Affiliate Marketing can be a very lucrative business but it will require a lot of work. This is not a get rich quick scheme this is a real business.

But if you’re like most affiliates out there and you make this one huge mistake, you will be dead in the water before you even get started.

So, what is the single biggest mistake most affiliates make? Not having a means to collect people’s personal information such as first name and email address.

Affiliate Marketing is the way to go in my opinion, and if you are just starting out trying to make money online, list building is an absolute must if you intend on making enough money to stay in business.

I would venture a guess that almost every affiliate marketer starts out at Clickbank picking a product to promote, gets their Clickbank affiliate link and then runs to Google Adwords and gives pay-per-click a try. What most people start out doing is driving traffic straight to the merchant’s website. If you make a sale you get a pretty hefty commission, usually 50%-75% and you are happy as a pig in you know what. The whole problem with trying to make money in this manner is that when you finally do make a sale that’s it, you will never see that customer again.

Affiliate Marketing can be a great way to make money online and has proven to be one of the easiest ways to make money online unless of course you are what they call a “Newbie”.

The first thing the Newbie does is go straight to Google and types in the phrase “affiliate marketing”, thinking they will be magically guided to a few web pages where they can get some instant answers. Much to their dismay, they are starring at search results 1 – 10 of about 14,400,000 web pages. WOW, I didn’t expect that.