The affiliate marketing industry has grown at the same rapid rate as the Internet itself. The increasing number and variety of ecommerce sites these days means that there are lots more pieces of the pie to go around and affiliates can make money whilst sending more sales to an online retailer. It’s a win-win situation at the end of the day. That said, there are some big problems that affiliates face, and they usually pop up time after time. Lets take a look at three of the most common and fatal mistakes made by affiliate sellers.

Thinking too niche. What most affiliate marketers forget is that even if a market is big enough to support an online retailer or two, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s big enough to support affiliates. This site advertising snowboards for example may be able to survive, but seeing as they will only pass on around 10% of the profits to affiliates, it is unlikely that affiliates sites could servive in such a niche. What affiliate sites should do is broaden the horizons and cover, in this case, all ‘extreme sports’ for example, not just snowboarding.

Thinking too big. When products cost a great deal of money, like buying a swimming pool or luxury cruises for example, sellers take a lot of time over their decisions.Not many people will click an affiliate link for something very costly and then convert in a small time-frame. They tend to compare offers to a greater extent and take more time in the consideration period of the purchasing cycle. They will then actually buy the item a little bit further down the line, by time your affiliate referral tracking would have been lost. Sticking to smaller items like gifts and ebooks for example is far more likely to get results and people are more likely to buy these quickly.

Not strong enough. With any successful market it is not long before it attracts quite a crowd, and you find that you are not only competing with lots more affiliate marketers, but on top of that you have to try and boost your profile over the online merchant. The difference being that they are working to get 100% of the profit, whilst you are only working for a proportion of that. This means you need to stay one step ahead of the game if you want to turn any sort of profit.

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