The single biggest mistake made by affiliate and associate program members

Here's a tip that can change your thoughts about the best way to market an affiliate program.

What is the difference that leads some people to make a very good income with online marketing while others make a few dollars here, a few dollars there, but never really make any substantial income. What is the most common mistake made by those who don't get the results they are looking for with their associate or MLM programs? It's very simple. They are marketing the WRONG website! Let's look at it a little more closely.

You know that nice self replicating website that you are given as part of the package you received after joining affiliate program A. You know, the one with the URL that looks something like this:
http://www.myprogram.com/affiliate/cgi?13658/

That website they gave you is the single BIGGEST obstacle to you making any money. Why? It looks nice doesn't it? It has a nice sales letter, and best of all, it was easy. You're right. It's all of those things, for you and about 5000 other people, or however many are in the program. The solution is very simple. Get your own website. And I don't mean a freebie site like Hotyellow or Geocities. (There's nothing wrong with these sites, but they are not for people trying to make money. In fact they are just short of useless.) I mean get your own real domain hosted on a real web server with real features. Sure it costs $70 to register your own domain name for 2 years. But if you are serious about making it in the online business world, it's not even a question of should you get your own domain. YOU MUST! Look for domain names that contain your keywords or keyword phrases. And sure it costs maybe $15-$30 per month to have your site hosted with a quality hosting company, but this is how the game is played. If you are not skilled in website design, hire someone.

If you are serious about making money online this is what you MUST do. The people making the BIG money ALWAYS have their own domains. They advertise their associate programs on THEIR own website, in THEIR own words. They promote THEIR website. All the traffic comes to THEIR website. They make their own personal recommendation about the programs they are offering. These are the folks who are making good money. Some more than others, but each of them will be marketing from their own domain. You can still link to the self replicating site you were given originally from your site to make sales. But having your own website is almost 100% guaranteed to get you more traffic than a self replicating website. Most of the major search engines will not even list a domain with characters such as '?' in the URL. You are just out of luck. With your own website and domain, you can control your own meta tags, you can control everything. Search engines give far more weight to sites having their own domain. Freebie websites often won't get listed either. Most search engines limit the amount of pages from any given domain that they will list. So what are you waiting for? This is one thing you can do yourself. It's totally in your control.