I thought this would be a great post for the newbies. Once we get enough info here I will move this and make it a sticky in the New Affiliate Q&A section. I figure with all the experience here let's share what our biggest mistakes were when we first started. I'll start.........

1. Expecting too much way too soon

2. Not investing any money in my business (it takes money to make money)

3. Playing poker with affiliate revenue's

Buying traffic

Buying non-targeted banner ads

Not finding a mentor

As one of the newbs here, I am excited to see how this post develops. I have been lucky to hook up with Dave as my mentor and he has shared so many points and insights with me that I never would have thought of, that I'm sure have already shaved months off of my learning curve. If not for Dave I probably would have had a bannner farm up in about my first day and wonder why I wasn't getting any response. Instead I am slowly building a content site that may take a bit more time, but will pay off threefold down the line!

Not understanding the fundamentals of business. This is like any other business - it is all about competitive advantage.

Not understanding the most powerful weapon you can have is . . . . a good idea.

Spending too much time on the technical advantages which don't benefit the end user - like SEO. SEO is fine but people need to realize that good traffic brings good SEO and not the other way around.

PPC - Do you really think buying $1.00 worth of traffic for $0.99 cents in a god busniess model?

Thinking that poker site summaries with banners is content. Those are advertisements - you need content for people to put up with the advertisements.

"Do you really think buying $1.00 worth of traffic for $0.99 cents in a god busniess model?"


Yes. If you show me a guaranteed way to make 1.00 for every .99 I spend and I'll be a millionaire in no time, a penny at a time.

Believing that your situation will change when you do the same things.
Einstein said that this was the definition of insanity.

One mistake is to not take action. I believe it was perhaps Randy that said that this is a simple business but not an easy one.

As others have said get a mentor. As Ed said having a guy like Dave to help show you the way is invaluable. -Chip

Not realizing that your affiliate manager is a great resource and that he/she is on your side. I think to many people who start out just think their AM is "some guy from X card room who sends me emails"

Mistakes I made:

1. Getting backlinks with www and without the www in the url. I actually had the site's pr divided into two. http://www.mysite.com was a pr4 http://mysite.com was pr5. You would think the SE's would know they are the same darn pages, but apparently they don't.

- pick WWW or none-WWW and stick to it when getting backlinks.
- set up an .htaccess to redirect to this url

Example of .htaccess redirecting to url with WWW:

options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

2. Not utilizing the anchor text properly. I alot of links coming to simply "casino geek". Not a lot of searches for "casino geek" - not back then, anyway.

- For a new site, I really think it is best to choose a good 3 or 4 word phrase that has popular 2 word phrases in it. "Online Poker Bonus", for example covers "online Poker" and Poker bonus".
- Vary the anchor text - using the above example, a few "poker bonus" and a few "online Poker" and a few "online poker bonus", throw in the odd return link that using the site url as the anchor text for good measure.

3. Not setting up the site to use 'includes'
My first site grew and grew, and it got very hard to add new pages, as it meant going through the whole dang site add the page links to the navigation.

- Use includes!

If your site pages are .html , you can use, .inc files as includes.

Here's how:

1. make up a separate file to put your navigation/menu in it, call it whatever you like, but make it a .inc file. We'll use menu.inc for the example.

2. Once this file is made, replace the menu on the pages with this line:


3. You say you can't get it to include the menu.inc file on your html pages?

Put this into your .htaccess file ( leave a little space and add it right under your 301 redirect code ):

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .php3 .phtml .html .htm

It should work on any linux server. If you're on a windows server, I don't know what you can do to get includes in .html pages. Maybe someone else knows how.

A big one is signing up for CPA's vs. MGR for long term profit. I suggest for a new player to set a goal of hitting 10 CPA players their first go round. Take the money which should be at least $600.00 and INVEST IT IN A GOOD SITE WITH CONTENT. Now you take your "capital" and go after the long term MGR players from that point.

I could give you some other secrets but that costs more than $600.00 :)

Bottom line kids is this, don't waste time going after all CPA's. The quick money is nice but it's 100X nicer to look at my stats daily and see hundreds of MGR profit coming in knowing that I've done very little to earn it. I put in the hard work first, now I just maintain relationships with these PRECIOUS MGR players.

Work the hardest to identify your MGR players that actually produce. Then take the time to maintain the relationship. It doesn't take much but will pay big dividends down the road.