It is sad but true, affiliate marketing beginners are better at losing
money than earning it. The only thing worse than not making money with your online business is losing money with it!

Does this sound like you?

You find a product in the ClickBank or PayDotcom marketplace and
start promoting it with PayPerClick.

You are getting clicks...and more clicks. You check your affiliate
account 4 or 5 times per day - no sales yet. The same goes for the
next day - clicks but no sales. WOW! What's worse than not making money?
GOING IN THE HOLE! (Google loves you though)

I've had 3 different people contact me lately with this problem.

Learn from their mistakes!

Person #1: I told this person to send me their affiliate link. They
did, I checked it, and their ClickBank link led to a sales page
WITHOUT a ClickBank buy button! They WERE probably making sales,
but the vendor was getting 100% of each sale. Nothing they could do
about it either...but stop the AdWords campaign. They had already
spent over $100 on clicks!

Person #2: Their link led to a squeeze page (you know, where you
have to input your email address for a download or something). I
signed up just to check it out. The page led me to a content page
where I did not even see a buy button. If they mailed me anything,
I never received it. My email probably thought it was spam and
trashed it.

Person #3: This buy page had a working buy button on it, but they
were offering a product I would call a scam. Their offer promised
"hundreds of dollars" per day right away. THAT'S a SCAM. Most
people are too smart to fall for that (thus it takes a LOT of
traffic to make a few sales). The vendor was offering 75% on a $97
purchase. This is what caught the affiliate's eye probably. In my
opinion, promoting a scam product is just bad Karma. If you aid in
the act of taking someone's money like that for a lousy product, I
say what goes around comes around and you too probably deserve to
lose money. ONLY promote high value products!

The moral of the story:

If you are promoting affiliate products in your online business, you may not know every every mistake you might be making. However, it is a BIG STEP for you just to be aware that you don't know it all! This way you know
to keep a better lookout for things that might go wrong.

How to make sure your efforts pay off - a few tips:

I HIGHLY suggest buying the product yourself so you can check out
the vendor's sales process. Find some reason to contact him about
the sale. If you can't contact him, don't promote the product!
Vendors who can't be contacted for simple sales problems will have
a high refund rate (there goes your commissions).

Be aware that if you don't have your own, content rich, niche site
to promote your products with, it will be an uphill climb for sure.
I'm not saying it can't be done, but your job will be tougher for
sure. A niche site which shows up well in the search engines is the
BEST way to market affiliate products; it gets traffic you don't
have to pay for!