
If you’re just writing some mediocre posts that you have little or no interest in writing, that’s probably going to start to show after a while. If you’re not interested in what you’re trying to say – who else is going to be?
9. Your keyword research sucks.
I won’t go into the details of keyword research here, I’ve written plenty of posts on it before. But, needless to say, if you’re either targeting keywords that are way too competitive, or keywords that don’t have any traffic at all… you’re going to struggle.
Also, you can easily be tricked into thinking that a keyword is low in competition from a keyword research tool… which is why it’s so important to ALSO check the search engine results independently.
Often, a keyword may appear low in competition, but you will see that the top 10 results are entirely dominated by high domain authority websites.
While you can certainly compete with more authoritative websites down the road, your website needs to have a certain amount of authority before you’ll have any chance of doing this.
10. Your calls to action are not obvious enough.
This can be tricky!
Because, depending on your niche, your calls to action may need to be more natural, or more obvious.
You may need to play around with this and track your sales to see how they work for you. However, I have seen calls to action that have no visibility at all – as in, they are just within the text and not even highlighted… so, how could anyone know?
People online have a very low attention span. They don’t want to have to scan over your content for long without knowing what they have to do. Make your calls to action clear, but be cautious of having too many, which could appear over sales-y.
So, there are many reasons that you may not be marking any money from affiliate marketing. Do any of these ring true to you?
Sometimes, showing your content to someone more experienced can help you see where you are at fault. It can be difficult for us to analyse our own content often and someone external can make you realise the things that you may not have noticed!
Do you have any other questions about affiliate marketing? Let me know in the comments!
All the best.
