While ambition is a good thing, the true key to success with Internet marketing is knowledge.  It’s imperative that you know what works, what doesn’t and how to put it all together to make your venture work.

Here is a short list of some of the most commonly made mistakes by new marketers.

Not having your own domain name – No one will believe you’re a legitimate marketer making legitimate money if you’re using a free site.

As with brick and mortar businesses, image is everything.  If you’re striving for success your image will suffer using a free site.

Using free e-mail addresses such as Yahoo, gmail, or Hotmail – As with the free websites, using free e-mail services don’t lend professionalism to your image.

If you have a legitimate web host that you pay for your domain you can create your own e-mail address on that domain.

Unprofessional look on your website – If your website looks like the strip in Las Vegas with flashing banner ads and cheesy graphics people will assume you’re an amateur.

Your site needs to have quality look and quality content.  You’ll also want to take care in the layout of your site making sure that it’s easy to navigate and makes sense.

Poorly written content – Before you jump to conclusions, don’t assume that I’m going to tell you to hire someone to do your content writing for you.

Unless you truly cannot write (many people think they can’t but haven’t really taken the time to try) then you can write.  Whether you do your own writing or have someone else do the writing for you, be sure that it’s quality content.

You want to offer your visitors information they want that’s easy to read and grammatically correct.

As you can see, many of the mistakes made by new marketers are simple, avoidable mistakes.  You can’t assume that you’re going to get something for nothing when it comes to Internet marketing.

Success as a marketer doesn’t have to cost you a fortune, but it will take some investment on your part, in time and money.

But what you hear very little about are the rules and regulations of articles on affiliate sites. Before you end up in a sticky situation let’s take some time to discuss what rules and regulations are out there that you should be aware of.

When it comes to affiliate marketing, most affiliate programs have their own rules and regulations regarding content articles on their affiliates’ sites.

While some are clearly· stated, others are not. The following list is just a few of the most commonly-known rules regarding content articles on affiliate sites.

· Links may only be placed in certain areas in articles. (dependent upon program)

· You may not tell or ask a reader to click on a link. (dependent upon program)

· Your article must be written in a certain font style and size. (varies from program to program)

· Stale content is not allowed. (this is becoming a widespread rule, especially since the Google revolution)

This is particularly important to marketers regardless of the rules, since your visitors want fresh content.

The fresher the content the more likely you are to have repeat visitors. They will come to your site looking for new reading.

· Filler content is not allowed. No one wants to read an article full of "fluff". If you’re going to take the time to read an article you want to feel like you’ve gotten something out of it when you’re done reading.

· Articles topics must be related to the product or service on the site. This is to prevent people from "stealing" traffic by have content on their site that is totally unrelated to the products and services they offer. After all, fair is fair!

Before placing content on your affiliate site be sure to take the time to fully understand your program’s rules regarding content. It will save you a lot of wasted time on re-writing your content and the possibility of a lot of trouble.

While a good flow of traffic to your site is necessary, it does not guarantee success.  So what is necessary to ensure success beyond having a steady flow of traffic coming to your site?

Let’s take a look at a couple of important ingredients to success.

The first ingredient is a quality website.  While anyone can generate traffic to their site, the site has to be able to keep the visitors there.

To do this you need a well-designed site that has quality content, is easy to navigate and offers the visitors what they want.

Without these facets your site will not retain the visitors’ attention and you will not get sales.

The next ingredient is your products/services.  If you have a limited number of products/services your customers will soon tire of seeing the same old thing and go elsewhere for something new.

You must provide a variety of products/services to keep your customers coming back, however don’t change things up too much or too often.  In doing so you may inadvertently discontinue carrying/offering something that was popular.

On the other hand, having too much to offer can be equally bad for business.  Your customers will not want to spend hours sifting through scores of products or endless lists of services.

You must take the time to find a balance that will please your customers.

The last essential ingredient I would like to mention is customer service.  Quality customer service is of the utmost importance, more so than product/service offerings.

No matter how good your offerings are, if your customers can not get answers to questions or satisfaction when they have a complaint they will not be likely to come back any time soon.

Let’s go over a few that I feel are most important.

The first difference is the content requirement for products versus services.  For products you can have less content on your site and still make the sales as long as your product offering is adequate.

With services, however, your customers will want to feel confident that you’re knowledgeable in your field, so offering plenty of quality content is essential, since this projects a certain level of expertise.

The next difference I’d like to mention is upsell offers.  While upsell offers work remarkably well on products, they can be seen as tacky when selling services.

An example of an acceptable upsell for a product would be:  you have a necklace for sale at $39.95 and for today only you can get the matching earrings (whose regular price is $29.95) for only $19.95.

While everyone likes a little something extra you need to be very tactful when trying to upsell services.

You may want to consider an alternative to upsells for your services.  An example would be offering a percentage off or a coupon in a mailing.  This wouldn’t be viewed as being tacky.

While there are surely many more differences between marketing/selling products and services I think you have an understanding of how they can differ.

Before offering an upsell on a service you would be very wise to do some research on how others offer promotions on their services to see what works well and what doesn’t.

You wouldn’t want to inadvertently offend or put off your customers by making an offer that they feel is simply unacceptable.

You’re not alone.  Many of us have been where you are and there are a couple of simple steps you can take to remedy this situation.

The first step we should discuss when talking about how to get the clicks you want on your website is content.  Quality content cannot be substituted with anything else.

Without quality content there is very little that you have to work with when trying to get good rankings on the search engines.

To ensure that you have the kind of content you need to make your site successful you need to have well-written articles on topics related to your market that are keyword rich.

If you’re unsure that you can write these on your own there are a wide variety of sites you can visit with information on writing these types of articles.

You may also want to consider hiring someone who is experienced in writing content articles to do the writing for your site.

The next step you need to take after getting good content on your site is to make use of the keywords in the content articles.

You’ll want to make a list of keywords in the articles on each page of your website.  Once you’ve done this you need to contact your web master and ask him/her to name each of your web pages with one of these keywords.

Your web master will likely be able to tell you which of the keywords will be most effective for your site.

If not you can use a keyword search tool (Google search keyword rankings) and find which will get you the most clicks.