Is affiliate marketing hard? Affiliate marketing can be hard yes, but it can also be easy. Affiliate marketing only gets easier though after a long period of learning, and gaining experience. Once you have experience, know what you’re doing and can draw upon data to know what works and what doesn’t, you’re far better prepared to promote products online and earn commissions.
However, as a beginner affiliate marketer, it can be very challenging. This is for a number of reasons:
- Thinking it’s easy! If you think affiliate marketing is easy, you’ll have a harder time than if you’re better prepared for the tough times, of which they will be many!
- There’s a low barrier to entry. The low cost and global accessibility of affiliate marketing means anyone can “give it a go”. Many drop out when things don’t start happening immediately. “Giving it a go” doesn’t make you an affiliate marketer however.
- Not having any experience or knowing a definite path. When you’re unexperienced at anything, you’ll tend to struggle. Without experience everything you do is based on what you know. This is why your education is so important.
- Conflicting messages and multiple “gurus”. There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing and lots of conflicting advice online. So it’s easy to get lost in overwhelm and information overload.
Is Affiliate Marketing Hard – My Journey
I would say for a beginner the answer is an emphatic “Yes”! Affiliate marketing is hard. I started learning affiliate marketing over 10 years ago and spent a lot of time struggling. I jumped from one course to the next, and all of them promised something which I couldn’t attain for several years.
There’s problems which go unseen too and you can easily waste a lot of time in the early stages of being an affiliate. You need to focus on the money producing activities as an affiliate marketing, since you can spend heaps of time on less important tasks. Being a “busy fool” is the term which is often used.
If you’re expecting easy results for not much work, you might be tempted by the sensationalist courses which promote themselves by saying how “easy” affiliate marketing is! It can be easy, of course. But it gets easier the more you do it because you gain experience and learn what to focus your efforts on.
In the early stages you’ll spend time on things which don’t work. Over time, as you gain experience, you’ll learn which activities are the best ones to spend time on. If you stick at it, you can build a residual income online which keeps coming in whatever you do.
But before you get to this stage, you’ll have to overcome a lot of hurdles. This biggest one is overcoming your own scepticism and doubt. Once you start making sales online, you’ve overcome a major hurdle: doubt. Before this happens you can spend months working with no results at all. When you’ve nothing to show for months of work, it can be so much more difficult to accept that you’re on track for success online. See also how difficult is affiliate marketing.
Is Affiliate Marketing Hard – Your Mindset
There’s a reason affiliate coaches and trainers talk a lot about mindset. I never used to think mindset was a big deal, but perhaps that explains why I struggled for so long with it.
Your mindset as an affiliate marketer is probably the most important part of your success or “failure” online. Successful affiliates don’t do things much differently than unsuccessful ones except they persevere when things don’t go well and use their “failures” to learn, rather than as a reason to quit. Affiliate psychology is pretty important if you want to succeed as an affiliate marketer.
As a beginner, it’s particularly important to learn resilience and turn “failures” into lessons. When you are unsure, and doubtful about affiliate marketing, thinking it’s all a scam, it massively lessens your ability to be productive and passionate. If you think affiliate marketing is a scam, you’ll be more likely to quit when things get tough. If you fill your mind with positivity towards it, and surround yourself with other affiliates (who are succeeding), you’ll be much more likely to persevere through the setbacks.
With sceptical friends and relatives persuading you to quit, a small set back can be enough for you to join them and believe it’s all a scam! With others helping and supporting you to grow your affiliate business and get your mindset right, you’re in with a much higher chance of success.
Practical Actions
It’s worth getting help and support with your affiliate marketing goals both on a personal mindset level, and with the right tools and software. That’s why if you’re committed to success online, it’s worth joining an online community which gives you everything you need. You can join a community through this link. You’ll be able to get started with all the tools and support you’ll need.
Without help and support, and the right direction, affiliate marketing can be considerably more difficult to attain success with. When I started out online, I tried many different strategies. Most of them didn’t work. I wasted a huge amount of time because I didn’t have the support I needed.
There’s also a number of different strategies affiliates can use to sell other people’s products:
- Blogging or organic video creating offers a cheap solution for affiliates but is time consuming and a long term marketing strategy.
- Paid marketing is expensive and risky if you don’t have the money, but much faster if you have the right products.
- Social media platforms also offer a number of strategies to get people to products and services
Depending on your strategy, your marketing budget (if any) and your products, you could find affiliate marketing more or less difficult. Getting the right knowledge upfront will considerably lessen the hardship of becoming successful as an affiliate.
Making Affiliate Marketing Easier
There’s a few ways you can make affiliate marketing easier. Join a community, use a high ticket program, promote products which offer recurring commissions, use paid marketing rather than free strategies. But even affiliates who do all the above can still struggle with their affiliate marketing business.
If you’re financially well off, but time poor, you’ll need a different strategy than someone who is time rich but has little in the way of spare money.
However, if you’re going to struggle anyway, why not make it worth your while! Would you rather make 3% commission on your products when you actually make a sale, or 40%? Would you rather sell a product for $10 and make $0.30cents, or sell a $2500 product and make $1000?
Learning your “craft” takes time as an affiliate. But when you finally break through and start making sales online, it’s a fantastic feeling. For what often amounts to the same amount of work, you could be selling low value items for tiny commissions, or earning large commissions from more valuable products.
Knowing about high ticket products was something which totally changed things for me as an affiliate. Switching to digital products too, after selling physical products was another game changer. See affiliate marketing commission rates.
Get this knowledge before you start, and you’ll shave years off your journey and arrive richer when you do finally break through and start earning online. A journey of a spaceship to the moon starts from the trajectory. Even a few degrees off course will send it thousands of miles off course. The same is true of affiliate marketing. Start out with the wrong marketing strategy, or products, and your struggles can be considerably greater, and your income considerably less.
Get Started
If you’re still reading, you might be able to make a success from affiliate marketing. You made it all this way after all!
Is affiliate marketing hard? Yes it can be tough. Like any business it requires consistent hard work and effort. But unlike a job, where you trade time for money, affiliate marketing can eventually give you a passive income, without you having to do much.
This is why it is so attractive to so many people. Affiliate marketing is hard, in the beginning. But it’s a business you can work hard on initially, and reap the rewards later on. You can get paid for work you’ve done already – which makes it much better than a job where you need to keep working for decades if you still want to get paid.
If you’re serious about building a passive income online through affiliate marketing, get help and support through this online business platform and community.
