This is a HUGE mistake.
When your marketing efforts put your message in front of prospective buyers, it is your responsibility to take care of those prospects.  What does that mean?  Add them to your mailing list!

A potential customer often needs to see an offer several times before making a purchase.  If you are not able to follow up with that prospect, you leave money on the table.

Additionally, in most markets people will purchase more than one item over time.  If you send visitors directly to a sales offer from a company you’re affiliated with, those visitors become clients and prospects of that company, not of you, and you will not be able to promote offers to them in the future.

Let’s look at this more closely.

Let’s say you have decided to promote a $100 video series that teaches people how to dance the tango, and you earn $50 for each sale.  You place your ads, and send 100 people to your affiliate link.  Your ads are highly targeted and the sales letter is outstanding so you are credited with 10 sales.  Not bad, $500 in commissions.

Now what?

Now you have to place another ad and try to find more people interested in your offer.

But what happens if you place your ads and send those 100 people to your own page to sign up for your mailing list and then send them on to the sales page via your affiliate link?

You still make 10 sales, you still earn $500 in commissions.  But now you’re able to follow up with the 90 people who didn’t buy.  If you have a powerful follow-up campaign, statistics show you WILL convert more of those prospects into buyers after multiple promotions.

Not only that, but you will also be able to send other offers to all 100 of the people who signed up for you mailing list.  Maybe you’ve found a great affiliate program for a company that sells tango shoes.  Ideal promotion for this list.  Or perhaps you’ve fallen in love with Latin dance and decide to develop your own videos – you can promote them to this list.  You already know they’re interested!

Setting up an opt-in page is very easy to do.  In fact, if you’re not confident in doing it yourself, you can use tools that will generate the page for you.  All you need to have is an autoresponder service and a place to load your web pages.

Before you start placing your ads and promoting that product to your prospects, be sure you’re aware of some of the potential pitfalls that can make your marketing efforts useless.

Banners

Most affiliate program managers provide a variety of banners for their affiliates to place on their websites. Banners should be tested extensively because they are not always an effective method to advertise. As you begin your testing, try to use banners that are smaller than 15k. And, as with all of your advertising, be sure any graphics you put on your own website match the theme of your site.

Pop-ups and Pop-unders

Many companies also provide pop-up or pop- under ads to their affiliates. Pop-ups work in some markets and for some products, and they don’t work in other markets and for other products. The best way to know…test. The same applies for pop-unders, but it’s generally accepted that website visitors find these less “irritating” when they’re visiting your site.

Text ads

Some of the most successful promotions come about because of text link ads. They load very quickly because they’re small and they are usually easy to place on your web pages. The problem is that many affiliate programs provide their affiliates with ads highlighting the product name and possibly features. The best text link ads let your website visitors know WHY they should click the link rather than simply state what product the link is for.

Email messages

If you plan to use email to promote affiliate offers, be sure to customize the messages that are provided by the company you’re promoting for. Your email promotions should be personal in tone and provide your prospects with a good understanding of your own experience with the product. You definitely don’t want to send out the same email message that every other affiliate for that product is using.

Cookies

Many companies with affiliate programs use cookies to track your referrals. Since the vast majority of visitors don’t purchase the first time they see an offer, cookies “tag” those visitors so if they return later and complete a purchase, you will be credited for the sale. The problem lies in that cookies are set for a specific amount of time, as determined by the company, not by the affiliate. Some companies set cookies that last only as long as the visitor remains on their site, and others set them to last for years. Additionally, the visitor might delete all of their cookies as a way to improve performance on their computer, and you will lose out on that commission.

Affiliate Links

Once you become an affiliate for a company, they'll usually supply you with a personalized link or affiliate code. It's essential that you use this code in all of your promotions, or you may be sending visitors to the company without earning any commissions. Unfortunately, there are some dishonest people out there who know how affiliate links work and will steal your commission. They simply sign up for the affiliate program for the product that YOU introduced them to and order the product from their own affiliate link.

Fortunately, there are tools available to help you improve and protect your affiliate marketing efforts. Be sure to spend enough time to thoroughly research any tools before making a purchase.

Compensation is usually based on one of three things: a flat amount for each prospect introduced to the company, a flat amount for each prospect who signs up for the company’s offer, or a flat amount or percentage for each purchase completed by a customer as a result of being referred by the affiliate. In Internet Marketing terms, these performance measures are referred to as Pay-Per-Click, Pay-Per-Action, and Pay-Per-Sale, respectively.

So why should you care?
Affiliate marketing brings the potential to earn a lot of money. The best affiliate programs will pay 50% or more of the cost of a product to the affiliate when someone they refer makes a purchase. Imagine for a moment what this can mean when you’ve built a relationship with your prospects. If you introduce them to a product that costs $5,000, you earn $2,500 for EACH sale. That’s why you see so many internet marketers become millionaires very quickly.

Additionally, affiliate marketing is very inexpensive for the affiliate. To be an effective affiliate marketer, you will need a website to promote your programs (which you can build for free using a service such as Blogger.com) and a method to keep in touch with your prospects. Many of the most lucrative affiliate programs cost nothing to join.

As an affiliate marketer, you don’t need to develop your own products, you don’t need a method to collect payments, you don’t even need to provide customer support. Your job is to find and recommend the best products and services to your prospects. It is recommended, however, that you only promote products and services that you own or have reviewed.

The biggest investment to you as an affiliate marketer is in the amount of time you’ll spend maintaining your site and researching various companies. You can work with one company or promote for as many as you’d like to fit your business goals.

Perhaps the biggest advantage to affiliate marketing is that it fits in perfectly with any other business building strategies you use. If you have your own products and services, you can still recommend complementary products to generate additional revenue. Again, the most important thing to remember is that you should only promote products and services you believe in.