Thinking too small. Overestimating the size of a market is a common mistake for affiliate sellers as they tend to forgot that they will only ever be able to capture the percentage of it that is being offered by merchants. This site selling snowboards for example may be able to survive, but seeing as they will only pass on around 10% of the profits to affiliates, it is unlikely that affiliates sites could servive in such a niche. What affiliate sites should do is broaden the horizons and cover, in this case, all extreme sports for example, not just snowboarding.

Thinking too large. When products cost a great deal of money, like buying a swimming pool or luxury cruises for example, sellers take a lot of time over their decisions.It is quite rare for buyers to follow affiliate links for expensive goods or services and then buy them on the same day. They will spend time pondering, weighing the options and doing further research for example. And by the time they come to make the purchase the tracking cookie or alternative will have expired in lots of cases. Sticking to smaller items including gifts and downloads is far more likely to get results and people are more likely to buy these quickly.

Not strong enough. With any successful market it is not long before it attracts quite a crowd, and you find that you are not only competing with lots more affiliate marketers, but on top of that you have to try and boost your profile over the online merchant. Of course, whilst they are marketing themselves with the goal of getting 100% of the sale, you are marketing for usually a much smaller percentage. This means you need to stay one step ahead of the game if you want to turn any sort of profit.