Hi, today I want to share some very important information. Over 90% of all website operators are having trouble making their business successful. Why is that? There are things that are counterproductive if your goal is making money online with a website.
In my time as an affiliate marketer, I have already collected some experience. With the three websites I run, I can see what I do differently and what the results are.
I know how frustrating it is to work day by day, hour by hour, and see no increase in success, be it with traffic or sales. It is also not nice to see the huge bounce rate most websites have.
So what is the reason for your website may be going wrong? Probably it is not because you are lazy but because your efforts go in the wrong direction.
If you feel addressed by this question, I recommend reading this article and overthink your approach on how you try making your website a money machine.
The 9 most popular mistakes people make.
What Am I Doing Wrong?Here’s a bullet list you can quickly check which one of the mistakes you might make. Go read in detail the points you think might be the problem with your website.
- Have chosen the wrong niche.
- Loose time perfecting the website itself.
- Focusing on making money instead of helping people.
- Trying to sell a product instead of a problem solution.
- Not addressing the reader but write for oneself.
- Not making it easy for the reader finding your product.
- Fail to make the reader think you are an authority.
- Focusing on SEO instead of content.
- Not publishing new articles regularly every week.
I don’t want to say I am the best blogger in the world and making a million dollars on this website but I have experienced a great improvement compared to my older sites.
Many of these points I didn’t know about before but now I implement them naturally into my work and see much better results.
With the wrong niche, you will have a hard time.
There are several reasons why you can call a niche the wrong one. A good niche should address certain attributes.
First, and I think most importantly, it should be popular, it should be something many people are searching for and a rather big market should already exist.
Second, you must feel comfortable with the niche. You have little to no chance blogging about a niche you are not interested in.
There are always hundreds of others writing about the same topic and the ones most compassionate will win the race. Your audience can feel how passionate you are about your niche and this eventually reflects in traffic.
Third, please try to choose a niche with products or services with some high value. If you sell things at a low value you will wait forever to make enough money to survive.
Everything is possible, Amazon, for example, a website making his founder more money than anything else. I think Jeff Bezos is or at least was passionate about his idea.
He saw the huge demand and ok today he sells everything from cheap to expensive. I think once we grow that big that doesn’t matter anymore 🙂
A perfect looking website is no guarantee of success.
Don’t Waste Your Time Beautifying Your WebsiteI often observe people spending days and days with creating better logos, changing themes and trying out new plugins.
These are nice things to do and also really interesting but for the goal of making money, they are not the most unimportant.
Once I chose my theme, added the essential plugins and had a header set up I started writing content. I like the look of my site but for sure it could be better.
Fancy moving graphics and colorful backgrounds are not what people are looking for. If your articles are interesting you make them read and come back for more. That’s all that counts.
Of course, a website should look clean, not aggressive and as calm as possible and should be easy to navigate but that can be achieved in one day.
From there on you can establish a style for the look of your articles and stick to it.
Your readers don’t like feeling you just want to sell something.
Make A customer Feel Being Helped, Not Being A CustomerA mistake I see many times. The articles are too focused on selling a product instead of helping people solve their problem.
If you build a promotional website just for the sake of promoting products you’ll have a hard stand. Big and established brands have covered this market already.
Everything is possible but not right from the beginning of your website presence. First, you should earn the trust of your audience before attacking them with products.
I know it is tempting. In fact, the reason you make a website is to make money. But your reader should not feel that intent.
I made my own experience with my flip-flop website. I implemented all three mistakes, wrong niche, too much effort in looking good and only focused on selling.
Thus so far I have sold one pair of flips and those I probably sold to someone that knew me and wanted to encourage me 🙂
I can only recommend to focusing on helping people with your articles. At the end of the post or sometimes during you can unobtrusively recommend a product that can help solve the problem discussed.
It’s not the product that should be sold but the solution to the problem.
All so often people, me as well, make the mistake of trying to sell a product. This sounds almost like the problem above but is slightly different.
We should sell a problem solution.
The seller’s cycle would be like this. Get traffic, write a post helping to solve a problem, link to a problem-solving opportunity which happens to be a product or service.
The reader has a problem. That is why he opened your site. Now you want to help him, let’s say improve his writing skills. Then one efficient recommendation you have is to use a program to minimize writing mistakes in an efficient and inexpensive way.
If your reader is interested, he will follow the link and find (for example) Grammarly as the recommended product. Here you can either write a review or let the potential buyer sign-up for free directly.
