5 Surefire Ways to Fail at Affiliate Marketing

There are many mistakes made by beginning affiliate marketers, but I believe there are 5 mistakes in particular that should be avoided.

1. Not Testing or Tracking

I am constantly surprised by how often I see marketers who are not testing or tracking. When asked why, they often say they will get to it "later" or say they don't understand its importance or how to do it.

Without testing/tracking you are shooting in the dark, and often will have no idea why something is or isn't working. Testing can be as easy as running multiple ads per ad group in Adwords or split-testing the landing page you are sending traffic to.

Tracking is also extremely important and is easily doable. With the many available tracking softwares - some free - there is no excuse for not knowing where your traffic is coming from and how it is converting.

2. Not Preselling

Your job as an affiliate is not to sell, but you should absolutely be preselling. What is preselling? Getting your visitor in the state of mind where they are predisposed to buy once they click on your affiliate link and land on the merchant's site.

Many merchant sites are lousy at converting visitors to sales but with preselling you can increase the odds that the prospect will buy, which allows you to spend more on getting traffic to the site than anyone else.

Preselling is best done with emotion; getting your prospect excited or curious is a great way to put them in the "buying" state. Reveal your personal experiences with the product, if any, using emotional language or get the prospect to imagine the difference in their lives once they are the proud owner of the product you are promoting.

3. Not building a list

I am sure you have heard this a million times so I won't spend a lot of time on it. You can make money as an affiliate marketer without building a list but that's like boxing with one arm tied behind your back. Why would you want to do that? It's so much more difficult.

Build a list of prospects interested in the niche you want to promote and then establish a relationship with them.

4. Using Black Hat

Black Hat refers to using techniques designed to manipulate your search engine rankings that specifically violate the terms of service of those search engines.

Now, I am not personally opposed to Black Hat methods on any sort of "ethical" grounds, I just think that the vast majority of affiliate marketers will only hurt themselves by using these methods.

Using Black Hat requires some sophisticated knowledge and often requires significant resources in software and other expenses, like hosting. In this area, a little bit of knowledge is definitely a dangerous thing. You will almost certainly get caught by the search engines, resulting in your sites getting banned and your efforts going to waste.

5. Using Spam

This one should be obvious in this day and age, but there are still far too many people trying spam because they haven’t figures out how to market legitimately. This is almost surely going to be a waste of time and will ultimately result in getting your sites banned and possibly having legal action taken against you. Don't do it.

If you avoid these 5 affiliate marketing mistakes and develop your knowledge over time about the best practices you should be using you will have taken a huge step toward achieving your affiliate marketing income goals.