One big mistake new affiliate marketers make is paying to join an affiliate program. This is commonly know as a pyramid scheme or a scam. It is usually very enticing and promises to make you rich. The fact is that the only person getting rich is the guy who came up with the scheme.

Take for example Dan, he approached me about three months ago and wanted to learn about affiliate marketing. I gave him lots of advice and resources (free) to learn more. He said he had just gotten back from doing a seminar with Mr. $$$ and that I should check it out to. he gave me the information and I told him I would check it out. The next day Dan calls me back and says he would like to have a conference call with him, me, and Mr. $$$. At first I really didn’t want to do it, but I wanted to support Dan as much as I could. So two hours later I am on a conference call with all three of us and we get talking about Mr. $$$ product and how it is going to “Revolutionize the Industry” and the rest of his sales pitch. Then came the time for me to ask questions. I didn’t care to much on what he was selling, but the way he was selling it. He wanted me to pay him $250 to join an elite network of sales people to sell his product. BIG RED FLAG New affiliates take notice, no network, affiliate program, or any company wanting you to sell their stuff should ever charge you any fee. Not even for a membership or “exclusive” deals. I kept asking him about this and he tried to explain it but I kept reminding him that no company I have every represented or worked for charged me to join them. To make a long story short, he finally gave up and said “I was missing out”.

The point of the story is that you have to be very careful on what you promote and who you work with. They can be very convincing. You NEVER pay to join a network or affiliate program! If you do, it is more likely a scam or some sort of pyramid scheme. Stay far away.

Many new affiliate marketers fall into this scheme and buy pre-written articles and content and think they are going to make millions. The sad truth is, they are not even going to make $5. The reason why they are not going to make money is because that same article or content has been sold numerous times over and over again. There may be over a thousand copies of that article or content online even before you get your site up.

Why this is bad?

Google and other search engines rank your site on how unique your content is. They will punish the site owner who uses other peoples work, especially when there are thousands of copies already online. By then the search engines will just skip over you and your site will not be ranked and possibly considered as spam.

Take for example Sue, she came to me one day saying she bought a special package that was going to be on sale for today only and limited to 500 copies sold. We talked for a bit more and I told her to upload the info and send me over her site url. I then entered her site url into CopyScape and you wouldn’t be surprised to see she had 3,293 identical matches to her website content! The sad part was that she spent $12.95 for it. Even though this wasn’t much, I have heard of people spending $300 for an all access pass to thousands of articles….which most likely have already been put online millions of times.

How you can prevent this

If you happen to have already purchased pre-written content then I suggest you run your site through CopyScape. This will check your website against duplicate content and show you how many other websites have the same content as you. Don’t be surprised if you have more than one hundred matches.

To prevent this, don’t buy pre-written content. The best content for your site is written by you and is unique online. The time you invest into your content and articles the better your results will be.

Affiliate marketing and working with niche markets is the way to go today if you are young and eager to make a lot of money. I’m not saying that affiliate marketers never have to work a single day in their lives and just rake in the cash while sitting out by the pool, but there are tremendous perks to this job. Do you hate going to work every day? Commuting, whether by car or mass transit, is an absolute bore. The hours you spend every week commuting are lost hours that you will never get back before you die. So why not choose something better?

The best thing about affiliate marketing is the freedom to work in a relaxing environment. The “office” could be your home desk, the kitchen table or, why not?, a table by the pool. Every day is “casual Friday” and all your tools are concentrated in the computer. No paperwork to shift around from one desk to another. And the earnings are on par with the setting. The more effort you’re willing to put in building a maintaining a nice website, the more money will come in every day. If this isn’t a good deal, then I don’t know what a good deal could be.

Some people think that affiliate marketing is too much work and that splashing some AdSense ads on a page is far easier. It might be so, but how much money can you get out of AdSense? Two or three dollars a day? Come on, that’s not money but loose change. Affiliate marketing may be a bit harder than AdSense, but this is where people actually spend money. If you play with the big boys, you could make as much as $175 out of every sale. That’s the equivalent of 58.3 days of AdSense at $3 per day you can make in one day.

What many people don’t realize is that the global economy is going through a huge spending period. Across the world people are willing to pay good money for all kinds of products and the Internet has made it easier than ever to spend money. eCommerce has made it possible for people to buy things they had never had access to before. Orders pour in and products and services move across countries because people can search the Internet for answers to their problems and are willing to pay for solutions, regardless or where they come from.

It’s like a river of money moving across the planet and you can become one of those who help connect the buyers with vendors and cash in commission while never leaving their armchairs. The gap between offer and demand is huge nowadays because there are far more people with money out there than there are people who sell things. The key is to find products that are underrepresented, highly demanded and pay high. Until now affiliate information packages do not address this. Many of the marketing programs out there are about re-selling the program you have just purchased.

