There are many problems with affiliate marketing, and making money from it is not as easy as it can sound. One of the main problems is that those who wish to sell you courses, can offer a biased view of it, and how “easy” it is! That’s because even if an affiliate is being honest and genuine in their copy, they still really want a sale!
Google, of course is on to this. There’s been huge changes in Google algorithms which reflect their distain for many affiliates who spam the internet with their links, without giving any actual value in their copy. Algorithms are much cleverer now than they were in the past. Google can see many factors which relate to content, and rank or demote it accordingly.
This of course causes untold problems for affiliate marketers who are attempting to get traffic the old-fashioned way – free! Free traffic is a huge problem for affiliate marketers.
Getting Traffic To Your Affiliate Offers
Getting traffic to your affiliate offers is perhaps the biggest problem for affiliates. Either you pay for traffic and risk capital, or you work hard at getting traffic from the organic searches. Either way, it’s a risk you take and there’s no reward for trying! As an affiliate marketer you only get paid for sales. So you can work for a long time without any results.
Getting traffic from the organic search engines is something many affiliates start out with as a strategy. It’s free after all, right? But there’s another cost in using this strategy and it’s time and frustration! You can work hard for months and years and still get it wrong. Even with traffic to your blog or website, you still have to convert that traffic into sales; which brings more problems with affiliate marketing. Get the wrong kind of traffic and you could have wasted your time. Traffic needs to be well targeted to your buyer audience, or you won’t make sales. See why targeted traffic is important.
Of course the long term goal is financial freedom. This is something affiliate marketing can deliver. But in many cases, affiliates will give up long before they have figured out a strategy which can deliver this. Organic traffic too is slow. It will take considerably long to build a good stream of traffic and sales from organics than from paid marketing. You can’t scale up organic traffic in the same way either; so if you hit upon a good strategy, it’s difficult to scale.
Problems With Affiliate Marketing – Not All Doom And Gloom
But it’s not all doom and gloom. If you never give up with affiliate marketing, and keep going no matter what, your chances of succeeding rise dramatically! But that’s quite difficult if you’re giving up your precious time every day and are also holding down a job and bringing up a family.
When I started out doing affiliate marketing, I took many courses and tried many strategies. Checkout my article digital profit course review where I share some of my experiences. I was tempted to throw my laptop through the window on more than one occasion. Affiliate marketing can be very frustrating. There’s lots to learn and if you’re desperate for success, this can make it all the more difficult to keep your head and be patient. See 23 affiliate mistakes newbies should avoid.
Yes there’s many problems with affiliate marketing. If you’ve tried and failed as an affiliate, you’re probably aware of many of them. The main problem I see with affiliate marketing is that it’s performance based pay. But, this is also the main benefit too!
Problems With Affiliate Marketing – Performance Related Pay
Performance related pay means you don’t get paid unless you start making progress and actually sell affiliate products. But this is a massive plus when you discover how to make sales, and start to see a good return on investment. If you are making sales through organic traffic, you don’t even pay for advertising, bar the cost of a website and hosting. Or better still you use a free social media account such as Facebook or YouTube. If that’s the case, you get 100% profit and there’s very few costs involved.
Paid marketing is much faster than working away at an organic strategy. Plus you can scale up quickly with paid strategies. But you can still fail over and over again before you succeed. Failing is indeed what is needed as an affiliate. “Failing forwards” is a term I heard in the community I am now a member of (see video series on this website).
It’s hard to fail forwards when you’ve no money for paid adverts, or time for organic content. But the main job of affiliate marketers is to test strategies, fail, and keep trying out new stuff. Keep going long enough, and eventually you’ll find a strategy which works. Once you you do, you can rinse and repeat. The long term benefit of this is free money, or an easily scalable income and a completely free and flexible lifestyle.
What stands between an affiliate and this goal is the journey they take, their own particular mindset and mental baggage and any other obstacles which can be physical, financial or mental. See also what psychological factors limit the growth of a business.
Why Do Many Affiliates Fail?
Affiliate marketing is a business model which is in demand. Anyone with a laptop and internet connection can learn how to become an affiliate. Anyone with a website, can join an affiliate program, grab a banner and put it on their website. Hey presto – they’re an affiliate marketer! It’s an massively accessible business model which has super low barriers to entry. A normal business wouldn’t attract so many people because there are far too many costs involved.
However, this also means there’s a huge drop out rate among affiliates. Only around 3% of affiliates who attempt to build an online business will see it through and become successful. Why is this such a small figure? Partly this is because many who attempt it aren’t prepared for what is ahead. They see it as an “easy win”. Once they are confronted with the truth, they quit rather than stick it out.
There’s also a lot of conflicting information on the internet. Who do you trust when you’re sitting in your pyjamas by the telly? It’s almost impossible to know the difference between the charlatans and the real mentors in the online world. When you get burned a few times, you lose interest in trying. You become risk averse and you decide affiliate marketing is not for you!
Rabbit Holes In Affiliate Marketing
Yes there’s many rabbit holes with affiliate marketing. I’ve fallen into quite a few! In the early days of affiliate marketing, I was convinced I would rank around 20 websites for their keywords – just by throwing them up! I followed an organic strategy I had learned on a course. None of my websites worked, bar one, and I spent months on them. The one site which did work was called tedssheds.net and I sold a digital product (shed plans from Clickbank) from it. It was exciting but the success was limited to one sale. I eventually let the site go, since it proved unprofitable over a few years.
Each little success such as ranking a website, making a single sale, kept me going though. Even through the difficult times, I was certain I didn’t want the jobs which I was doing; HGV driving, office jobs, and basically employment alternatives. I kept building sites which made little or no money, and I wrote thousands of articles which got lost in the black hole of the internet and produced little or no results. I gave up more than once!
But, little by little things started working. I took something from every little victory, and each “failure”. If I had been working at a strategy for over 6 months with very little results, I would consider changing tactics. But the key is to never quit! Ultimately it took finding the help of affiliate marketing mentors to turn my affiliate career around. I would recommend doing the same! Good luck on your affiliate journey and remember it’s up to you!
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