Afiliate Marketing Mistakes by Vince OHare

The thing about affiliate programs that nobody really understands is the amount work that it takes. This is especially true for new people; well let's use me as an example. When I signed up for a say CJ or Linkshare network I signed up with every program known. Boy I was going to build the greatest shopping mall site known to man. But that didn't happen. I had about 50 links on each page to stores that had nothing to do with each other. And of course I had no traffic.

Getting traffic to a site is pretty hard in itself, first off, you have competition. If that isn't bad enough you also have to be at the mercy of the search engines. We all know that search engines don't like affiliate sites. Okay maybe that statement isn't true. What search engines don't like is websites that have no value at all to the end-user. So basically what happened with my site, the greatest shopping mall site of all times was that I was not able to gather enough traffic at all to generate sales. Heck, I couldn't even generate traffic! Even my family looked at the site and they didn't buy anything. That should have been a red flag.

The search engines hated me, and instead of saying what's wrong with my site. I said what's wrong with the search engines. Sadly enough, this is something that happens to new people. When they join affiliate programs, they think they going to be rich. The "You will build it and they will come" attitude doesn't happen online. It is funny that people still believe that this can happen today. I see people almost every day complaining that the search engines hate me. The search engines hate me. It is not the search engines that hate you, it is that your site is meaningless and has no value to a search engine. I know, no one is going to like that statement as everyone feels their site adds value.

It seems that everyone thinks they know what they're doing, but they really don't have a clue. The next thing you know, they're on chat rooms and forums and message boards with the Henny Penny attitude that the sky is falling. My favorite is when they say affiliate marketing is dead. Every time I hear that I say to myself here is another person that will fail eventually with affiliate marketing.

While people are posting and complaining and not doing anything to make their sites better, the super affiliates are working on their sites, and not paying any attention to stuff that is being said on message boards and forums. Sure, they check the message boards and forums. They probably go about this every three days every five days, though scan over real quick. See what the latest programs are and then go back to working on their sites. I don't mean to knock forums at all, but I seen the results on my own sites when I stopped going to forums. Some forums are great but others are a waste of time. Here is a list of the biggest mistakes I made Affiliate mistakes. I hope you can learn before you waste your time.

About the Author

Vince provides others with free information on how to make money online. Through teaching common sense SEO to new webmasters. He is an experienced affiliate marketer. You can see more at VinnyOHare.com or the sister site Nyfalcon.com