1. Selecting a narrow segment

One of the things that make affiliate marketing successful is on account of its domain. If you have chosen a niche that is too narrow to sell products or which does not have a large enough market then you can expect your sales to dwindle. On the other hand, if you select a niche segment which has a broad market base and terrific demand then you can sell more products and thus maximize your income potential. You could browse through the service called Standard Rate and Data Service. Then check if there are commercial lists available in it. If there are many lists then you can be sure it is a good market to sell in.

2. Not promoting products to get publicity

You need to promote and propagate your products as much as you can in order to receive good commissions. Until and unless you start actively promoting your products no one online will know your products even exist! The world of affiliate marketing is filled with huge competition and in order to stay afloat you need to have a good marketing campaign. Luckily, there are several marketing tools which you can leverage such as PPC campaigns, article marketing, blogging, forum posting, banner adverts etc.

3. Not selecting a good mix of products

Try and select a range of both high income and low income range products in your affiliate product listing. Though it maybe more difficult to sell the high cost products they will fetch you more lump sum amounts with a single sale as compared to the low cost products. Try and balance out the two types of products so that you have a steady source of income on a regular basis.

4. Putting flashy banners and too many pop-ups

Another very common mistake that most novice affiliate marketers tend to make is to have too many pop-ups on their site and plenty of flash based banners. While these do tend to get the customer's attention they can be very distracting and annoying as well. Most customers have been known to close the pop-up window and banners even before they load. So beware of this. Instead, opt for pop-under windows which load on the back of the web page. Try using simpler banners which are not so flashy to lure your customers to the merchant site and earn more commissions.

5. Not optimizing your site

Most likely you will have an affiliate site of your own where you will be promoting your merchant's products. You need to optimize your site in order to get noticed by search engine spiders. This way, your site will get indexed faster and you will achieve a higher SERP as well. What this means is that your site gets more traffic each day and hence you receive more commissions as well.