This is the most important section in this guide, so pay close attention. Affiliate marketing, just like any other type of selling is about the passion you feel for the topic you are building your website around. If you want to be trully successful with the affiliate programs you offer, you need to build a passion for your field (niche).

The #1 mistake that most affiliate sites make is to think that they are selling products. It simply doesn’t work that way… you don’t want to sell products, you want to entertain and educate your visitors and you want to build a website that tells people about your passions, your interests and the things you like.

You want to give them valuable information about the topic your site evolves around and then weave into that content an endorsement for a product or service that you like and use.

You want your visitors to know that you are just trying to give them good information about the topic that interests them (else they wouldn’t be at your site in the first place). And if you feel a real passion for that topic, this will reflect in your writing… and if it does, people will percieve that passion and will be excited about it, and it will traduce into sales for you. BIG sales.

Writing about a product or service in the editorial content of your website is called writing an advertorial (this comes from the combination of the words “ad” and “editorial”. And just to be clear, this works exactly the same way if you’re blogging as an affiliate.

Mass media channels like TV, radio, magazines and newspapers endorse products and services in their editorial content all the time. Creating a good advertorial is easy, all you really need to do is talk about a topic you like giving people all the information you know about that specific topic and weaving in a few words about a product or service that has helped you achieve in your area of interest.

Imagine that you know a lot about how to grow bonsai trees. You can easily set up a *great* website or blog with all the information you have collected on this topic, giving specifics about how or why you grow your bonsai trees in a certain manner.

You can also include information about the kind of clippers you use to trim your bonsai trees and why you use them. You can also tell your visitors about the top three books that have given you the most valuable information about bonsais.You can start a newsletter that gives out free tips and tricks about bonsai growing (we’ll talk about in a later chapter of this guide).

Iif you’re into bonsai-growing, that sounds like a great site to visit doesn’t it?

When people find a site like this, they find this site useful and entertaining, they bookmark it and come back… and they even spread the word around to their friends, family and using social media sites.

Now let’s imagine a second site. A site that’s chock-full of banner ads and graphics that are trying to sell some bonsai trimming clippers. Which of the two sites above do you think will get the most sales (even if they are both affiliate sites)?

You are absolutely right. The site with all the bonsai information will make the most sales.This takes us to the #2 mistake that most affiliate websites make: Building a mall.

Malls are an excellent idea in the brick and mortar world. They give you a practical way to shop by placing a lot of stores together in a single building… this way, you don’t have to drive all around your town to look for a certain product. But it works a lot different on the internet! Here you don’t have to drive all around to get to a certain place – everything is just a few mouse clicks away!

If you find yourself at a website that doesn’t have anything of value to you, and it’s just packed with banners trying to sell you everything under the sun: from shoes to computers to practical jokes.. you just click the “Back” of your browser and you are gone from there. You wouldn’t buy a thing in there would you? But for some strange reason, people think you will and they keep building sites like this.

That is the pitfall you’ll want to avoid! The right way to do it is to sign up to only a few affiliate programs that are related to your topic of interest that are selling products that you actually believe in… and then build a website that endorses those products.