I try to avoid mentioning my recommended product by name, at least more and more the longer I learn about the buying psychology of our customers.
Articles must address the reader, not focus on publishing what the writer knows.
Yor Website Is Made For The Reader Not For YourselfThe main focus you should be oriented on is to answer the reader’s question. Nobody is interested in how much you know.
This sounds a bit harsh. Of course, the answer to the reader’s question is part of what you know. But writing all the way around just to show how much you know is boring and not helping keep your readers coming back.
You can write a lot of content, no problem but it should focus on helping the audience and not be used as self-exposure.
Again, if you are an interesting person and have a lot of experience it is surely possible to implement some of your own quotes to freshen up the content and make it more authentic.
The title of your post tells your reader what he can expect reading here and if you complicate things rather than deliver clarity only because you know much about the topic and love to write about it, it won’t resolve in conversions.
Call to action signs must be very visible and obvious.
Make Your Own Call To Action ButtonsMany sites seem to be shy about showing where a potential customer can find the recommended product. I’ve seen it a lot on new websites, where I could not find a call to action sign.
Of course, and I think quite naturally you want your reader to be able to find your products or services easily. There’s no need to hide your link.
A noticeable call to action button, image or whatever you chose is a must. It doesn’t have to appear all the time but with time you’ll find out where to place it to convert the best.
At the moment I choose to place my call to action sign at the end of my posts but that might be not optimal due to the people not reading until the end.
On the other hand, people not reading all the way down to the bottom of an article are not very likely to buy anything anyway.
Some articles, cover a lot of topics you have products helping in one way or another. In this case, you should always link to a review or a sales post/page.
My mentor says, never leave money on the table 🙂
If your reader doesn’t trust you, he won’t buy a thing.
Readers Trust Is Something You Need T EarnAgain something I see far too often. Articles that are not finished. I might think this could be interesting and helpful but then the post is finished and I feel unsatisfied.
If the writer doesn’t direct me to further, more in-depth information, I must think he doesn’t know more about the topic and isn’t able to help me.
Either you write a long in-depth and all questions answering article or you have to offer a place where your reader can find the missing part.
Sometimes I don’t know myself all the answers that might come up, then I say this openly and recommend coming back later when I have researched the missing information.
Sometimes it is also a good idea to link to an in-depth post on a website that is not yours. For example Wikipedia or a forum you know.
It can also help to add a video with relevant information. The video doesn’t have to be your own product but it can help your readers find more answers and stay on your site.
Always focus on helping your readers. They will appreciate it and come back or even subscribe to your email list. If you do a sloppy work you lose potential customers and will never reach authority status.
SEO, search engine rankings are important but not the reason why you make a website.
All these SE optimizations can take a lot of time. For a beginner in the business, it is important to focus on writing relevant, good in-depth and helpful content.
The keyword research should not determine what you write about. No, the other way around. You choose a topic you want to discuss today and look for a relevant keyword.
This practice should not take too much of your time. Writing content should be the main component you spend your time on.
Google is ranking mainly content. Keywords as well but they find lots of relevant keywords in your article if you write about what you promise in the title.
I just read an article of a very successful online money maker and he said most of his 1000 posts are anti SEO. You see what I mean, “1000 articles” are impossible to be overseen by Google and any search engine.
He also said his articles are only 500+ words but still, he is now the owner of a million dollar making business.
I won’t recommend working anti SEO, I don’t do this myself, but to overrate SEO and get distracted from SEO friendliness is also not the way to go I think.
Continuous and regular publishing content is the key to getting traffic.
Continous Publishing = Growing Traffic = Growing SalesThis leaves us with the last task, a lot of people wanting to make money online fail to proceed. Writing regularly every one or two days.
I can pick my own nose on that one. I have managed to publish 2-3 posts a week so far. Not publishing regularly for months and years is killing your business.
The best way to earn trust, get an authority and improve your SEO is to write as many articles as possible.
Not to say writing a lot of poor articles does the trick! No, every two or three days your subscribers should receive a valuable article in their mailbox and see how hard you work.
I want to achieve 100 posts this year, wow, a lot of work to be done, this is my 27th. But it’s realistic. If I get only one visitor per post per day I already reached my goal of having an organic traffic of 100 people per day.
We’ll see and we’ll improve every week a little more. I see others working alongside with me have topped these goals already. In what time I don’t know, it doesn’t matter, everyone needs to set his/her own goals.
