New affiliate marketer mistakes are gonna happen. But preparing yourself against them can help you rise to the top and become a successful affiliate marketer. Lets take a look at the top ten new affiliate mistakes.

1.) Using an existing script or someone else’s work

This doesn’t work for one big reason, everyone else is using it too! If you think you bought something that is “unique” then run it through CopyScape. This is a free service that searches for website plagiarism and duplicate content online. Upload your content and run the site url and you will be surprised on how many copies of your “unique” bundle they sold. Read my story on Sue who thought she bought a special site package and the disappointments that I found for her.

2.) Filling site with ads

I see a lot of new websites created by new affiliates filled with adsense, adbrite, and other ads. As this is a good means of additional income for your site, it should not be the main attraction. Making the ads your main attraction takes away from your sites usefulness to the visitor. For example, if I where to visit a site with lots of ads and then see a tiny blob of content I will just leave the site without clicking on the ads. But if the website had a nice informative content and mentioned XX product I would click on the ad to learn more. I would then browse around the site for awhile and see what other information is useful to me. If the site is really good, I would then bookmark it and tell my friends. My rule of thumb is; build the site for the visitor, not for the money.

3.) “Jumping the Gun”

Launching a new site without fully testing it or creating a campaign without researching it can cost you thousands of dollars. It’s easy to waste $5,000 on a search engine ad that yields little results but could have been avoided researching more and finding that if you might have used another keyword could have yielded you the same results but with only $500. I see this happen a lot and have seen new affiliate marketers waste $40,000. Really makes you sick.

4.) Picking the wrong host/domain

Not to many new affiliates realize how important their domain and hosting company is. Having a good domain could mean better natural search rankings, easy for your visitors to remember, and so much more. Even more important is a good host. I highly suggest staying away from free hosting companies. These where good back in the day when hosting was expensive, but now you can find hosting for cheap. I suggest Hostgator for any newbie. They have great 24/7 support and provide you with free templates to use. Having a bad hosting company results in server downtime. This means that your website will return a “404 Page Not Found” error when people try to visit. If you are running any paid traffic, then you are just wasting your money.

5.) No link management system

Now many affiliates might not think this is too important, but when you consider dead links, link thefts, expired links, bad links, ect. then you might consider getting a good affiliate link management software. I suggest Manage Affiliate Links for any affiliate marketer. Not only does it cloak and protect your links from link theft, it will email you when a link is dead, expired, or broken. This is very important if you manage more than one site or don’t check your links often. A down link can costs you thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

6.) Spamming!

This is a big no no and will make a lot of other affiliates upset. I for one, hate getting spam email or messages and neither does the next person. Spamming on message boards, blogs, forums, websites, so on is a good way to get you banned or blacklisted. Try to look at this way, would you like it if I where to dump my trash all over your yard everyday? Spammers are the scum of the affiliate world.

7.) Not putting in the time

Making a million dollars does not happen overnight. It takes time to build a successful online business. Many new affiliates think that if they do this or that they can easily make a lot of money. This is one of the biggest misconception new affiliates have of affiliate advertising. Like any other business, you have to put in the time to reap the benefits.

8.) Copying someone else’s idea

Similar to using someone else’s content and articles is copying someone else’s idea. This is done when you basically clone their site and its concept. For example, eBay is a billion dollar idea and has been doing good because it was the first to bring the concept online. Now, how many eBay clone sites do you see making a large profit? Not many at all. Especially since so many more people create a new auction site everyday.

9.) Bad sales pitch

Once you get the visitor to your website it is time to convert them to a sale. Having a bad sales pitch or landing page is another way to loose thousands. Using Google Analytics Website Optimizer can help you compare different landing pages and help you find which one converts the best. To help create a better sales pitch ask friends and family to review your website before launching any ad campaigns.

10.) No idea of what you are doing

Very similar to jumping the gun is having no idea what you are doing. Yes, you could make some money but if you studied and learned how to build a great website you could be making a lot of money. I still run across top 100 sites that could be making more money just by changing a few things, nothing would be different to the user. A lot of websites have high earning potential but just don’t know it. Research, study, and learn and maybe one day you will be one of the top affiliates “Gurus”.

In the last few years, affiliate marketing has exploded on the Internet. In pretty much every web search that is done during every second of the day on the Internet, people are steered towards affiliate marketing sites. Some work, some don’t and some are gone before they even have a chance to get going. Let’s go over a few common mistakes affiliate marketers make when setting up and running their site.

• Make sure you completely understand the affiliate program you’re signing up for. It can be really tough to turn down that one program that brags about the huge commission, but if the program is selling car parts and you don’t even drive, you might want to pass it up. If you know a lot about sports or pets or horses, try to find an affiliate marketing program geared towards your area of expertise. You might not become a millionaire overnight, but in the long run, you’ll make a LOT more money that way, and you’ll enjoy the affiliate marketing experience a lot more, too.

• If you have the option on your site for folks to sign up for emails, make sure the ones you send out are informative and fun and not spam. Yes, you want to make sure you get the links of the product you’re selling in the email, but you have to take the time to set it up so it doesn’t look like spam or people will get annoyed with your site, opt out of your emails and never visit your site again. It’s the difference between taking a bit of extra effort and not. If you’re willing to go the extra mile, you’ll see the reward in your sales.

• Try to write your own content. It’s not unheard of for a person to visit 4-5 different affiliate marketing websites and see the exact same content on all of them. The site creators simply used the same public domain copy and didn’t even bother to change it up at all. Don’t let this happen to you. The only way your site will stand out among all the garbage is to make sure your content is completely unique.

Making mistakes when you start a new business are common. It’s going to happen, so don’t panic when it does. But with a little research, and a bit of common sense, you can avoid most of the mistakes that plague the laziest of the affiliate website creators.

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.