12 mistakes affiliates make

Affiliates struggling to earn $100 a month often find it hard to believe that other people could possibly earn as much as $10,000 or even $100,000 a month in commissions.
Believe it. Big commissions do happen. And you can expect to hear about even bigger commissions. Forrester Research predicts that affiliate programs and affiliate networks will produce $280 billion annually in e-commerce sales by 2008. In most programs, 5% of the affiliates generate the vast majority of the sales. If you're not in that 5% and want to be, you'll have to change what you're doing.

Here are 12 mistakes you could be making, and how to fix them.

1. Are you telling people how to make money on the Internet when you don't know how yourself?
Perhaps - just perhaps - you can succeed at this, but it's the most obvious trap into which new affiliates fall. You join a few affiliate programs and set up a site offering Internet marketing tips, work-from-home tips, instant-business tips, or be-your-own-boss tips.
The advantages of doing this include having great products to promote, high commissions and lots of help from Internet marketers.

However, if you do this, you face two massive challenges.
1. You'll have hundreds of thousands of web pages out there competing with yours.
2. You're competing with the planet's best marketing EXPERTS. Some of the brightest brains in Internet marketing are working full-time to grab the attention of your target audience.
I'm not saying you can't succeed in this field, but if you're new to affiliate programs, this is definitely NOT the best place to begin. If you're struggling, find a less well traveled path.
You don't have to abandon your existing website. Just launch a new one based on a new theme.
Later, when you've learned more and really have something to offer, it will be time to revamp your marketing tips site. Choose a new theme. Try a new niche.

2. Are you promoting the PROGRAM instead of the PRODUCT?
Over and over again, affiliates join a two-tier affiliate program and then create a page telling other people to join it. I've done this myself with LifetimeCustomers.com. However, that site is not my core business. It's just one page, which I created fairly quickly.
Feel free to try that technique, but don't pin all your hopes on it.
Unless you're really skilled at signing up key people in key places, or know how to sign up many thousands of affiliates, you're not likely to get rich on second-tier commissions.
The people you sign up will tend to copy you and try to sign up more people... Whoops! That sounds like the worst aspects of multi-level marketing. Who's going to actually SELL something and earn commissions?
I once read a report which claimed that my success with the SiteSell affiliate program http://www.AssociatePrograms.com/affiliates is due to the fact that I've signed up thousands of sub-affiliates. That suggestion was just a silly guess - and it's utter rubbish.
Only a tiny percentage of the thousands of dollars I earn each month from SiteSell is from second-tier commissions. I succeed because I promote the PRODUCTS. They're incredibly good value, I believe in them, and I succeed by telling people so.

3. Are you using banners instead of endorsements?
I know. It takes time, effort and money to buy and study the product you're trying to sell. It's much easier just to cut and paste a bit of HTML code. However, personal, enthusiastic endorsements out-sell everything else by miles.
If you put in the effort, you'll get the sales. You can probably quadruple your sales by endorsing the products you sell.
You can also combine graphics, text, short descriptions and relevant articles. However, best of all are your own, original personal endorsements.

4. Are you failing to capture email addresses?
If you don't collect addresses, your marketing effort is a one-shot wonder. You're making only one attempt per visitor to achieve a sale and then giving up.
As branding expert Rob Frankel says, people like buying from people they know, like and trust.
If you're not giving people a chance to get to know and trust you, don't be surprised if they don't buy.
If you're not collecting email addresses, you're seriously crippling your marketing. Remember how the big dot-coms poured buckets of money into banner advertising and TV advertising? Now they've finally realized that collecting email addresses is much better value.
It's getting harder and harder to do, because we're all deluged with spam and newsletters which don't provide the information we need. So get started now, before the competition becomes even stronger.
You may not want the commitment of publishing a weekly newsletter. Perhaps you don't believe you have the necessary skills. One option is to simply offer a monthly Update newsletter, telling people what's new on your site.
Perhaps you don't like the thought of being tied to a weekly or monthly publishing schedule. You don't have to be. You can publish irregularly, only when you feel you have something worth saying - or selling.

5. Do you have visitors but no sales?
Some affiliates complain that they receive thousands of visitors but can't turn those visitors into buyers. To them, I usually recommend re-reading Ken Evoy's article on pre-selling. Studying that article and implementing Ken's suggestions could have a huge impact on your sales.
Donald Skarzenski reported on a company which bought a MILLION visitors but - whoops! - hadn't first taken the time to figure out what to do with them. It's a tale of stupidity on a grand scale.

