Affiliate Marketing: 4 Common Mistakes

There are many appealing and attractive myths about affiliate marketing.

People who do not understand the process are prone to believing that affiliate

marketing will give them a great fortune overnight. Yes, it's true that there

are a few very successful affiliate marketers. You may be one of them for all

I know!

And affiliate marketing can be very rewarding, financially. But, like most

things in life, these rewards don't come without hard work. And they won't

come to you unless you avoid the mistakes that many, many affiliate marketers

make.

Here are four common mistakes that wannabe affiliate marketers make:

Mistake #1:

Not understanding search engine marketing

If you are promoting affiliate products through your own website, you must be

capable of driving traffic to your site. And, until you become a lot more

successful, pay-per-click methods will be too expensive for you to use.

This means that you will have to rely on search engines for traffic. And you

will have to learn the best ways to optimise your pages to rank higher in the

search engines for your chosen keywords.

Mistake #2:

Not providing enough information

The primary job of the affiliate is to pre-sell the product being promoted.

You don't have to copy the sales page of the product. Your job is to get

people in a favourable frame of mind before they arrive at the sales page. You

need not only to get your website visitors to click through to the sales page,

but to get them to click through in a favourable state of mind.

Stuffing your web pages with affiliate banners is not the right way to promote

products. But so many inexperienced affiliate marketers do just that.

You need to understand the products you are promoting, and you need to pass

this knowledge on to potential customers.

Apart from links through from my main website, Marketing Magic, I also have a

product review website, Marketing Choice. Here I can devote an entire web page

to the pros and cons of a product. And yes, you should mention some of the

weak points about a product; it adds credibility to your review. Just ensure

that the "pros" outweigh the "cons"!

Mistake #3:

Promoting too many products

You're not able to give enough attention to an individual product if you try

to promote too many products.

Experiment a bit, find half a dozen or so products which get results for you

and stick with them for a while. Don't close your eyes to new opportunities,

but don't jump onto every band wagon that rolls past you!

It would be equally wrong to promote just one product. The most successful

affiliate marketers may have one product that they concentrate on, but they

also believe in multiple income streams. This is a sound strategy for all

internet marketers.

Mistake #4:

Short-term thinking

As I said in my introduction, you won't succeed in affiliate marketing without

hard work. And that means hard work over a long period of time.

Many unsuccessful affiliate marketers pick up a new product and run

half-heartedly with it for a few weeks. Then, when it doesn't make them

incredibly rich (surprise, surprise!) they drop it and proceed to make the

same mistake with the next "flavour of the month"!

If you have enough confidence in an affiliate product, then you must sustain

that confidence over a period of months - or even years. There are some

affiliate products that I have been steadily promoting since 1999 - and they

are still producing income for me.

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So, if you can avoid these common mistakes, you will achieve much more than 99

per cent of affiliate marketers. Wouldn't you like to be one of the top one

per cent?

About The Author:
Ian Traynor has been building and running websites since 1996. His "Marketing Magic" website provides tons of free advice and help on all aspects of online and offline selling and marketing. Sign Up on "Marketing Update" newsletter - and get access to his subscribers' free Download Library. Ian is also the Principal of the Newbies School of Internet Marketing.