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As hopefully everyone of you knows by now, I am competing on the Top Affiliate Challenge with a bunch of smart affiliate marketers. Ian Fernando, one of my teammates, forwarded me an email that he got from the Pepperjam Affiliate Network. They added a 40% increase to their payout for referrals, so if you want to help out my team on the Top Affiliate Challenge, sign up today to earn my team $7.

In return for your assistance, the Pepperjam Network will start you off with a FREE $10 signup bonus. In addition to that, you can make your own blog post with your affiliate link and earn $7 for every person that you blog refers. It doesn’t even stop there, because Pepperjam is looking to expand their network by offering $10 for every blog post you make about the company or their tools. They allow you to do up to 5 posts a month (although I wouldn’t recommend pushing the limit unless you are really strapped for earning some quick cash). They make your job even easier by offering your referrals a free $10 as well, the same offer that I am showing to you.

In simple terms, if you want to earn a free $10, start working on affiliate marketing with me, and most importantly help me earn money for the Top Affiliate Challenge, sign up for Pepperjam today.

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!

The following is a paid review and is my complete and honest opinion. If you would like your own paid review on my blog please visit the advertise page.

At the end of March, I entered WinningtheWeb.com’s $15,000 blog contest and sponsored a free review for one lucky winner.

It turns out, I won an autographed copy of Kris Jones’ upcoming book about SEO. For those of you who do not know, Kris Jones is an online entrepreneur and he owns the popular pepperjam network.

As for the reason of this post, I would like to congratulate Derek Salyers for winning a free review on my blog for his site. Derek is the owner of a blog called Click Consultants. This blog focuses on helping you learn affiliate marketing, which is something that I am getting into.

On my first glance of Derek’s website, I was visually pleased. I am a big fan of orange and black color schemes (if you couldn’t tell already), and Derek has a phenomenally brandable logo. In blogging, you want to be as unique as possible, and the design and logo that Derek has definitely will do that job for him.

Derek’s theme is optimized for the first time reader, with an easy to subscribe button at the top center of the page, as well as popular and recent articles to the left and right of them. This allows first time visitors a fast chance to see the newest, as well as the most important stuff Derek has ever written.

Derek has monetized his blog with the standard 125×125 advertisements on the sidebar (like this blog), and until he sells his advertising it looks like they are affiliate network affiliate links right now.

Below the 125×125’s it looks like two columns, and it makes the blog look crammed. The one thing I regret when I had my new theme designed was that I should have just kept it at one sidebar. Just like my blog, Derek’s theme has too much sidebar room with the two columns and this results in having more than one post on the homepage have a completely empty sidebar.

Moving on from appearances, the content on Click Consultants appears well written. Derek has gone a completely professional route by having nearly 80-90% of his posts as professional as can be, with the only 10-20% being personal posts or blog contests.

Click Consultants has a popular affiliate forum, which boasts over 1250 members already who have made over 8750 posts. The forums are made to help beginners learn affiliate marketing, as well as help the median marketers improve their game. The cost of joining the forum, however, is $29.99 a month or a one time payment of $279.99. While a monthly charge is a huge turn-off for most people, the amount of money some affiliate marketers make is incredible. While I am a bit leery to fork out $30 because I do not know how much good knowledge is listed in this forums that can’t be found elsewhere for free. Shame the forum doesn’t have a few day trial for a dollar or two, as that would probably increase sales.

Well, if you are looking to learn affiliate marketing and want to give the $30/m forums a shot, I would love to hear if they helped you.

The following is a paid review and is my complete and honest opinion. If you would like your own paid review on my blog please visit the advertise page.

No, im not going to talk about the George Clooney movie, but rather about about a blog named Affiliate Confession.

Affiliate Confession is the brainchild of network marketer, Alan LeStourgeon. It is essentially a personal blog which takes a completely honest look at all of the issues surrounding making money as an affiliate marketer. In his blog, Alan gives his tried and true opinions about real ways to make money with network marketing instead of boasting about unattainable, unrealistic income like many other popular bloggers. Affiliate Confession is a blog for the regular Joe who wants to dive into earning money online legitimately, minus all the scams and immoral marketing tactics.

As of October 2007, Alan has successfully managed to build his earnings to a steady $2000 to $2500 per month. Through his hard work and dedication he has learned many of the tricks of the trade and passes them back down to you through his posts on Affiliate Confession.

Updated daily, the blog covers a broad range of topics including: advertising, affiliate programs, Clickbank, Commission Junction, eBay, ebooks, Google Adsense, MLM, pay per click, traffic and more.

Affiliate Confession holds frequent contests to reward its readers. The current blog contest which runs until February 18th is for a free bottle of Nubody Organic Health Multi-Vitamins, a $40 value. Entering the contest is a breeze; just subscribe to the Affiliate Confession RSS feed and add the blog to your favorites on Technorati.

Taking The 30 Day Blogging Challenge is one of Alan’s most popular posts. Here he proposes that serious bloggers need to challenge themselves by committing to making at least one blog post per day for 30 days straight. The 30 day challenge is just one of the many honest ways that Affiliate Confession helps encourage readers to get serious about blogging, getting traffic and ultimately earning a decent income.

Pros

1. The blog offers completely free advice, plain and simple. As a reader, you will not be scammed into buying ebooks or products that are misleading.
2. Affiliate Confession lays everything out there without the sugar-coating and lies used by greedy marketers whose only interest is making a quick buck off of their readers.
3. Since the blog is updated on a consistent, daily basis with informative posts, there is always something fresh and interesting to read.
4. Contests are friendly, fun and anyone can participate.

Cons

1. Like any normal human being with feelings and wandering thoughts, Alan does tend to stray off topic from time to time with posts containing personal ramblings and even healthy dining tips and recipes. These oddball posts are by no means a terrible thing (they are actually quite entertaining), they just have nothing to do with network marketing!
2. The design is crap. At first glance I saw that it was an unbranded free theme and my first impression was that it was yet another crappy blog. Affiliate Confession should have a professional design done if Alan wants to stand out as the blogger who teaches affiliate marketing.
3. Alan’s landmark posts are not visible to the new reader. My blog converts a lot of subscribers because they can quickly and instantly see my most powerful posts and how much they will benefit them. Even if a first-time reader visits my blog on a day where I have an off-topic post, they will still have a good chance at converting. On Affiliate Confession, the only landmark posts shown are the ones with the most comments, and that is only displayed on the bottom right of the footer! You should make a featured posts area above the fold in my personal opinion.

If affiliate marketing interests you, go check out Affiliate Confession.