The 5 Worst Blunders New Affiliates Make.

If you want to succeed as an affiliate you need to avoid these blunders that are made regularly by new affiliate marketers. The main reason they make these mistakes is that they do not think of affiliate marketing as a business, and do not treat it like a business.

Here are the biggest mistakes.

1. Signing up for the wrong products or services :

It is very tempting to sign up as an affiliate for the first e-book you bought about affiliate marketing, especially if the marketer offers you a 'free' website which is supposedly worth thousands of dollars. You read the blurb, and it seems that you are now on a magic money-making carpet.

This is not the case, simply because hundreds of others will have signed up for exactly the same web page, and these are very simple sites. True, you have your own domain, but the site will be seen by the search engines as duplicate copy. They use software which can compare your page with others on the Internet in a couple of seconds, so they will never rank you high enough to make money.

Even if you do not sign up for the web site, you are still unlikely to make money as a new affiliate if you try to enter the market of Internet marketing, or affiliate marketing, because these are very competitive areas, and you need to know what you are doing to succeed. You will be able to do that later.

2. Signing up for two many affiliate programs :

New affiliates head over to Clickbank, and I recommend you do, and then they see all these programs offering good rewards for making a sale. They can end up with a dozen or more perfectly sound products to sell, but with not marketing knowledge, and little in the way of tools from the merchant. Many do not even think about marketing tools.

What happens then is that they try to market all of these, either on pay-per-click search engines or at a web site they create, and the result is like throwing confetti at a target. It all gets scattered everywhere, and none hits the target.

The solution is to sign up for two or three products, and to get to know them and the marketing materials well, and market them in sequence. Don't start the second one until the first is generating income. That concentrates the mind.

3. Advertising with Banners :

Here's another mistake: advertising with banners on your site. Banners worked about five years ago, but were soon seen as adverts by surfers, who ignore them. It is true that the newer animated banners do catch the eye, but at the same time a trigger goes off and you say to yourself: 'Another dreadful ad' and get rid of it, or click away. Always use text ads in preference to banners, and ideally review a product rather than advertise it on your site.

4. Not buying products :

You cannot buy every product you market as an affiliate, but do buy our main products. Most affiliates fail to do this, and don't know what the product will do, and in many cases do not even know whether the product is a download or physical book.

This ignorance shows through when you start to market a product, so do buy some of those you intend to market.

5. Paying too much for Adwords ad :

The other blunder made by new affiliates is to waltz over to Google Adwords, and set up some ads, using a huge list of keywords provided by the merchant, and a couple of ads also made available, or copied from someone else's ad.

With this approach, many of the keywords you are advertising for will match neither your ad nor the web site where you are sending the prospect, so you will pay more for your ad than an experienced marketer. As a result, you will find that the money goes quickly, and becomes a real drain unless you set an end date for the ad. Many people don't, and of course, that suits Google and MSN very well.

Here, you need to tread very warily when you advertise on Adwords or MSN Center, with few keywords, few ads, daily or monthly limit on spending and with an end date.