Wonder why you’re struggling with affiliate marketing? There’s lots of reasons affiliates struggle. I struggled with affiliate marketing for years before finding a community who could help. Checkout the free video series here to learn more.
I first began learning about affiliate marketing in the early 2000’s with a few online courses. One course taught me one strategy and another one taught something completely different. This is one problem with jumping from course to course – also known as “shiny object syndrome”! You don’t get any consistency with your strategy and before one particular strategy can work, you ditch it and start another!
One of the first courses I bought was from a guy called Shaun Smith. He taught to create content and earn advertising revenue from Google Adsense when your visitors click on your adverts. I got super excited when I earned my first few clicks – even though the actual earnings were ridiculously small. I never made it pay much more than some pocket change.
Why You’re Struggling With Affiliate Marketing – Shiny Object Syndrome
Next I found a guy called Peter Lexis who taught paid advertising and selling affiliate marketing products. I did manage to run a paid advertising campaign and make some sales. Before I could increase my ad budget and scale, I had my Google Adwords account shut down and couldn’t retrieve it. So I ditched the paid advertising strategy and found another course – this was called “The Keyword Academy” and taught a similar strategy to Shaun Smith.
By doing a lot of keyword research, you found a topic/niche which could pay you for advertising clicks by ranking your content on the first page of Google. This strategy is fraught with difficulties, as I later found out and The Keyword Academy is no more, which tells you something! Google changes its algorithm regularly and despite some small lived success with this strategy, it never really panned out. I suspect it was the same for many would-be bloggers who built huge websites and spent hours creating content, only to see their sites drop from the rankings and disappear into no mans land.
It’s very painful I can tell you!
Why You’re Struggling With Affiliate Marketing
There’s other reasons besides flawed strategies, shiny object syndrome and burnout as to why affiliates quit. Around 95% of affiliates will quit which shows just how difficult and frustrating it can be making your living from it. One of the biggest problems is knowledge. Unless you have spent some time doing affiliate marketing (or got the right knowledge) you won’t know the pitfalls. But to get to that point means a lot of pain and heartache, and often not much money!
Results aren’t linear as an affiliate and although you’d expect to work for a certain amount of time and get paid for that, it doesn’t work that way with affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing it is performance related pay. This means you could work for years and still not get paid (until you make a sale). While some affiliates will “get it” very quickly and start generating sales, others (like me) struggle for a long time. So if you struggle you’ll need a die hard mentality and a very strong reason to pursue it to keep going and see the light at the end of a long tunnel.
You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know
As a beginner you’re filled with enthusiasm and little knowledge. You don’t know what you don’t know! This can mean you waste time on all sorts of actions which don’t move the “needle” on your affiliate income. You’re also carrying experience of other world activities – such as employment. In a job, you’re employed and paid for your time. So there’s the knowledge that whatever you do with your time “at work” you still get paid at the end of the month.
Not so with affiliate marketing. Your income is a direct consequence of the specific actions you take (or don’t take). So even if you spend all month making a website look shiny and pretty, you still might earn nothing.
But it’s likely that you will bring some employee mindsets with you when you start an affiliate business. The mindset of successful affiliates is very different to that of most. They see “failure” as a stepping stone and a “learning”. They see the end outcome and keep going and do whatever it takes to get there. Most successful affiliates have a “whatever it takes” mentality and a strong reason to keep going through the problems and difficulties.
Stuck In Learning Mode/Comfort
When you begin to learn affiliate marketing it’s quite exciting. It’s a new venture which can change your life. You’ll be watching training videos and ticking off boxes and this can be very rewarding. However, the danger is to get “stuck” in learning mode, following course after course, watching video after video. You might even, (like I did), jump from course to course, in an endless learning cycle and get stuck with always searching for the next shiny object.
The “real” study with affiliate marketing is getting stuck in with some kind of marketing strategy and getting your feet wet and your fingers burned! Unless you take action which will likely result in “failure” you’re never going to move the income “needle” for your business. The “failure” though is actually growth and unless you put yourself through it, you won’t learn what is necessary.
Unfortunately this is painful and pain is something most people avoid like the plague. The comfort zone is comfortable until the point where it isn’t. It is at this point (where your comfort zone is suffocating you) where you will take action to make change. But if you’re happy in the “comfort zone” it’s unlikely anything will change. Pain is a huge motivator but if you’re not uncomfortable enough to step into discomfort, you’ll likely avoid it altogether and therefore avoid the work that is necessary. If you’re not driven to put yourself through the learning phase of affiliate marketing, and likely make some mistakes, you’ll only spend time on the periphery. Tinkering with low value actions which don’t move your business forwards feels like fun! But it isn’t going to move your forwards.
Why You’re Struggling With Affiliate Marketing – Summary
So here’s a quick summary of the main problems affiliates will encounter in some form or another:
- Shiny object syndrome – jumping from course to course looking for the “magic bullet”. This never works because a business takes time and effort to build, not magic bullets! Get started here by watching the free video series.
- Stuck in learning mode – ticking boxes and watching videos feels satisfying for a while, but if you get stuck here you’ll do nothing useful to move your business forwards.
- You’re comfortable in your present situation – if you’re comfortable, you won’t do the things which make you uncomfortable – such as running advertising campaigns or building content.
- You’re a “Busy fool” – a “busy fool” spends time on low value actions. Focus on high value actions which move your income needle instead.