Affiliate marketing is often viewed as a “starter” activity in internet marketing. In theory, it’s easy enough. You don’t need a website or even a product. Yet it’s not as easy as it seems. Many beginners make mistakes that sabotage their success. Read on to find out if you too make those mistakes?

Are YOU Making These Affiliate Marketing Mistakes?

1) You don’t know enough about the product you recommend

The first, biggest, and most common mistake is that marketers don’t really know the product they recommend.

Sure, it can get expensive to buy every product you want to recommend, yet consider the cost of recommending a product that doesn’t live up to the promises made on the sales page! The best strategy is to recommend products (and services) you use yourself. At the very least, buy the new product and check it out thoroughly.

2) You recommend bad products: The most deadly of all Affiliate Marketing Mistakes

I have just three words for that: “Don’t do it!” Recommending bad products is an extension of the first mistake, and one that can easily happen if you don’t thoroughly check out any product you recommend, BEFORE you recommend it.

There are many ways in which a product can fall short:

It fails to live up to the promises on the sales page
It doesn’t work as advertised
It requires costly upsells in order to work as advertised
It isn’t thorough enough in the details to allow people to implement it
The support staff is unresponsive, so users can’t get the help they need to make it work.

3) You try to sell the product to the wrong people

Another big mistake that can ruin your success is trying to sell the product to the wrong people. Someone who expressed interest in getting scholarships may or may not be interested in weight loss programs. And even if they are, they may not be open to weight loss advice from you – after all, they came to you for scholarship advice.

So try to keep your recommendations consistent with the interests of your list, or the interests of your website, your followers, or your friends.

Even if you send your promotion to the right list, or publish it on the right website, you can still miss out on commissions by sending your prospects to the sales page without adequately preparing them.

Instead, create a “pre-sell” page, one where you talk about the problem that will be solved by the product you’re trying to sell

5) You promote too many different products

The fifth mistake is promoting too many different products. You may think that there are benefits to spreading the odds, and to a certain extent that’s true. But if you flip flop from one product to the next, recommending a different one every day, your list will lose faith in you quickly.

Not only that, but mistake number one and two are most common when you’re recommending so many products that you don’t have time to adequately check them out. Plus, if you recommend several products a week, you may feel that it’s just too expensive to buy them all first, and so you’re more prone to skip that step.

That’s no excuse. Instead, be more selective. And before you decide whether YOU want to buy a product to check it out, why not do a pre-screen at my favorite Clickbank Search Tool where you can check out the refund rate.

After all, what good is a sale when your commissions evaporate faster than they appeared in the first place?

If you’re making one or more of the above mistakes, just stop right now. Instead, do the opposite of what you’ve seen above: Recommending a limited number of great products you know, trust, and personally use will eliminate mistakes 1, 2, and 5. Recommending them to the right people, and being upfront about why you think they might benefit from the products will eliminate mistakes 3 and 4.

Follow these principles and avoid the mistake, and before you know it, your affiliate marketing mistakes will be history and you’ll be well on your way to affiliate marketing success.