There’s many reasons why most affiliate businesses fail, but one of the main reasons is expectations. Starting an online business is exciting at first, but seldom does the beginner know the full story of what they have taken on. Many course providers will embellish how “easy” it might be to make a full time living with an online business. Your circumstances or situation might limit you both in terms of time available to work on your business and/or financially.
Your expectations are seldom equal to the reality and it can often take a lot more effort and time than you might expect to replace your existing income. There’s a 95% drop out rate in affiliate marketing and part of this statistic is likely because of the low barriers to entry. Almost anyone can “give an affiliate business a go”! However, one particular barrier is that of consistency over time. When you expect results to happen in a linear fashion, and they don’t appear for weeks or even months, most will quit.
Have a look at this image from James Clear’s book Atomic Habits.
Why Most Affiliate Businesses Fail – Results Aren’t Linear
If you’re used to working for an employer, you get paid every week/month regardless of the relative consequences of your work. You put in the time, and you get paid consistently. With a business your must accept those consequences as result of the actions (or inactions) you have taken (or not taken).
When transitioning to a business, it is likely you may take some of this expectation with you, especially if you’ve been an employee for years and have subconsciously absorbed this expectation in relation to your output.
Your activities in the beginning or starting an online business are likely to be more scattered than a seasoned professional who knows exactly the actions to take to move their business forwards more quickly and purposefully. As a beginner you are likely to focus on certain actions such as:
- Building your website or sales funnel
- Creating content – blogging or shooting and uploading video content
- Setting up social media profiles
- Designing logos
- Signing up to various platforms such as Google Ads etc.
- Running your first advert
- Writing and sending emails
- Getting set up with an email autoresponder
- Learning new skills
- Watching tutorials
Why Most Affiliate Businesses Fail – Results Aren’t Linear
You can expect to be spending several months working on your online business learning new skills and setting things up. In the initial phase you will be in “learning mode” and this is before you even implement the actions you need to take to drive your business forwards.
Once you have learned some new skills, you can apply them. But until you start doing so, you won’t have any feedback or data to base your marketing decisions on. So for example, you might start blogging. Three weeks in to blogging every day you see that you haven’t made a single sale! How frustrating – you’ve put in all this work but without any results!
Similarly you might try running an advert, sending leads into your sales funnel. After only 100 leads and no sales, you might decide “it just doesn’t work”. But when you consider that some affiliates have 100,000 leads or more, you will see how much further there is to go.
The problem is that to get to 100 leads is hard when you’re a beginner. But once you have that knowledge, it becomes considerably easier to collect leads as time goes on. Similarly, at first you might try a bunch of stuff and find that it doesn’t work for you. But it’s not a waste if you learn from it and keep going until you find something which actually works!
Why Most Affiliate Businesses Fail – Exponential Growth
The linear growth we assume as beginners doesn’t happen because much of our initial activities amount to nothing tangible. Our growth in the outset is a growth in knowledge. As we start to implement that knowledge we start to see some seemingly trivial results – perhaps a hit on our website, a few leads and maybe even a sale. But it’s nothing compared to the work we have put in and far from the income we need to survive and even quit our job!
It’s at this point that many new affiliates will quit. They see their results as a direct result of the time and effort (and investment) they have put in. But in fact, the results they achieve is only the outcome of a tiny percentage of that effort. Once they start to see that it is only a few specific actions which create those results, they can get more focused on those actions alone, spending less and less time on actions which are superficial and relatively unimportant. But it is the superficial actions which are often the more attractive ones to beginners. Designing that logo, writing that blog post or spending time on social media for example.
In the outset, you are implementing actions which once completed will never need to be done again. These are things like setting up your sales funnel, building email templates and learning about advertising. Once you’ve done those things once, they are set up ready to be automated. The thing to keep in mind with an online business is its massive potential to be automated and scaled. This is something you can never do with a job. You’ll always need to keep turning up physically to keep getting paid – until you’re eventually replaced by a robot who can do your job automatically!!
Summary
There’s many affiliate marketing problems you’ll encounter on your journey to building a profitable affiliate business. But keep in mind that an online business can work pretty much on autopilot once you have it running on all cylinders. To get it running like this will take some time and effort in the beginning and this seems as though you’re doing a lot of work for nothing. But it isn’t so if you keep your mind focused on the outcome you will eventually receive – a fully automated and profitable business running whether you do any work or not! Keep the faith and make a choice not to quit before you get there.
Affiliate marketing is a globally scalable business which can set you free both geographically and financially. With this prize comes a cost. That cost is your deliberate and consistent focus on the things that matter in your business until you get the job done!
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