99 reasons why you will fail at affiliate marketing

[SEOidiot]

Here are the Affearners teams 99 reasons why you will fail at Affiliate Marketing

1.  You don't get enough traffic.
2.  You get the wrong traffic.
3.  You promote the wrong product to the wrong people.
4.  You give up too soon.
5.  You don't understand your product.
6.  You don't rely on your affiliate manager.
7.  You can't build a proper website.
8.  You don't research your niche.
9.  You don't have a niche.
10. You only promote one product.
11. You don't know how to build a landing page
12. Your copywriting sucks
13. Your design isn't appealing
14. You overloaded with banner ads and drove prospects away
15. You built your site in flash  loser
16. You didn't insert your aff code properly (ha ha!)
17. Your testimonials are teh gay
18. adsense overload
19. You lose your customer with expired Aff product links
20. Your page loads far too slowly.
21. Your images don't load.
22. Your merchant is offline.
23. Your merchant doesn't pay his affiliates.
24. You don't have a variety of merchants.
25. Your merchants don't have what the shopper wants.
26. You expect instant results and give up before you have really tried
27. You never finish getting the site built fully
28. You dont give the visitor enough information to make a decision
29. You give the visitor too much information and never close
30. You try to promote too many products at once
31. Knowing the difference between sell and pre-sell
32. Trying to follow every self-proclaimed guru
33. Failing to maintain focus and having too many offers
34. Thinking MFA means Marketing For Affiliates
35. You think affiliate marketing will get you rich quick
36. You don't use your affiliate stats to improve your conversion
37. You don’t use your site stats to improve your traffic quality
38. The keywords you go for are too generic
39. The nature of the offer is not very clearly presented on your landing page
40. You waste money on buying shit unrelated traffic
41. You never spend any time to promote your landing page
42. Your host is unreliable and your landing page is down half the time
43. You target the wrong audience
44. You target the wrong geo locations
45. Your account details are wrong or fake at the affiliate program (doh!)
46. You have too much text on your landing page
47. You have too little text on your landing page
48. You spend too much time looking at your stats and don't get much work done on your site(s)
49. You don't spend enough time reading on affearners.com  Cheesy
50. You have too many images on your page
51. You don't have enough images on your page
52. Your images (from the merchant) are broken
53. Your links (from the merchant) are broken
54. Your merchant network isn't crediting your account
55. Your network has deactivated your merchant
56. You never update your datafeed
57. Your merchant doesn't update his datafeed
58. Your network doesn't update the datafeed
59. You don't update your landing pages frequently
60. You don't know your competition
61. You don't understand the SEO for marketing
62. You over-SEO your pages
63. You under-SEO your pages
64. You don't have a business plan
65. You don't follow your business plan
66. You don't adjust your business plan
67. You're afraid of making mistakes
68. You don't want to take risks
69. You take too many risks
70. You don't build relationships with like minded marketers
71. You spend too much time building relationships
72. You advertise in the wrong places
73. You only optimize for one search engine
74. You don't use ppc advertising
75. You use too much ppc advertising
76. You spend too much on ppc advertising
77. You don't spend enough on ppc advertising
78. You don't learn from your mistakes
79. You don't learn from mistakes made by others
80. your landing page has no call to action!
81. You've over-designed and conversion isn't happening
82. You're losing affiliate sales to Adsense (nickels for dollars)
83. Your affiliate offer expired and lose your customer before checkout
84. You have mucho duplicate content on your site.
85. You don't change the merchant categories.
86. You don't modify the description supplied by the merchant.
87. Your images aren't linked to the product.
88. Your merchant banners are promoting Easter products in December.
89. You use javascript links from your merchant.
90. You use an I frame for your links.
91. You are classed as a 'thin affiliate'
92. You put up an xml sitemap on a dynamic site.
93. You don't have an html sitemap for your site.
94. You don't have good visitor tracking.
95. You don't know which link your visitor clicked.
96. You don't know what your conversion rate is.
97. You don't know what the ratio of page views to clicks is.
98. Your site is not sticky.
99. You don't spend enough time reading on affearners.com!

Thanks to all the mods for helping to put the list together and lets keep adding to them below 

[nop_90]

you are targeting and ranking for google short tail
yahoo long tail is the shit that convert like crazy

[SEOidiot]

  Nop! Where have you been we missed u 

[nop_90]

heya seoidot
busy these days pulling in hay while the sun still shines .

[SEOidiot]

IM me sometime then - id love to 'compare hay' (that makes even less sense)

[markus]

I'm not so sure I wanna know...

 

[bronnamdi]

All 99 reasons are correct.
How do we begin to correct them so we do not fail at affiliate marketing? There are enough points for an ebook to be written out of this post. Can somebody take up the challenge? Or at the least, let's have an affiliate marketing course out of this thread.

[Ekim]

Well let's get started then!

1.  You don't get enough traffic.....

First you want to get all the free traffic you possible can get. Optimize your site and get listed in the search engines. Submit it to directories and try to get a lot of links and mention your site in forums and remember to always include your links in your forum signature. bronnamdi is a classic example 

When that's taken care of you could go to adwords and buy additional visitors. I don't.. I prefer to build more and pull more free traffic.

Anything else before we go to #2?

98 to go 

I'm getting tired... I'll be right back.

[bronnamdi]

Well said. This is the first commendation I am getting on the internet. I hope to get more soon. I have a problem with traffic. I do not get enough of it. I have recently paid a lot of money [by my own standards] to get my site listed in search engines and directories but I did not get anticipated results for 6 months after the deal, my stats have remained the same. I challenged that company to show evidence that they did the job since I did not appear to have got extra backlinks and I told them so.

Anyway, I am still battling with getting traffic. I plan to optimize my sites and make them look better and then wait for the spiders. I also want to add additional pages to my sites. I want to also write additional articles to boost my backlinks. However, I have observed that some blogs posted my articles without giving me credit for it and so ezinearticles.com refused to add the article as my own in their directory.
I have tried adwords. It has not paid me.

What other options do I have to get additional traffic before we move to the next point?

[bronnamdi]

I have not received any clicks to my sites from this forum. Maybe my signature is out of tune with this forum.

[Bompa]

I have not received any clicks to my sites from this forum. Maybe my signature is out of tune with this forum.

Yah, you're correct.  Out of tune is putting it nicely. 

[markus]

Maybe you should try something like  /mpboards.htm if you're trolling

[Miguel]

I will put it all into one reason for 99% of people who will ever try it:

Reason 1:

You bought an Ebook and tried it once with some crap ClickBank product, failed and then moved onto the next moneymaking idea you paid $97 bucks for.

[joefrisky]

Nice list and oh so true. Can i use it on my website?

Btw. miguel, the problem is in commitment and persuverance with clickbank as much as with other affiliate products, i'm finishing my ebook today. Using my own methods which do involve clickbank, and ebay i make more money then i ever did working a day job

The problem is people try something, don't put commitment into it, and move on. Its not the products that are crappy but the lack of trying !

[Daniel08]

bronnamdi,

You need to always think about who your audience is.  You are marketing stuff for acne, premature ejaculation, and weight loss in an affiliate marketing forum, of course no one is going to click on it.  Make your signatures relevant to the forum you are in.  (ie. Go to acne forums for your acne signature, etc.)  Obviously, in this forum, your signatures should be for something that can help affiliates become better marketers and make more money.