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”.

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.