First Thing’s First – Avoid These Silly Affiliate Marketing Mistakes! While affiliate marketing is a great way to earn a living, the fact is that many people become discouraged and drop out of programs. In many instances, the failure to be successful with affiliate marketing has to do with making a few simple mistakes. Here are some examples of those mistakes and why they should be avoided. Perhaps the most common misconception about affiliate marketing is that one can rake in huge amounts of revenue simply by slapping up a low-quality website with no original content and tossing in some affiliate links. While it is certainly true that you need to have a web site up and running in order to participate in an affiliate program, there is also the need to apply some effort to getting the word out about your site. Otherwise, the chances of people visiting your web site and clicking on one of the links are pretty slim. Promoting yourself and your web site is a big part of ensuring the creation of affiliate income. This will mean doing everything you can to raise your search engine ranking positions on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Far too many people assume that somehow the Internet magically will capture every lovely word on the web site and magically have it show up prominently when people do a search. This is not the case at all. Taking the time to carefully research keywords, craft content related to them, and the optimize your site for them is an absolute must. And that’s not it. Marketing is bigger than just SEO. A strong and comprehensive marketing effort includes getting out there and using every legitimate means of promoting your site, from leaving business cards on restaurant tables to posting a printed ad in the local supermarket to listing your site at online business and informational sites. Choosing to consider this sort of activity a waste of time is more or less deciding you want the program to fail. Another mistake many affiliate partners make is not choosing products that have some relevance to the content of your web site. For example, you run a wonderful web site about the care and training of dogs. People will visit your site to see the images of your pets, read your comments on various aspects of dog training, and perhaps to post a message or two. Since your visitors will already have an expressed interest in pets, why not make sure the ads that reside on your site have to do with some aspect of pets or pet care? You will earn much more money if this is the case, rather than having ads that have to do with home decorating or some other subject. Keeping your site content and the ads more or less relevant to one another will make it easier to generate revenue, and not fail as an affiliate marketer. Now, this may seem intuitive – but many make this mistake in subtle ways (i.e. they mismatch their customers with products). One final mistake that many affiliate marketers make is not sprucing up their web sites from time to time. Keeping the content fresh is one way of building and keeping a loyal reading audience. If there is a reason to check back with your site every week, then chances are repeat visitors will click on ads that appear to be new to them, or that they enjoyed looking at the last time they visited your site. Keeping the same old look and the same old text with nothing new to entice people back is a sure way to limit your chances at being a successful affiliate marketer. In short, most of the more common mistakes all track back to an attitude that you do not have to do anything in order to generate revenue. The fact is that you do have to proactively promote your site, keep the content fresh, and make sure the ads have some connection to the subject matter of your site. By taking the time and effort to do these three simple things, you will have much better chances at being a success with affiliate marketing.