How hard is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is a business model in which third parties get paid for promoting products and services online. If they don’t make any sales, they don’t get paid, anything! Although some affiliates are able to make millions of dollars through finding customers for other people’s products, around 95% of affiliate marketer quit!
This should give you some idea about the difficulty of earning from affiliate marketing. Despite this huge drop out rate there’s also a very low bar for entry in affiliate marketing. This means almost anyone can “give it a go”, so it’s no wonder most of them don’t make it work.
To succeed as an affiliate you need to be fairly patient and resilient. It’s certainly not a get rich quick scheme. There’s also a few things which can make the affiliate journey more fruitful and less painful. Here’s a few pointers.
How Hard Is Affiliate Marketing? Mindset
Have you heard the saying “If you’re hard on yourself, life is so much easier on you”? This is definitely true of affiliate marketing. If you work hard on your business and yourself with affiliate marketing there are great rewards for those who stick at it. Although this can be tough when there’s nothing to show for your work, the results will come later if you make a decision to keep going and never quit.
Most people don’t have the certainty and conviction to do this without first hand evidence though, and this is a major problem for most people who “try” with affiliate marketing and don’t stick at it. The “do or die” mentality is a rare one and affiliate marketing requires a certain set of characteristics. If you’re just “giving it a go” for a few months to see if “it” works, you’re going to be disappointed. But if you’re seriously committed to learning however long it takes, this is a different mindset.
A good analogy is getting your gym membership and expecting to get six pack abs within a few weeks. It doesn’t happen not because it’s not possible, but because of all the other competing parts of yourself which stand in the way. Things such as limiting beliefs, bad habits and lack of consistency. When you’re a beginner at something too, you typically lack focus and certainty.
How Hard Is Affiliate Marketing: The Right Products
How excited are you at selling that widget you found on Amazon? Probably not as excited as getting paid? But imagine you’ve been flocking your guts out blogging for 6 months and still no sales. Will you quit? Probably. But think about something you really love to do. You never grow out of enthusiasm for it. If you can find something you are passionate about, that passion will long outlast some meaningless trinket which you’re flogging online.
With the right products you can stand behind them with your passion and enthusiasm and outlast those who are just flogging trinkets. Unless your business has some meaning for you beyond the obvious financial considerations, it’s going to be much more difficult to stay the course long enough to start making it pay.
With the right products, your journey as an affiliate is going to be easier and more fulfilling. If you don’t care about what you’re selling, the opposite is true.
Which Products To Sell
There’s many products you can sell as an affiliate marketer and many newbies gravitate towards Amazon because of its well known affiliate program.
But Amazon’s commissions are teeny tiny! They pay peanuts. So you’ll need to flog a lot of products in order to only make a small income. Digital products typically pay much more than physical products (30-40% compared to 1-10% for physical). That’s a huge leap, so just by choosing carefully the products you sell, you make your affiliate business much more viable instantly.
High ticket affiliate products offer much higher rewards still. They are those which carry a much larger cost. Subscription products allows affiliates to earn ongoing recurring commissions from previous sales. So these can again make a huge difference to your bottom line. The most profitable digital products are typically education courses and high ticket digital programs which offer more personal coaching and mentoring.
Help And Support
To make the affiliate marketing journey more straight forward you can employ the services of an affiliate marketing mentor. Mentors can help you with recommendations of the right programs and with one to one affiliate coaching and mentoring too.
This is a good idea given the high drop out rate among affiliates. A mentor can hold you accountable and give you confidence and direction. This is quite difficult when you’re going it alone because it’s easy to get distracted and veer off course. You need to maintain a steady trajectory for some time to break through and get results as an affiliate. Constantly jumping from one course to another, like many newbies do, only serves to distract you and waste your time.
Access an online resource here to learn more and get started.
