Dealer Dan, pictured here with WWE Superstar Mick Foley, has been in internet marketing since 1996. He likes hugs, long walks on the beach, and making money while wearing his jammy jams. For more information, you can read all 
Before we get into building you your first website, let’s quickly talk about mistakes I see from many affiliate marketers:
1: Affiliate Marketing Is Easy. It’s not. No matter what product you are promoting, it’s not going to be easy. It takes a lot of work, and you need to be smart. You have to keep updated on what’s going on in the world, especially when it comes to search engines. Trust me – you’re not going to throw up a WordPress Blog and start making money immediately. I know some successful affiliates who took over a year to get their first real money player at poker. Their secret? They just kept trying.
2: Content Is King. You may hear this phrase a lot when it comes to affiliate marketing, which is that Content Is King. Hell, I’ve actually written an article stating that Content IS in fact King. The phrase itself isn’t incorrect – however content is just one large part of affiliate marketing. There are so many other important factors including link building, search engine optimization, visitor optimization and calls to action to name just a few. If you’re not making money on a content rich website and you keep just throwing content at it – you’re making a big mistake.
3: Affiliate Marketing is Over saturated. It’s true that there are a lot of affiliate websites out there, however there is still room for many more affiliates. Sometimes, you just have to focus on smaller niche. For example: let’s say you want to build a website around “poker strategy”. Unfortunately if you search poker strategy you see a large variety of websites, and realize that you’re unlikely to take over any of these sites in Google rankings. In this case, just start to add more words to look for a niche to dominate, like “razz poker strategy”, “horse poker strategy” or “7 card stud poker strategy”. Suddenly the websites listed there aren’t too intimidating, and it’s easier to take over them in the rankings.
4: SEO is Easy/Overwhelming. I hear conflicting reports from new affiliates on search engine optimization: “its super easy” or “its very overwhelming”. Let me clarify this: basic SEO is easy. The most basic of SEO, like using H tags, and keyword phrases and keyword density – all that is easy. However to really get ahead in this world you need to learn advanced SEO techniques. This isn’t overwhelming – it just takes time, and takes a lot of trial and error.
5: You Need Money to Make Money. A lot of people seem to think that to get into affiliate marketing, you need money. However while you need SOME money for the basics like website hosting and domain registration, you really don’t need a lot of money. You can start with as little as $20. You don’t need to pay people for a design, you don’t need to pay for good links, and you certainly don’t need to pay for those “How to make $100k a month” ebooks that you see all over the place. So if you’re concerned about needing money to start with don’t be – other than a domain and web hosting, you can do everything for free.
This article was written on November 12, 2010 however all articles are looked at on a monthly basis and updated to keep them relevant.
If you need to contact Graeme, please see his Contact Page. If you are an affiliate manager wanting promoted please see this page.