6. Are you doing the same tired old things over and over?
It's time to try something new.
If you keep repeating actions which fail, you'll continue failing. If what you're doing isn't working well, it's time to change it, to move out of your comfort zone and try something new.
Here's something you can do. You can syndicate your columns or tips all over the Net to other web sites. Imagine how that would boost your image, your traffic and your sales.
Each web site publishing your column simply puts two lines of JavaScript code on its page at the location where your column is to appear.
All you do is paste your column into a Syndicator form and click a button. That one button click automatically updates all syndicated web site pages.

7. Are you building a business on a foundation of sand?
Are you promoting questionable products and services in the hope of earning high commissions?
Or are you building something of VALUE? Are you creating a business you're proud of?
Even if it's a small site, build a USEFUL, strong web site, one which provides valuable information and helps people. Not only will this give you a great sense of achievement, it will do wonders for your marketing.
If you build a site or write a newsletter which helps people, your readers will do a lot of your marketing for you.
They really will.
I love it when I see my sites mentioned on other web sites, in newsletters, in mailing lists and in books. I love it when web sites link to mine.
For example, my assistant Glennys is building a useful resource with Pay Per Click Search Engines , the first directory of pay-per-click search engines.
Most of the links to it were created simply because website owners like it and want to recommend it.
Ralph Wilson, publisher of the hugely popular Web Marketing Today newsletter, has created a massive, valuable Internet marketing resource which earns links the same way.
Such voluntary links are pure gold. People see the site recommended, visit it, and add a link on their site, and so on...
Such a site takes time to build but after a while momentum builds.
If you're the expert in your niche, you'll be interviewed for articles in newsletters and books - and those articles will attract more interviews for more articles...
All those links and favorable mentions don't just boost your reputation and sales, they help boost your ranking in search engines such as Google.

8. Are you selling ONLY other people's products?
It is possible to earn a living that way, but such successes are rare.
Create your OWN product. Then you can use affiliate programs for back-end sales.
That works well because someone who has just bought a product is often in the mood for buying a second, complementary product.
When you create your own product, you control your destiny.
You control how it is marketed.
You control how much profit you make.
Neil Shearing's newly revamped Internet Success Blueprint tells you how to do it, how to create an ebook, illustrate it, and sell it, with or without a merchant account. Neil describes, step-by-step, how he earns his living online.

9. Are you just SELLING instead of HELPING?
One of my favorite email discussion used to be John Audette's I-Sales Digest. There were many reasons for its success. One was that members of that community helped each other in their posts to the mailing list.
John says that I-Sales Digest was the major force behind his success in building a multi-million-dollar business. The digest gave him an opportunity to build credibility, respect and trust while encouraging people to help others. John sold I-Sales Digest to someone who didn't have John's flair and didn't seem to care enough about his readers. It quickly folded.

10. Are you learning from mediocre sources?
Because conditions are changing so fast on the Net, you need to learn fast and grab the opportunities which exist now. One way to save time is to learn from Internet experts. You won't make so many mistakes that way. Learn from people who are earning a very good living from Internet marketing.

11. Have you forgotten to add a dash of personality?
When Chris Pirillo published his Libera Manifesto on his site he received a huge flood of responses.
Chris received that outpouring of support because he injects his personality into his writing and because he's acknowledged as a hard-working expert in his field.
Too much of the Internet is cold and anonymous. Your visitors appreciate knowing that there's a real person running the site they're visiting.
Inject your personality into your site.

12. Are you failing to PLAN?
I received an email from someone who had bought a domain name and was trying to decide what to do with it. Whoops! That's getting things backwards. First you have to decide what you want to do.
Here are three main options for affiliates. They all work.

*Option 1:* "Go where the money is," says the highly successful Marlon Sanders.
Do research on what is popular and sell that. Do a survey, find out what people want and sell it to them. Want to know what's hot? Here's a really fast way. Keep an eye on Yahoo! Shopping. Yahoo! has done lots of research and endless experimenting. It knows what sells.
Look at the "What's hot" list, where you'll find such things as digital cameras, MP3 players and Razor scooters.

*Option 2:* "Follow your passion," says Ken Evoy.
Choose a topic in which you are passionately interested and build a site around that theme.
That way, you'll enjoy what you're doing and derive a great deal of satisfaction from it. It won't seem like work. "Everyone, absolutely EVERYONE, has a special interest... a passion," he says. Having trouble choosing a topic? See Ken's free "Affiliate Masters" course. It shows you how to brainstorm your concept.

*Option 3.* Become passionately interested in something.
Immerse yourself in all the little details about a topic and suddenly you'll become so absorbed that it's like a hobby, not a business.
That's what affiliate programs have become like for me.
Perhaps for you it could be digital cameras.
If you become passionately interested in products which are hot sellers with little competition, that's even better!!