There are many affiliate marketing mistakes that can severely affect your online earnings, and like many others, you may be unwittingly making these mistakes in your internet business. Obviously, mistakes are part of any business, and we do our best to learn from these mistakes to better ourselves and our earnings. But why not learn from someone else's mistakes instead of your own? You'll certainly make a lot more money a lot quicker if you do, and here are 3 affiliate marketing mistakes that you can learn from so that you won't have to make them yourself any longer.

Costly Affiliate Marketing Mistakes #1: Product Selection

One of the most common and costly affiliate marketing mistakes is choosing the wrong product to promote. This is a real killer, because you can be putting in super affiliate-esque efforts, but if the product falls flat on its face, then you're going to have serious refunds and charge-backs hurting your bottom line. You don't want to spend time, money and effort on something that doesn't last right? So the first thing you've got to do is to analyze the products you are currently promoting. Are they converting well? Do they attract a lot of refunds and charge-backs? If you can better the quality, conversions or commissions if the product you're currently promoting with an alternate product, do it!

Costly Affiliate Marketing Mistakes #2: Lack Of Focus

If you're promoting more than a hundred products on your site, that's one of the biggest affiliate marketing mistakes that you can make. With that many products on offer, how do your visitors know which one to choose? Chances are, they won't choose any of them and leave the site even more confused than before, never to return. Instead of directing your traffic to a hundred and one different product sites, what you can do is create lists of products and rank them from 1-10. That way, you not only add value to your visitors' experience by ranking the products in order of quality or preference, you also have a clear focus towards your top ranked products. Watch your conversions and sales skyrocket as a result!

Costly Affiliate Marketing Mistakes #3: Lack Of Integrity

Are you mailing your subscribers week after week promising them "the magic solution that will cure all their woes"? If you're touting a different product every week as "the best solution to X problem", you're going to turn a lot of people off you because they won't believe what you have to say after a while. After all, there can't probably be 10 "best solutions" to the same problem, and it can't change every week or month! Instead, you should aim to promote complementary products and services that cater to a wider range of needs within the niche that you're focusing on. For example, if you are in the dog training niche, you can promote a home dog training product one week, then a healthy dog food recipes the next. Vary it, but keep it relevant, and you'll soon experience a drastic increase in long term relationships and sales.