affiliate marketing success rate Archives - Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Don’t quit your affiliate marketing business. One of the best pieces of advice you can hear as an affiliate is simply “don’t quit”. Most affiliates quit. In fact, around 95% of them do which means only a tiny percentage of affiliate marketers actually make it and build an income online. But don’t be put off by this statistic. Affiliate marketing is an easy business to get into. There’s a very low barrier to entry and pretty much anyone can “give it a go”.

You can start for next to no cost. All you really need is an internet connection and a laptop. This means anyone with a laptop can try it, for next to no risk.

To succeed, you need to stick with it when others quit. Most people will experience some adversity and use it as an excuse to quit. The 5% who succeed, use this adversity to get better.

Don’t Quit Your Affiliate Marketing Business – Failing Forwards

Failing forwards is a term I first heard after becoming an affiliate marketer. A good analogy is of a toddler who is learning how to walk. He first starts getting up and falling over again! Again and again the toddler falls over! But he doesn’t let the adversity define him! He keeps going until he has managed to actually stand! Then, little by little he begins to walk. At no point does he think “this walking lark just doesn’t work“!

This is the same experience of an affiliate marketer. Only, with affiliate marketing you’re trying out some kind of marketing strategy. Initially, most of the efforts you put in will result in a less than successful outcome. This is tough and you’ll be tempted to give up. But when you see that some affiliates are making a nice, passive income from affiliate marketing, it can keep you going. (One of the benefits of joining a community).

If you keep going long enough, you should experience your first sale. This is a great moment and it should be celebrated. From this moment, you have proved to yourself that it can be done. You have some actual real world experience and you’re no longer hanging on the advice of some “guru” or coach!

The experience of failing forwards in affiliate marketing is what every affiliate experiences – trying things out until they reach a sale, or they quit!

Don’t Quit Your Affiliate Marketing Business – Your “Why?”

A strong enough “why” will overcome almost any “how”. So ask yourself why you’re doing affiliate marketing. Is it for the independent income, the time and geographical freedom? Do you long for more free time to spend with your family? Or, are you sick and tired of the commute or a crappy work situation or difficult boss?

When you’ve tried everything you can thing of, and those sales still aren’t coming in, you’re going to feel like quitting. It’s in those moments you need to pull out your “why” list! Here’s some of my reasons for continuing when things get tough:

I can choose when and where to work
I can turn away employment I no longer want to do (choice)
I work how I like, and can put my friends/family/hobbies first
No need to ask the boss for time off – I am the boss
No more commuting long distances and in rush hour for employment
I’m in control of my own destiny

Your “why” in affiliate marketing is pretty important because it’s going to be tested. When things aren’t working out, you will look for reasons to quit. But your “why” keeps you motivated and reminds you why you’re working so hard.

If your situation is pretty ok as it is, you’re probably not going to have the resilience and motivation to keep going if things don’t go your way quickly. Many successful affiliates have a huge motivation to free themselves of corporate life, or from lack and poverty. This is often motivation by the pain of their circumstances, or of giving themselves no other choice but to succeed.

Feedback – The Key To Success

Your results from your affiliate efforts is your “feedback”. How you interpret that feedback is the key to success. If you have no results or feedback to draw from, you probably haven’t been an affiliate for very long. This can be the most difficult part of affiliate marketing; when you’ve run ads, built a list, created content and still have nothing tangible to show (in terms of sales). Most affiliates will quit before they have built their email list to even 1000 subscribers. This just goes to show the short term view of many affiliates.

Once you understand that affiliate marketing can reap rewards for you long after you stop, if you put in the effort beforehand, it’s highly motivating. It’s also a very forgiving business and you can always start over again. The real value is in your understanding, not the results per se.

I like the analogy of the Chinese bamboo tree, which is a lot like affiliate marketing. The Chinese bamboo tree gestates underground for 4-5 years. If you didn’t know the type of plant it was, you would be forgiven in thinking that it wasn’t going to grow at all! During this time it needs feeding and watering. But once it breaks the surface of the soil, it can grow 90 feet in only a few weeks.

Affiliate marketing can be a lot like this plant. It needs feeding and watering and the results don’t sprout up immediately. But if you feed your mind with belief, get help and support in your affiliate journey, the rewards can be amazing if you keep going for long enough.

How long this is will depend on the methods you employ. Use your feedback to adjust and craft your actions. No feedback means you need to fail forwards more. Try new things, join another course. Using paid ads? Try content marketing. Tried content marketing? Use paid ads?

Access a training and education course here and get started.

