When it comes to affiliate marketing there are 101 different reasons why people fail, especially beginners. Being able to identify these reasons can help you avoid them and come out profitable.

Some of these problems are not just targeted at people starting out, many of the big affiliates will still make these common mistakes if they are not careful.

You may be thinking why should you listen me as I myself am a new affiliate, I’ve been an avid reader of some of the popular blogs and believe that I know the theory behind affiliate marketing and what I need to do – I just need to put it into action . It’s just like driving (kind of), you can pass your theory test but still have trouble when it comes to driving a real car although you know what you should be doing.

Don’t Rush

This is probably the main reason why a campaign will fail, the more you rush through the stages of creating a landing page, gathering and grouping keywords, creating the campaign in the PPC advertiser etc the higher the failure rate will be – fact.

It’s natural to get excited about launching a new campaign thinking ‘this is the one!’, don’t get into the mindset that the quicker you get it up and running the quicker you will earn all of that money. A simple mistake can turn a profitable campaign into a campaign that will cost you hundreds of dollars and a number of manual hours trying to fix it.

A great example of this is a post by Jonathan Volk when he set up a campaign quickly and it cost him $3,500 overnight! The full story can be read here.

This then takes us onto the next problem many of faced with…

Know exactly what you need to do

Take the time to sit down and list what you need to do. I find it much easier to work from a checklist so before any campaign I will list what I have to do in order so I don’t miss anything out. It only takes a few minutes and helps productivity in my opinion, try jotting down what your plan of action is going to be.

You get so much satisfaction when you can finally cross them off and move onto the next job.

Don’t give up to early

This is a very common problem for many new affiliates that may not have the funds or patience to pursue affiliate marketing. Don’t expect to have a great amount of success with your very first campaign, if it was that easy everybody would be raking in millions each year.

Affiliate marketing is a skill that needs to be learnt so you have to expect a loss before you can make a profit, as with almost everything else in the online world. If you are afraid to lose money then maybe this industry is not for you.

Just put the loss of earnings down to a learning curve and keep on going – practice makes perfect!

Ensure that your keyword tracking is working as intended

This is another problem that is mainly focussed towards new affiliates and/or the rushing factor. The main purpose of a campaign is to make money right? So you in essence need to find those keywords that are converting for you, extract them and expand on them to make even more money.

If you are not tracking which keywords are converting you are flying blind and can’t really make a decision on which ones to keep and which ones are bringing your campaign down. You are throwing money away if you are keeping keywords that are getting clicked but not converting – it’s your job to be able to spot these and remove them as fast as possible.

Keep an eye on your conversions in the early days to ensure that they are being tracked, it’s better to find out that it’s not working after 1-2 sales rather than having 100 sales and not knowing which keywords brought them in.

Split test, split test & then do a little more split testing!

One thing that many new affiliates fail to do is split test. You can split test absolutely everything from the landing page, call to action, text ads, offers and many more. The aim of split testing is to get the best results from your traffic and money, if your visitors respond better to a certain call of action you can significantly improve your ROI in an instant. The only way you can find out what converts the best is to test them – you see where I’m coming from?

Keep thinking of variations of key elements of the campaign to see if that performs better than the previous, if so replace it and split test another variation to see if that improves the result. Only split test one element at a time, if you were to change 2 things on your landing page how do you know which one increased the conversions?

Take advantage of all 3 PPC advertisers

When people talk about affiliate marketing they mainly focus on Google Adwords, this is because it will provide you with the most traffic allowing you to earn some mega money if done correctly. Many people forget about the other two being Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter and don’t bother using them – those are the people that are throwing away potential traffic to your campaign.

Yahoo search marketing is a great place to begin with if you are just starting in affiliate marketing, there is less competition and you can often find the cheaper bids which will allow you to find your feet. Once you have got a profitable campaign you can export it and upload it to Google Adwords and Microsoft adCenter to maximise the results.

Don’t check your statistics every minute!

A very common problem which everyone does is to check their stats an excessive number of times throughout the day, I’m a sucker for this problem too, constantly checking for an update on how my campaigns are performing – the same with Google Adsense.

More times than not you will be disheartened because you will be seeing that you’re making a loss (paying for clicks with no revenue) and your emotions will become a factor when making a decision – first mistake!

If possible fight the temptation to check your statistics on an hourly basis and check them once a day, this will give your merchant time to update and reliable statistics for you to work from when it comes to tweaking and tuning the campaign.