Most Often Repeated Mistakes

As I mentioned before only 1-5% of all affiliate marketers are succeed in internet business. The others fail.

What are the most often repeated mistakes you should avoid? I want to show you some very basic mistakes I made myself and many ‘marketers’ are still making.

Signing up for every affiliate program – Most of the affiliate networks are free to join and offers thousands of merchants. Affiliates who participate in too many programs will not have enough time and money for promote all of them. Instead of focus on one vendor or niche they are trying to make huge money by offering hundreds of products. They bite off more than they can chew…
Promoting unrelated programs – I wouldn’t recommend a software on a jewlery site. But sometimes marketers do. If your visitors are not interesting in what you are promoting, you will never see them again.
Poor website – There is a lot out there… I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. Poor design, hard to read sites, worthless and duplicated contents, ‘useful’ widgets (weather etc).
Banners only – Some of the ‘marketers’ thinks that a banner is enough to sell those products. They found some great banners in the affiliate resources area so they put some of them here and some there. Now they ‘do the hard work’ and waiting for the results. But what we really need is unique content, CTA (call to action) graphics and targeted traffic.
Abandoned affiliate sites – Would you ever buy something from an affiliate who can’t remember when s/he saw his/her site last time? Updates are really important. There is always something happening in your niche. You should talk about it.
Hard selling – Don’t sell, recommend. People are not stupid, they know when you want to sell something. Build a website, get targeted visitors and just talk about a product that makes your/our life easier.
Pay Per Click traffic – Setting up a successful PPC campaign is really hard. Newbies should stay away from PPC (Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft adCenter). Organic traffic is the most important way to get visitors to your website.