I believe if I stick to my own recommendations I collected from everywhere on the internet and from my mentors where I work, I will reach my goals.
The selling thing comes all by itself. My dad used to say, “who works will earn money”. I believe in this truth and keep focusing on working and not on making money. As well as I keep focusing helping you and not selling products.
Once you know me well enough and have seen what I am able to do, you will yourself be interested by which means of help I use and where I learn all this stuff.
Thanks for your visit, I hope you enjoyed my work.
That’s it for now again dear people, I now have to beautify this post and then think of what might interest you the most for a next post.
You can help me a lot with the second of my today’s tasks. Tell me what should I write about? Do you have an urgent question?
Please leave a comment below, any opinions or suggestions as well as questions are very welcome and add value to this post.
I wish you a wonderful Easter Monday, a great start to the new week and in general all the best.
See you, Stefan 🙂 asuperaffiliate.com

Hello Stefan,
Thanks for sharing! I agree with everything you stated completely. What really caught my attention was when you pointed out “Perfect Looking Website.”
I’m definitely guilty of that because lately I’ve been tampering with my website more than content production.
There is one thing that I would like to add(:
Google AdSense is a blessing and a curse.. When you have too many ads on your website, you are essentially driving traffic away from your website. – This reduces conversion rates significantly.
My recommendation is to focus more on delivering valuable content. If done correctly, you should be able to gain more email subscribers. – People who are more likely to convert into sales.
Thanks again for the informative article Steff(;
– Eric
Hey, Eric and thanks for the valuable comment.
You are absolutely right there, the Google AdSense is also something I don’t work with.
I forgot to mention it because of making the experience it is not easy to get accepted first.
Next, as you say, the money possible to gain, at least with a young website, is in no relation with the distraction it brings to the site.
Best of success to you, see you, Stefan 🙂
Steff, Thank you very much.
I think you have just helped me get over my writing issues.
I have been worried about keywords instead of topics that can help my readers.
Being new, we make a lot of the mistakes you mention.
It is nice to have someone like yourself to write these articles to keep us on track of our internet business.
I am also going to take the advice on call to action buttons.
I do try and focus on my readers which is why I don’t have pop-ups. I don’t like them and I know the readers might not like them as well.
I want to thank you again for your help.
Hi Lee Ann, thanks for the comment.
This sounds great if I was able to help you a little here.
For sure, attractive call to action button is very important. My example is not the best lol.
You are right, pop up’s are annoying but the one for an email sign-up is almost a must.
I wish you best success, see you Stefan 🙂
Thanks, Steff. Good reminders.
All of them. Particularly for me because I’m the kind of person that gets distracted but the next new thing.
So focusing on the main thing, content, is a great reminder for me.
Hi CT, and thanks for commenting.
I know, the playing around with technology can be very tempting.
But what would you say if someone was wasting your time and you’d have to pay for it?
Why wast our own time just because it is for free.
I think it is hard all ready to get hundreds of posts out, I have to concentrate on that.
Have a great time, see you, Stefan 🙂
Stephan, I really enjoyed reading this article.
I love the detailed points you have provided about the common mistakes affiliate marketers make.
I also love that you emphasize writing to help your site visitor. This is something I often struggle with.
Again, great article. – Shirley
Hi Shirley, thanks for your comment.
Great to hear that you like my article.
Helping our visitors is the key and goal of every website. It is sad to see that many people fail to focus on this.
If you check famous websites, especially in this niche, you’ll see that most of the posts are created to help in one way or another.
Help the reader of course, not our selves lol.
I wish you all the best, see you, Stefan 🙂
These are topics that if not addressed will lead to failure.
Websites fail because there a “must do” practices that one has to adhere to.
Also, one must monitor their sites diligently and stay up to date with technology.
Hi Maurice, and thanks for the comment.
I see you agree with me. many people do not understand at first that there are essential corner points of a website that has to be addressed.
The same important I think is to know and to refrain things inefficient for creating a successful website.
I know, technology is moving at light speed and at some point, we have to catch up with it as well.
But I believe this is something that can be done in some few spare hours and doesn’t need to be a priority.
All the best, see you, Stefan 🙂
Interesting stuff Stefan. And all of it very true.
I initially found a nice clean theme and I use it all the time. I can dress it up but I hate fussy stuff.
So many themes are and I feel these detract from the great content we all write.
