Starting a work from home program is an excellent way for any individual who is looking to start a home based business with little or no financial investment and still earn a fairly decent profit margin.  You can see why the field of internet marketing is catching on like wildfire and has become the fastest growing venture in the world of business today.  When you compare it to other brick and mortar small business ventures, internet marketing is the easiest way to earn money online.

So, how come you are not making any money online?  Only a handful of people has ever made money from marketing while a vast majority will experience frustration and failure.  When you view an affiliate program for the very first time, you will hear testimonies of people who have made thousands of dollars each month while on the other hand, there are individuals who fail to make a profit online and then call it quits.  Why is this so? How come so many people quit so soon when the potential to earn a lot of money and succeed in internet marketing is very high?  This is coming from experience and I will share with you the one main key that will change your mind and attitude towards internet marketing:  You have to treat your affiliate program like a real business!

In this article, I will point out the 10 main reasons why people fail to make money online:

• No business plan. Yes, you do have to form a business plan.  It does not have to be a 20 page report, but only a page or 2 will suffice.  On this plan, state what your long and short term goals are.  As you are making a note of your goals, ask yourself this question, “How am I going to fulfill these goals?” So, be sure to write your plan and go over it every day.

• Not putting your plan to work. What good is a business plan, that you spent an hour or 2 working, if it’s just lying in a pile of paperwork doing nothing.  Your business plan is the backbone of your home based business, without it, everything will crumble and you will not succeed in making any money.

• Biting off more than you can chew. Many beginning internet marketers are so eager to get going that they set goals that are not attainable.  Start small and work your way up the ladder.  For example, you are not going to get the ultimate affiliate website overnight, start small and keep adding fresh and original content every day.

• Not enough knowledge. If you join an affiliate program, take full advantage of the training program (if applicable) that came with the program. The internet is an excellent resource for you to find mentors and training programs that will guide you through the internet marketing process.  Just recently, Clickbank started their own training program called Clickbank University and it offers some of the best training tools for affiliate marketers.

• Failure to invest in your home based business. Sometimes, it takes a little bit of capital to get your business going in the right direction.  You might also want to put down in business plan how much you are going to spend each month on your business.

• Failure to promote your business. Many affiliate programs will coin the phrase “auto- pilot,” and everything is done for you. Many people will take this message the wrong way by building their website and doing nothing else to it.  You will not have any success if you go this route.  The word “auto-pilot” in affiliate terms simply means that you must do some promoting (submit to search engines, article writing, forum posting, blogging, etc.) and the internet will do the rest.

• Wanting the results now! This lack of patience is a major downfall for almost every affiliate marketer because they want to become instant millionaires overnight. Remember this one important key factor; do not view internet marketing as a way to get rich quick.  It will take time for your website to be ranked in the search engines.  If you have invested some money in your internet business, do not give up, but let you have business have some to grow and flourish in the competitiveness of affiliate marketing.

• Failure to pick the right niche to promote. On the Clickbank website, there is a special tool that lets affiliate marketers see which niche is having success; it is called “Gravity”  The higher the gravity numbers mean that marketers are actually making money on that niche. The lower the numbers mean that there is no money to made and marketers are not promoting that niche.

• Failure to make your content stand out. Uniqueness and originality are king in the eyes google and other search engines and if you write content that is unique, you will captivate your readers and they will want to buy from you.

• Failure to be committed to your online business.  You cannot spend only a few minutes working on your business and forget about it for an entire week.  It does not work like that.  Try to spend at least a couple of hours every day writing an article, posting a blog, building a website, etc.  If you are married and have children, make a schedule of when you want to work on your business and stick to it. You can work on your business while the kids are taking a nap, at school or when they go to bed.  This type of commitment will also work with your full-time job.

An important note, if you have a job, don’t quit just because the creator of the work at home program tells you to.  Wait tell your online business takes off and then you can make a decision at that point.  Just remember, that all your hard work and dedication will pay off in the long run.