7 Most Common Mistakes Made By New Affiliate Marketer

When you are starting out or looking for new ways to start making money working from home one method to consider is affiliate marketing. With this method you don’t have to set out early for work, don’t need your own product, no worries about customer service problems. It all sounds so easy and can be a successful business, but not everyone gets it right and it then fails.

The following are some of the mistakes made by new affiliate marketers.

1. Banners and links are plastered all over their website or blog.

This is a direct giveaway of a “Newbie Marketer” and does not help when it comes to search engines. What Google is really looking for is good quality content, and when found, the site then has a good chance of showing up in the rankings.

Don’t expect the people that come to your site to be so impressed with your banners that they feel they must buy something. They are on your site looking for information to solve their problem(s).

2. All they do is set up a site, sit back, and wait for visitors to come

If only it was that easy. What is needed to make this work is for the newbie marketer to spend time driving traffic to their site. Some of the many ways to do this is by: article marketing, emails, product reviews, Facebook, Twitter, Squidoo Lenses, Pay Per Click Ads,etc. The more ways you use to drive traffic the better the results.

3. They set up their site and do not update it with fresh content.

The Google thing again… what search engines like is to see fresh content appearing on a regular basis. There is a posibility, a very slight one, that they could get on the first page of Google but they would not stay there for long if the site was not updated. There are exceptions but it is much better to keep updating content.

4. They send out cut and paste promotional emails.

Emails are generally provided by the product creator but these are to be used only as an example and need modifying. The marketer of the affiliate product should re-word the email in their own words and develop a style which will show their own personality. This will also develop a way of talking to their list, which should continue to be evident, or people on the list may soon lose trust in them.

Established marketers have been known to send out these emails without modification and maybe get away with it as they have big lists but for the newbie it must be re-worded.

5. They throw lots of money at Pay Per Click advertising without knowing what they’re doing.

PPC advertising can be very effective but before spending any money they should thoroughly investigate this method. Fortunately, there is plenty of information available online both free and paid to educate them before making any investment in advertising.

6. They pick a niche they have no interest in.

You may have heard that you don’t really need to have an interest in your niche to make it work and you can just outsource everything that needs to be written and it will do just fine. Maybe they can make this work, but I am not convinced, and feel that if they are totally disinterested in the topic of the niche then this would get neglected and not kept up to date. Outsourcing is not always an option for newbies due to the cost when first starting out.

7. They don’t build a list.

Now for the big one. They don’t seem to realize that by capturing visitors email addresses they would save a lot of repeat work. By building this list they can market to them again and again. The old saying still stands today – “The Money Is In The List”.

Affiliate marketing has been around for a long time in many forms and by using the Internet this can be a successful model to follow for making money from home. By avoiding the mistakes mentioned above it should be much easier to get started and become successful.