3 Affiliate Marketing Mistakes You Have To Avoid... And A Tip To Boost Your Income!

While the concept of having an affiliate marketing business that can be set up to generate an income on autopilot is a great one, the reality is that although there is good money to be made with affiliate marketing there are not a large number of people who are actually manage to achieve the sort of success that they ultimately dream about.

The purpose of this articles is to enlighten you about 3 affiliate marketing mistakes that you need to avoid if you are to stand any chance of building a successful business, and not only that we will also look at how you can generate residual income from affiliate marketing programs to create an income stream that pays you month after month even though you only need to do the work once.

I imagine that you are pretty clear on how affiliate marketing works and that you understand the concept of receiving a portion of the sales price for a product or service that you promote, but let's just touch on the major benefit of this kind of marketing again... there is no need for you to create your own product, have your own merchant account or be responsible for customer support.

Just concentrate on finding people who are interested in buying the products or services that you are promoting and get them to follow your link to the merchant website, after that, if they decide to make a purchase as a result of your hard work you will receive a commission on the sale. It sounds pretty easy and conceptually it is, but there are some common mistakes that affiliates make when they first start out, and here are the top 3 for you to avoid:

1. They don't capture prospect information before sending them to the merchant website.

One of the attractions of affiliate marketing is the easy way in which you can find and promote products without needing to have your own website etc, the problem is that the conversion rates for directly linking people to affiliate offers is not great and worse still by doing it this way you have no chance to get in touch with those prospective buyers ever again. So if you manage to send 100 people to an offer and they choose not to buy right there and then you have lost your opportunity and you can't even get in touch with them again in the future.

But, if you take the time to create a lead capture page that is shown to the visitor before they see the merchant offer you can capture their name and email address and potentially use this in the future to contact them again and make them another offer. Better still if that next offer doesn't appeal to them, then you can make them another offer, and another offer massively increasing your chances of sending them to a product that they will find to be to their liking, ultimately making you more money in the process.

2. Building a website that trys to show as many offers as possible to your visitors.

If you have your own website it can be tempting to think that the best thing to do is load it up with as many offers as you possibly can in an attempt to meet everyone's needs and offer the widest possible choice to your visitors. The problem with this scatter gun approach is that most of the time you are not going to get anyone to click on any of your links because they won't be able to choose from all the options you present.

The best thing you can do with your website is to optimise it for one or two offers and make sure you do a fantastic job of describing and 'selling' these offers to your website visitors. This way when visitors arrive at your site it will be very clear for them what it is that you expect them to do next and in many cases they will do just that, end up on the merchants website and make a purchase, all because you took the time to focus on the offers you were promoting.

3. Not protecting your affiliate links from your competition.

One of the problems that can sometimes plague someone in the affiliate marketing business is the theft of their commission by other affiliates meaning that you can do all the hard work and someone else gets the credit (and the money) for it. Now it is very hard to eliminate commission theft however there are some things you can do to reduce the chances of it happening to you, with the use of 'cloaked' affiliate links being one of them.

This basically means that instead of exposing your affiliate ID within the body of your link you use a redirect on your website to hide this information from people who may try and steal your commission. So instead of the link showing www.productwebsite.com/?affiliateid=... you can set up the link to be more user friendly and less likely to be highjacked like www.yourwebsitename.com/offer_name.

So there are 3 mistakes that you need to avoid if you want to be truly successful within the affiliate marketing business and if you take the time to set yourself up so that you don't get caught out by them you are 3 steps closer to your dream of becoming a successful affiliate marketer. So go out there and concentrate on working your business, finding the right products to promote and setting your website and affiliate links up properly to ensure you don't miss out on commission.

But, before you go and do that here's a fantastic tip that you should follow to provide yourself with regular income month after month, all for the same amount of work as getting a single sale. The trick I am talking about here is promoting products and services that have a residual commission structure, meaning that not only do you get paid for the first purchase but you also get paid for subsequent (usually monthly) payments that the customer makes to the merchant.

Just think about that for a moment and you will realise why these programs are so much more valuable to you than products that have a single one of payment, afterall if you can get paid $10-15 every month for the lifetime that the customer stays with a merchant this is far better than getting paid $30 once, never to get any further value from that customer again in the future. Even if the customer doesn't spend a long time with the merchant program you are still likely to be better off and this is one of the ways that you can generate automatic income month after month.

So keep an eye out for affiliate programs that pay residual income, you'll still get paid up front for the initial sale but not only that but you'll continue to receive money in the future meaning that you can dramatically increase the return on your advertising investment and provide yourself with a constant stream of income each and every month. This is one of the ways that the most successful affiliate marketing business owners make their money each and every month, so why shouldn't you do the same - try it, you won't be sorry!