Affiliate marketing is not easy. There, I said it. Anybody who says it is, is smoking that funny stuff. Having said that, by avoiding a few things that most affiliate marketers can’t seem to help but bungle along the way to disaster, you might actually give yourself a good chance of being successful. Personally, I finish in the top 20 of every affiliate promotion I enter, and that’s going up against some of the big boys. Why? Because I avoid these three common mistakes.

At the very top of the list is the actual choice of product to promote. Sometimes I think affiliate marketers play pin the tail on the donkey when it comes to choosing a product. Just put on the old blindfold, spin yourself around, and then point and click. A little thought process should go into picking a product to promote. And no, picking the top product in the Clickbank marketplace is NOT the best way to go about it. Your competition is going to be astronomical and more likely than not, you’ll get nowhere.

But it doesn’t just end with picking a product. How you promote it is equally as important if not more so. And this is where my second tip gets beaten to a pulp by so many lazy marketers. The common practice goes something like this. Email the product creator and ask him if he has any pre-written ads that you can use. Can you guess why this is just plain dumb? Well, if everybody is using the same ads, how is anybody going to stand out from the crowd? This way, making a sale literally becomes a crap shoot. I don’t know about you, but that’s not the way I want to run MY business.

Finally, there’s making sure that the product you choose to promote isn’t going to end up turning your reputation into a dust bowl. Some marketers don’t care about this and will promote just about anything, but if you end up promoting a product that is a piece of junk, do you really think that the people who bought it from you are going to buy anything else from you again? It takes forever to build a reputation online. However, that reputation can be destroyed in an instant.

If you want to keep yourself from becoming an affiliate nightmare waiting to happen, check out my signature for my free report and see if affiliate marketing is even right for you.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Get my free report at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/affiliateassassin/whyaff.html and find out if affiliate marketing is right for you.