Affiliate marketing is big businesses these days. As online retailers become more widespread and better established, affiliate sites provide another way to drive targeted traffic and at the same time make some bucks for themselves. It’s a win-win situation at the end of the day. However, people are still learning quickly in this game and there are mistakes that seem to be quite common. Lets take a look at three of the most common and fatal mistakes made by affiliate sellers.

Thinking too small. Overestimating the size of a market is a common mistake for affiliate sellers as they tend to forgot that they will only ever be able to capture the percentage of it that is being offered by merchants. 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. This means that affiliates are required to umbrella a good number of smaller niches in order to stand a chance of capturing a decent amount of the overall market.

Thinking too large. When products cost a great deal of money, like buying a swimming pool or even luxury cruises for example, sellers take a lot of time over their decisions. People are very unlikely to follow an affiliate link and book an expensive holiday right then and there. They will spend time pondering, weighing the options and doing further research for example. And by the time they come to make the purchase the tracking cookie or alternative will have expired in lots of cases. 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 competitive enough. As mentioned earlier the affiliate market in growing at a rapid rate, which means that you are going to be in competition with more affiliate sellers each day, but additionally likely to be competing with the original online sellers at the same time. 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 either work harder or smarter than they do to make any money.