But things are about to change for you because help is on the way. MakingYouRicher is a comprehensive guide on niche marketing that teaches you how to make thousands a month by learning where to find the highest paying products that are searched for by millions. Visit www.makingyouricher.com/index.html and see for yourself all the opportunities that are only waiting for a quick witted marketer to take advantage of them and get rich fast.

www.makingyouricher.com

For those that are new to affiliate marketing, the whole thing can seem too good to be true. A real business from home that make you more then enough money to live on and you don’t even have to bother with products or shipping. Many new affiliate marketers simply jump into the business without properly researching it first and end up frustrated and angry that they aren’t making big time money within the first few days. Here is a quickie guide to common mistakes that affiliate marketers make and how you can avoid them.

• Patience is the key. For even the best affiliate marketers, it takes time to build a customer base. The people that are legitimately making $10,000 a month in affiliate marketing spent years getting to that level, not days or even months. For some that are new to the trade, it seems like that level of success is an overnight thing, but it isn’t. Once you pick an affiliate program, after researching it ahead of time, of course, you need to stick with it. You should change your content on a regular basis, update your site weekly, add in some holiday-themed pages and make sure you stay up to date on product information from your parent company, but the most important thing to do is to simply stay the course. If you jump ship after a month, the chances of your affiliate marketing site taking off are slim to none.

• The second big problem that many affiliate marketers fall prey to is subscribing to too many programs at once. By doing this, it makes it very hard to provide top-level page design and content relating to all of these programs at once. You should only subscribe to two or three programs at once. This will allow you to give these programs your laser-like focus so you can turn them into money makers sooner rather than later. Patience is, again, very important. It may seem like the best way to go is to load up your site with two dozen affiliate marketing sites but there is little chance that will make you any money. If your site is focused, you’ll be in much better shape.

The vast majority of mistakes that new affiliate marketers make are ones out of inexperience. They want to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible. What they don’t realize is slow and steady wins the race. Dedication, hard work and focus are the best friends of affiliate marketers.

The frenetic pace of sales letters and affiliate advice leads you to believe that if you don’t act now, the opportunity will be lost.

I personally hate the hard sell. How many times have you read…?

• This Coupon will expire 3 days from
• I reserve the right to end this introductory offer at anytime without warning
• Once we get the testimonials we need, we’re going to push the price up on this to $97 or maybe even $127

I don’t understand how this approach works, especially when you are selling to other affiliate marketers. Creating a sense of urgency with these kind of buzz lines overwhelms the message of your product. And as a customer, making a decision with the timer running is just bad for business. But given the persistent nature of the extreme hard sell, someone must fall for it, right?

The problem with giving in to the hard sell is that it doesn’t always make good business sense. So before you jump on in because of you’re worried about missing out, take a step back and figure out if the product you’re buying actually makes sense for your business.

Look for full disclosure
You should know exactly what you are getting before you buy it. Whether you are buying a membership, or an eBook, whatever format the product gets delivered to you should be clearly stated.

You should also check out the FAQ. Most direct response pages have one, and it can be very enlightening to see what the seller views as important questions. Depending on the product, you will often see just a repeat of the same pitch you already read, a broken link, or a handful of questions and answers too general to be useful. If you aren’t getting enough information to make a sound decision, that is a tipoff that you need to be wary.

I’ll give you an example. There are numerous products on Clickbank for background checks and criminal searches. They all work essentially the same way. The price you pay is for a limited number of searches, and typically only basic ones. In order to use the service fully, you have pay per search, and often there are “premium” searches that cost more. But it doesn’t tell you that on the website, so you don’t find out until you have purchased the product.

Full disclosure is also related to price but at least with Clickbank products, you get the benefit of price disclosure before you purchase.

Ignore claims of financial success
No software or eBook can deliver you instantaneous financial rewards. People always want to believe it’s that easy, but not one system can guarantee that for every individual. Even when you are determined to follow a program step-by-step, you still have to do the work.

The truth about affiliate marketing is that there is an elite group of individuals who make most of the riches, and everyone else divvies up the other minuscule profits. Breaking into that elite crowd is tough, and most affiliate eBooks are built around the notion that it’s easy, playing to your greed. So don’t be played.

Go to an outside source
Google is amazing, you can find a review of practically any product, any service, and any company. If you have concerns, why not run the product name through Google search and see what comes up. A lot of affiliate products get marketed by more than one seller, and many of them use write-ups to advertise the product with their affiliate commission. As long as you look at these things with a little skepticism, there’s no reason you cannot use the information others’ offer in making an evaluation.

