Affiliate marketing is like a magnet. People are lured into affiliate marketing by the promises to make a lot of money without a lot of work. The people who fail in affiliate marketing pretty much always make the same mistakes. Even if these mistakes are pointed out, people still don’t seem to get it and think they can beat the system and that they are better than the rest of us. But what are some those mistakes and what can we learn from them?

Affiliate marketing should start with product research and selecting a target group you want to sell the chosen product to. Without defining the target group and without selecting the right product you are most likely to fail with affiliate marketing. The next item on the list is the sales approach. Trying to sell something that people can buy all over the place makes it hard to be successful. The only thing that would help in such a case is price and that is something an affiliate does not have any influence on at all. Think about it and ask yourself why should a potential customer buy from you and not from Joe Schmo who offers the exact same product?!

Another big mistake is to throw a product at a lot of traffic hoping that one or two of the 500 visitors to your website will buy the product you are advertising. The idea behind it is that the more traffic you have the higher the chances are somebody is interested in your product. WRONG. This does not work. You might get the occasional signup, but for a coordinated business approach this is just not the way to go. Find out what your audience is interested in. Then carefully select the right product for your audience to be able to have success. You do not want the occasional hit, you want recurring signups on an ongoing base.

There are quite a few more mistakes you can make, but I wanted to speak from my own experience. I always fall victim to these mistakes again even though I know better. Why? That is the $64,000 question and it is one of my goals for 2007 that I want to fix. I have been to too broad with my approaches hoping for success, but it turns out I am just one of many making the same mistakes. So, how am I going to tackle this problems?

Research. Research. Research. Last year I bought Keyword Elite (aff.) - a keyword research software. So far I mainly used it to build lists of keywords, but the software can do so much more. I just did not get around to really research it and learn it. Here is my plan:

1) Identify a product I want to promote via Google Adwords/MSN Adcenter/Yahoo Search Engine Marketing

This task is already taken care of.

2) Identify keywords for this product

In this case I want to identify keywords that my competitors are using on an ongoing base. The thinking behind this is that if somebody uses a keyword over weeks to promote a product, it most likely is working well for him. So, I want to identify about 100 keywords to start with and monitor them Keyword Elite. How exactly does this work? Find the keywords for the product by using keyword tools and the suggestion you get from there.

3) Identify Competitors

By using the keywords researched in step 2 I want to see who is bidding on the same keywords in Google. So, I will plugin each keyword into a Google Search and identify the websites on the right hand side (the Google ads) that come up. Some URLs will be different, but in most cases I expect to see about 5-10 of the URLs showing up. At the end of the research I will probably have 75 keywords and 5 competitors identified.

4) Research of Keyword Quality

Now Keyword Elite comes into play. One of the features is to connect keywords and target URLs and let Keyword Elite do monitor if the URL comes up as an Adwords advertiser for the selected keywords. If a keyword / URL disappears fairly quick, the keyword is most likely not performing as expected and will be taken of my list. In the end of this process I should be able to identify keywords that seem to create good ROI for the advertiser as they otherwise would not bid on it over - let’s say - 3 weeks.

At this point I have a product and keywords identified. You might say that 75 keywords is nothing and I will need thousands of keywords, but the idea is - and others have already confirmed this fact - while thousands of keywords can work, a small list of highly targeted keywords can work very well, too.

I still have to come up with a good squeeze page for affiliate marketing and with writing good ad copy, but I will discuss this in a different posting.