There’s many challenges of affiliate marketing you’ll need to overcome even before you make your first sale. Challenges in your beliefs, the products you find, and also your marketing strategy.
When I started out on the affiliate marketing journey, I found many hurdles which stood in the way of making an income online. One of the very first affiliate challenges is in finding your direction. With so many affiliates promoting their offers through their websites and email marketing, it can be daunting to enter the affiliate space. You’re constantly being inundated with email offers, all pushing you in a different direction!
This is the information overwhelm stage. It’s easy to quit at this point because there’s simply too much conflicting information. It’s well worth choosing a training course and sticking with it at this point!
Challenges Of Affiliate Marketing – Information Overload
Information overload comes to most affiliates at one stage or another. One of the problems with working online is that you determine how much information you put in front of you. If you’re keen, you’ll try and take a lot in, and this can lead to burnout! It’s important to prioritise your time and do one thing at a time.
If you have signed up to a lot of offers, you’ll get a lot of emails in your inbox. This can lead to another problem which is shiny object syndrome! With shiny object syndrome, you jump from one affiliate marketing course to another. I did this for some time before making any progress at all! Have a look at some of the courses I took in my digital profit course review.
I jumped from course to course but they all taught something different, so it was difficult to make any progress. Many courses claimed that earning online was easy too, which didn’t help! So I would leave one strategy for another one, completely abandoning any progress I had made in one direction.
Challenges Of Affiliate Marketing – Being A Busy Fool
It’s easy to gravitate towards the activities which you are happy doing with affiliate marketing. You can waste an awful lot of time browsing the internet, chatting on social media and not doing the activities which will lead to you making progress.
Even getting stuck in education mode can be limiting. Watching videos and learning can feel like you’re making progress, and you are in a way. But you don’t want to stay here, in constant learning mode. You need to actually apply what you’re learning or you’re wasting your time!
I became a busy fool too! I wasted so much time designing logos and making websites look pretty, meanwhile no-one could find them and I wasn’t making any sales! No traffic = no sales.
Challenges Of Affiliate Marketing – Traffic
Whatever you decide to promote as an affiliate, you will need to generate traffic. There’s many ways to do this and your choice of traffic generation can have a massive impact on whether your affiliate business is successful or not. See 22 ways to promote affiliate products. With a blog, traffic generation will be slow. You’ll need to create a lot of content before you see much in the way of traffic, let alone sales. With paid marketing, you can build an affiliate business much faster.
But if you choose the blogging route, you can expect some more challenges. Blogging is a cheap strategy to generate traffic. By turning that traffic into leads, you can more easily convert those leads into sales. This will also depend on the particular products you have chosen to promote. Blogging at first is pretty tough. You can spend a lot of time blogging, without seeing much in the way of results. So your belief needs to be pretty high if you’re going down the blogging route.
Over time, if you stick at it, you should see some traffic come in from your previous blog posts. But this can take months, or years, depending on how regularly you blog and how you promote your content. See also blogger problems.
Traffic & Paid Marketing
If you choose to go down the paid marketing route, it’s a good idea to choose recurring income affiliate programs to promote. High ticket affiliate offers will give you more chance at being profitable too, should you choose the paid route. With low value physical product, being profitable while using paid marketing is much more difficult. Digital products will pay more and you can earn ongoing income from memberships and software type products. So it’s worth choosing carefully the products you decide to promote. See affiliate marketing business models.
Although paid marketing is much more scalable than content marketing, it also requires you to risk capital and test and measure your campaigns. This is another affiliate challenge and you should expect to do some learning here. Most affiliate marketers don’t hit a home run on their first time out. Many of their advertising campaigns simply don’t work. The key to generating an income with affiliate marketing is to expect to do a lot of failed activity first, learn from it, and get better!
That First Sale
Making your first sale as an affiliate marketer is a monumental achievement! Make sure you celebrate small wins. A small win can be getting your first website visitor. It can be setting up an advertising campaign or getting your first lead on your email list. The first sale is usually achieved after a lot of other small wins like these. Keep up your enthusiasm by giving yourself rewards whenever you achieve something of merit.
Once you’ve achieved your first sale online, congratulate yourself because it’s a massive achievement. Don’t set out to make huge amounts from your affiliate business overnight because you’ll be massively disappointed! Then you’re more likely to quit. The affiliate marketing failure rate is high with around 95% of new affiliates giving up before they get anywhere. But remember you only need to commit to the process and make a decision never to quit to be in the 5% of ones who make it!
Belief In Your Product
One of the challenges of affiliate marketing is the fact that a product might become obsolete. If you’ve spent months or years promoting a product though content generation, this can be a tough one. Your content which now gets traffic points to a product which is no longer available. For this reason, it’s worthwhile finding products and services which have been around for some time and which are going to last.
It’s also worth diversifying your affiliate product portfolio and creating your own email marketing list. With your own content and email list, you can more easily pivot should something change with the products you’re promoting. With a variety of products on offer, you leave yourself less open to this eventuality.
A friend of mine heavily relied on promoting products from Amazon. Amazon recently reduced affiliate commissions and changed their API – (website interface which connects affiliate websites with their products). This caused massive problems for Steve as he had thousands of links to Amazons affiliate products in his blog posts.
For any affiliate product you promote, it’s worth keeping up with changes in their terms and conditions. If they change something and you’re unaware, your old links may no longer work!
Challenges Of Affiliate Marketing -Belief
Belief that your affiliate business will work is a huge challenge, especially for new affiliates. It was for me too. If you’re creating content on a regular basis, with nothing to show in terms of affiliate commissions, it can be much harder to keep going than if you have some results.
Likewise if you’re running a paid marketing campaign, you can spend a large amount of money before you build your list and make a return. This is tough, especially if you’re on a limited budget.
Before running up such expenses, it’s worth testing your sales funnel with a small budget. Try different advertising campaigns before scaling up. Stick to a low, manageable budget and test and measure cautiously. Although this can be frustrating, it’s much better to manage your spending than to get impatient and over spend, blowing your budget all at once!
Much of this can be helped by choosing a product or service which you deeply believe in. If you’re thinking that the product you promote is a scam, and only promoting it to make money, how do you think your marketing efforts will come across to your subscribers and website visitors! Align yourself with your products and the value they have.
Choose products you believe in and can get behind. Any doubt and scepticism will show in your marketing efforts, either towards your potential customers, or in your marketing mindset and psychology. See affiliate marketing psychology. This can stop you from taking the required action needed to succeed as an affiliate.
For more challenges of affiliate marketing see 23 affiliate mistakes newbie affiliates should avoid.
Summary
As you can see, there’s a great deal of challenges for an affiliate to overcome if they are to succeed and build an income online. An affiliate needs a “whatever it takes” mentality and any mental reservation and hesitancy can cost them dearly.
Affiliate marketing is a business and it takes time and a lot of effort to get the wheels off the runway. But if you do it right, your efforts can be rewarded over and over again with subscription affiliate programs which pay out recurring commissions.
Once you have generated your first sale online, you’re much better armed to know with certainty what can work to make online commissions. You’ll also have a much stronger belief when you are able to make a sale. So this should be the aim of a new affiliate marketer – to make their very first sale online. Access a free video series to learn more about affiliate marketing and get started.