As often as not, though, you can find someone who has used the product and isn’t trying to sell it to you. Usually, the reason they are blogging about it is because they were dissatisfied, but isn’t that information you would want, too? Nothing you find on the internet is going to be totally impartial, but that doesn’t automatically make it unhelpful.

Know what you need
It’s not just enough to spot the hard sell, you also have to have a really concrete concept of what benefit you are going to get from the product. Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and purchase the product to know whether it will truly end up being beneficial to your goals. But don’t be afraid to return it if it doesn’t deliver what it promises.

Whatever you do, don’t take action just because a seller tells you time is running out. That’s just folly. Sure, maybe the seller will raise the price, but you have to make decisions that are sound for your business, something that the seller has no way of knowing. Don’t jump right in just because the pitch says so. The extra time you take to make a decision can save you a lot of anguish later on.

How many affiliate marketers are too many?

Conventional wisdom says that no solid product, eBook or service, will lack for new customers. With the right pitch and the right price point, you can pretty much sell anything. But what happens if you and I, and the person next door, and hundreds of other people are all trying to sell the same product, will we run out buyers?

For any single individual product, maybe. If nothing else, even the best eBook is going to be outdated at some point. But the most successful affiliate marketers don’t stick to one product. Whether or not you are selling your own product, the resell rights, or just pitching someone else’s eBook, the best diversify their portfolio so that no one single product makes or break their profit potential.

Still, I think it is fair to say that it is not easy competing in the affiliate world. It is our own fault really; affiliates have long perpetuated the myth that affiliate marketing is easy money. That customers come and buy and there are no returns and little fraud - and all you have to do is just start and you will be successful. That very notion was the reason I got into the affiliate game.

Maybe at one time, it was easier to compete, but now there is some very real competition that you have to contend with to be a successful affiliate.

Pay Per Click Advertising

Even if you know what you’re doing, beating the competition in pay per click advertising is a gamble and a lot of work. You have to identify highly targeted keywords. You have to write ad text that compels your prospective customers to click with the intent to buy. Then you have to have a landing page that either converts sales, or collects e-mail addresses - and if you are promoting someone else’s product, you have no control over that at all (except not to promote it.) And then you have to position your ad with a pay per click advertising program so prospective customers can find it.

That is a lot of factors, without even addressing the costs of advertising and your competition. Beating your competition in pay per click advertising means pricing yourself over the top of them, bidding on obscure keywords - which for practical purposes, there is no such thing anymore - or promoting a niche product targeting a specific interest group which may very well mean a limited demand.

Website Marketing

A lot of people, rather than promote others’ products directly, send everyone to their own website and promote from there, or through auto responders. This is deceptively simple idea. There is no competition because the site is wholly yours, and you can saturate the page with advertising.

The problem, of course, two fold. One problem is generating traffic to your site. If you do it organically, it can take months to be at the top of search engines, and you have to continually add new content. And though the current model rewards you for inbound links from other highly ranked sites, gaining any is rarely a fluid process. The upside is that your costs are limited to purchasing the domain and paying for hosting. The downside is that you may never see a single targeted visitor for weeks while other established marketers are selling the same product that whole time. And furthermore, you always have to be thinking about what you are offering your visitors that is both unique and persuasive to buy.

The other problem is web users are banner blind, and banner blockers are as common as pop-up blockers now. There are programs that will wholesale block any ad script from loading in a user’s browser, which effectively means 90% of your advertising is for nothing.

One of the unfortunate trends that doesn’t make competing by having your own website any easier is the prevalence of websites that aggregate content. You promote your presence on ezine or other article submission sites, and a website aggregator picks up the first paragraph and targets the ezine article, not your own homepage. Not only are these aggregators not really effectively promoting your article, they are not linking back to your webpage. Furthermore, their own sites are just garbage because there is no original content and not even full length articles. So you are competing not just with legitimate websites but also with aggregator sites.

Product Development

Can you develop your own product that is a truly unique offering? It is simple enough to copy the gist of another eBook and just call it your own, but people are pretty skeptical about the quality of eBooks. And the last thing that will endear you to your affiliates (and for that matter, Clickbank) is to have a product that produces a lot of returns.

On the other hand, developing a quality product requires that you have an area of specialization, whether in a niche market or a broader market, and some intangible benefit to distinguish your product from the rest. Well, if that’s all it takes, right?

Fortunately, even with the competition, there is success out their for affiliate marketers. It’s not easy money, and there are a lot of people trying to do the exact same thing you are. But even for all the obstacles, just know that your success or failure won’t hinge on what the competition is doing.