Affiliate marketing is one way to start earning money working from home.  You can work in your pajamas, make money selling someone else’s product, don’t have customer service headaches, and don’t need your own product.  While it can be a successful endeavor, not everyone does a good job with their affiliate marketing.  Here are some of the mistakes you’re likely to see:

1.  They set up a website or blog and cover it with affiliate banners and links.

Not only does this look scream “Newbie Marketer”, it can also hurt them with the search engines.  Google is looking for content on the site and if they find it, they give the site a favorable nod in their rankings. 

People won’t come to this site and say, “Wow, look at all the pretty banners, I think I’ll buy myself something.”  They’re searching for information that will solve their problems.

2.  They set up their site and expect people to come and buy.

Ah, if it were that easy.  But no, wannabe affiliate marketers need to jump in there and drive traffic to their site.  There are many ways to do this - article marketing, Squidoo lenses, emails, product reviews, Twitter, Pay Per Click ads, etc.

3.  They set up their site and leave it alone.

Back to the Google thing… search engines like to see new content constantly showing up on the site.  Even if they were able to set up their site using SEO and miraculously landed on the first page of Google, they wouldn’t stay there if they just let their site sit neglected.

4.  They send out cut and paste promotional emails.

The emails provided by the product creator are there as an example.  The marketer of the affiliate product should put the emails in their own words and inject their personality.  They have a way of talking to their list and this should continue to be evident or the people on the list might not trust them.

5.  They throw lots of money at Pay Per Click advertising without knowing what they’re doing.

PPC is something they should thoroughly investigate and learn how to do before they start spending lots of money on it.  Fortunately, there is a lot of free or paid material online that can educate them.

6.  They pick a niche they have no interest in.

It’s been said that you don’t have to have an interest in your niche, you can just outsource everything that needs to be written and you’ll do just fine.  I would argue that if they are totally disinterested in the topic of the niche, they will find other things to do rather than update their site or do what needs to be done.  Plus, not everyone can afford to outsource when they’re first starting out.

7.  They don’t build a list.

They don’t seem to realize that they wouldn’t have to work quite as hard as they did getting people to visit their site if they would only capture their email addresses.  Then they can market to them again and again.

 Affiliate marketing can be a successful model to follow for people who want to make money from home.  Just make sure you don’t make these same mistakes when you’re getting started.