Summary

Don’t quit your affiliate marketing business. There could be many reasons why you haven’t had the success you crave yet. But quitting only guarantees that you won’t win! Here’s some of the advice which helped me go from a struggling affiliate to generating regular and consistent sales:

Get help – join a community where you can ask questions and get support and advice
Use recurring income products – rather than “one-off” sales which only pay you once per sale (subscription and memberships)
Choose to sell products which pay more – digital and high ticket items pay much more than physical products
Learn from your feedback and use your “failures” as stepping stones to deepen your understanding and learn what works.

What is the affiliate marketing success rate? Between 2017-2018, the search volume for the term “affiliate marketing” rose by 44%, according to Google Trends. But despite this massive uptick in awareness of affiliate marketing, only around 5% of affiliates go on to make it their full time living.

As of 2016, 84 percent of publishers and 81 percent of brands have adopted affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is incredibly effective for product owners since it is performance based. Advertisers (affiliates) only get paid if they actually make the sale! This means affiliates take all the risk, with both their time and money!

Affiliates themselves are flocking to the arena hoping to make a living on the internet without any products or services of their own to sell. It’s easy to see why. If you can earn a full time living from affiliate marketing, you can live on your own terms, working from anywhere on your laptop!

Affstat report 2016 — *See* Affstat full 2016 affiliate marketing benchmark report here.

Affiliate Marketing Success Rate

The Affstat 2016 report shows that most affiliates will earn under $30k a year, and even less. Many preferred not to answer the questions in the report about earnings. All beginner affiliates start out making nothing, and some never make any sales at all!

The image below represents the countries represented for the report. Of course affiliate marketing is a massive industry so it would be impossible to compile data across the globe for every affiliate.

The generally held view is that there is a massive affiliate marketing failure rate of 95% which leaves only 5% of affiliates who stick it out.

But why the massive drop out rate? Affiliate marketing is a massively over subscribed industry and this means there’s huge competition. According to Investopedia, just about 9% of affiliate marketers make more than $50,000 a year. See also how much does the average affiliate marketer make.

Affiliate Marketing Success Rate – Why So Many Fail

Affiliate marketing is often thought of as a get rich quick scheme and the barriers to entry are very low. With a traditional business, you have much larger costs. With an online affiliate business you only need a laptop and internet connection which most people already have. As such, many people can “have a go” at it with little or no investment and low risk. If you had to invest hundreds of thousands into a business, buy a building and employ staff, far fewer people would be eligible or make the effort!

This “easy” option, low barrier to entry and “get rich quick” view makes affiliate marketing appear to be a quick fix and easy access business. Unfortunately affiliate marketing is not easy and so many beginners will find out the hard way that selling affiliate products takes time and dedication. It is the long term affiliates who earn the most.

Most new affiliates won’t earn anything before at least putting in a few months, if not years of work beforehand. The short term view of this, particularly if you’re used to being in paid employment is that “affiliate marketing simply doesn’t work“!

The 5% who succeed with affiliate marketing have a longer term view and stick with it despite the problems.

What Most Don’t Know

Most newbie affiliate marketers will also fall into a number of traps which they don’t know about. Building a business is hard and takes time and effort. If you imagine affiliate marketing to be easy, you’ve fallen into the first trap!

This assumption will hamper your business because you won’t take it seriously enough or hold yourself accountable. It’s also not easy to be your own boss and you need to prioritise your time so that you are being productive.

As an employee shifting into entrepreneurialism, it can be an easy mistake to assume that time in front of the computer is always time well spent; since time at work is paid time! But affiliate marketing is a performance based business model. This means you only get paid for making sales. Therefore you need to become the master of your time; prioritise your time according to the most important activities for your business.

Not all affiliate products are the same either. Some pay incredibly low commissions. Physical products pay way less than digital products. By choosing subscription affiliate products and high ticket affiliate products, the same amount of work can be far more lucrative to an affiliate.

To Be Successful

To be successful as an affiliate, you only need to come into it with a better attitude than most! Knowing that most will fail should prepare you better already! Don’t expect it to be easy, get help and support, use the right products and build an email list of subscribers.

An email list is a massive benefit for an affiliate. Expect to work hard building up your list to at least 1000 subscribers in order to give an affiliate business a chance. Long term affiliates have had the same struggles as those who quit. they just look at those problems as lessons and not failings!

Learn how to “fail forwards” and learn from your struggles. With the right attitude, anyone can make a success of affiliate marketing. Just make the decision never to quit and you’ll eventually make it! Access a free video series to learn more here.