Affiliate Marketing is such an attractive alternative

Affiliate marketing is such an attractive alternative, especially when you start to look at making money on the internet. After all, you don't need your own product, the sales website is already set up for you, and you've probably been given banners and other tools to advertise the product. What could be easier?

1 Search engines. You need to make the search engines your friend. You can't do search engine optimization on the actual sales site, so you need to see how you can use search engines to get traffic in other ways. You could set up your own website and be able to optimize that and then send traffic from there to the merchants site. This could be a content site or a squeeze page.

In the content site you'd be preselling the product by giving relevant information about it and the marketing area it covers. With the squeeze page you'd be getting the visitor's email address for a free gift and sending them on to the merchant site. To have either of these sites you'd need to get traffic too, through paid or free traffic methods.

2 Too many banners. You'll often see an affiliate content site almost filled with banners. In some cases, the site might be just banners with no content. This will only switch people away to look for some genuine information, when that's exactly what the same site should have been providing. Banners could be used but only sparsely so that they have an effect when noticed and because they're in the context of relevant information on the same page.

3 One product only. Too many affiliates think they've found a goldmine in one product and stick to it only or they're lacking in interest or enough imagination to go out and find other good products. With only one affiliate product you're vulnerable to that merchant suddenly stopping selling it or simply going out of business. It's important to have several products providing different streams of steady income.