Do you want to make money with affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing allows merchants to pay their affiliates based on performance. You get paid to sell other people's stuff. Rosalind Gardner wrote an eBook a few years ago titled 'How I Made Over $435,000 Last Year Selling Other People's Stuff." Not surprisingly it is still a big seller today because it lays out in simple language anyone can understand how to use affiliate marketing to make money.

To improve your odds of making money with affiliate marketing there are things you should do and there are things you should not do. Here are the top 3 mistakes not to make to improve you chances of making money selling other people's stuff.

1. Do not send traffic directly to your affiliate sales page. For $8.95 you can buy a domain name at godaddy.com and for $9.95 a month you can get unlimited hosting for your websites at hostgator.com. Then you can build simple little 1-5 page websites promoting your affiliate product that is unique and different from what every other affiliate marketer is using. In the old days this used to be called building mini-sites and it is still a good idea today!

2. Do not use the marketing materials the affiliate program provides you. Sure you can use it as a guideline, but then you need to personalize it. Change it up a little to make it unique. Come up with your own short classified ads and write a couple of solo ads as well. Then write a few articles that work your new website url into it and submit them to the top article directories. This is the best form of free advertising and gives you a fresh approach to your affiliate product that other affiliates will not have.

3. Be sure and capture the names and email addresses of as many people as possible on your website. Getting traffic to a website is the hardest part of affiliate marketing. If you use your affiliate website you have no way to add a subscription form or pop-up to it. When you build your own website you should put a subscription form on every page of the site and a subscription form on an exit pop-up. Offer something free or valuable in exchange for your prospects name and email address.

Many of the top affiliates in the world build landing pages that are nothing more lead capture pages offering something of value in exchange for a name and email address. This right here will set you apart from thousands of other affiliates who are just promoting their affiliate sales page.