I noticed someone was talking of Adsense in the comments. Recently I reviewed a site I was interested in.
The first thing that popped up was a rather obnoxious ad that had nothing to do with the article and was very off-putting.
I did let the author know about this as I am in Australia and the ad most likely wasn’t shown where she was. One has to be so careful!
I certainly know the keyword issue. I find that once I have an article written the keyword/s fall into place unforced.
Most people are surprised at how many keywords they rank for when they check the analytics of their site. Don’t lose sleep over them.
Finally I, like a lot of people, hate pushy sellers. Puts me right off and bye bye.
Great article. See you around.
Ciao, Helen
Hi, Helen and thanks for the comment.
I’m glad you like the post. For some of us, these are normal rules we know and take care not to mess around with.
But I thought for many newbies they could be of value.
Really, websites with pop-up AdSense can be very boring and annoying. For the little money, these adds make us I think it’s not worth littering our websites.
Websites with hundreds of thousands of view every day might want to think of AdSense but younger websites should definitely not add these promotions I think.
I wish you a great time, see you, Stefan 🙂
Hello, you are so right with what you say, a beautiful website and lots of products do not spell success.
These nine reasons that you have addressed are so important and you are so right with what you have said.
Your post will be a great help in guiding those in how to be a successful online line marketer.
Hi Norman, thanks for the comment.
If it was that easy, fancy pansy websites and a ton of products and get rich lol.
I know it is not easy to write helpful posts all the time but that is what we need to learn to do.
I guess most people hate commercials, on TV and here as well.
All the best Norman, see you, Stefan 🙂
Stefan, I must say that this post is spot on! I’m sure this is helpful for both beginners and more experienced marketers.
It helps beginners to avoid making the mistakes and it reminds more experienced marketers like us to keep us on the right track.
I think the most important point among all is that we need to have the “helping” mentality instead of trying to sell.
Thanks for this awesome post by the way 🙂
Hi Jerry, and thanks for your comment.
You are right there if we focus on helping people with our website the most important task is accomplished.
I believe a helping website gets customers all by its self, of course, there must be some call to action buttons somewhere.
Have a great time, see you, Stefan 🙂
Steff, thank you so much for your article! I’ve been in this business for about 6 weeks and am just now learning how to put links to products on my sites.
I’ve found this very stressful and confusing with every affiliate network wanting something different and doing the process differently.
Up till now, I’ve loved the writing and I have managed to keep up with the tech. stuff so was really enjoying the work.
Thank you for reminding me that the most important thing is talking to the reader and helping them. That puts the joy back in the work for me.
I know I’ll figure out the marketing part, but I’m just finding it hard now. Do you have an article on affiliate programs/networks?
Thanks so much for the good advice and encouragement!
Hi, Kathleen and thanks for the comment.
It is a learning process with these affiliate links I know. I sometimes struggle my self.
Some affiliate providers don’t approve my applications and some are very difficult to navigate.
So far I have no list of affiliate programs due to the endless number of companies. I think though it is quite easy to find a matching program.
I just write the product I want to sell into the Google search bar and add the words affiliate program, search and then I get a choice of several.
But thanks for the idea, I might want to write an article on this topic soon.
Have a great time, see you, Stefan 🙂
I just read your article concerning keeping the important things uppermost in your website!
I agree with you that the most important thing is to write for your reader, and your readers who left comments agree with you, also!
Writing for your reader transcends every form of writing, whether it be an English novel or an article about springtime and birds! So let’s lock this down and remember it!
Janice
Hi Jenice, thanks for commenting.
It is the essence of making a website, to serve our readers. If we miss doing that we don’t get successful.
It is also essential to focus on providing a lot of good content instead of a fancy looking cover.
All the best to you, see you, Stefan 🙂
Great article, love the summary at the start.
Interesting thought, not to mention the product name in the blog title. This is not something
I’ve ever thought about.
I’ll have to check my traffic numbers and see if there is a correlation.
For me, the hardest part is the regular posting – I usually manage to do one per month, two if I’m really lucky.
Hi, Derek and thanks for commenting.
I don’t like to mention the product title due to often having a big competition on the keyword of paid adds.
If you already have posts with the product in the title, you can write a similar post with another title and compare the results.
The frequency of writing new articles can change once a site has some potential content with traffic. I speak mainly for beginners here, for a new website it is important to add new content as often as possible. Every new keyword rich post targets more potential visitors to the site.
I wish you much success, see you, Stefan 🙂