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These are the top 5 mistakes that I have made that you should read about so you can avoid them yourself. This post is my entry for Uber Affiliate Paul Bourque’s blog contest. Paul is getting a lot of entries for this topic so that he may post a large list of mistakes that his readers have made so that we may all hopefully learn something to avoid making the same mistakes. Here is my personal top 5 affiliate marketing mistakes.

5.) Not taking risks
When I first started affiliate marketing, I was deathly afraid to lose money. My brain kept telling me that it was better to spend $10 on advertising and make $30 back (3x my money), rather than risking $500 to make $750 (1.5x my money). While the ratio is half as good, the reality is that I would walk away with $250 rather than $20 profit. The mistake that I continually make and need to work on is realizing that it is better to scale a campaign big time rather than keeping it small with high margins.

4.) Not doing enough research
While many professional affiliate marketers repeat that you should stop reading about affiliate marketing and jump into it, I would disagree. Don’t get me wrong, I agree that you need to experiment with affiliate marketing, but I made the mistake of not knowing a thing before getting into it. I signed up for Google Adwords and Microsoft Adcenter before realizing the power of vouches. On the digitalpoint forums, you can buy a voucher with $50-250 worth of advertising credit for $5-25. If you do the research, you can easily get an extra $55 worth of advertising when you sign up, which should be enough to see if affiliate marketing is something you would be interested in.

3.) Not asking for help
When I started my first campaigns in affiliate marketing, I made the mistake of not asking for help. Little did I then realize that most affiliate networks assign you an affiliate manager who would help you earn more money. Rather than the help you would expect from a webhosting company (days late or no response), these people are actually great and WANT to help you earn more money. You can ask them anything and they like seeing you increase your earnings as much as you do.

2.) Not keeping up with campaigns
This is one mistake that I am still improving on. I always set a campaign, optimize it to be profitable, and then sit on it for weeks. A true professional affiliate marketer would never stop optimizing a campaign to make it as profitable as possible. If you have a few profitable campaigns, check out their analytics to see how you can improve it even more, I am sure there is something beneficial you can do to it.

1.) Starting too late
I had been creating and developing websites for over a year before I had even heard the word affiliate marketing. If I could start everything over today, I would start with affiliate marketing and use that year to build a ton of insanely profitable campaigns. If you are stuck on the fear of losing money and are thinking of starting off easy, my suggestion is to set a few hundred dollars aside and start learning affiliate marketing, but expect to lose every dime of your investment. The worst case scenario is you will lose the money that you set aside expecting to lose, but you will have learned a lot. On the other hand, the best case scenario is that you might just turn into the next super affiliate.

PS: For those of you who are inspired to start experimenting with affiliate marketing, I recommend watching the Top Affiliate Challenge this July, as there will be a plethora of great affiliate marketing techniques being handed out for free. As many of you know already, I will be one of the 12 competing!