affiliate mindset Archives - Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Affiliate Mindset

Your affiliate mindset is your best asset or biggest liability when it comes to building an affiliate business. Affiliate marketing is tough and over 90% of new affiliates will quit. The affiliate marketing success rate is low for a reason: it’s difficult. But why is this?

For one thing affiliate marketing is accessible for the masses. Pretty much anyone can “have a go” at affiliate marketing. If you bring a “have a go” mentality to an affiliate marketing business, it’s going to be so much easier to quit when things don’t work out. You’re already starting with the wrong mindset if you think you’ll “have a go”!

A better mentality to bring is an “all or nothing”, “do or die” or “whatever it takes” mentality. This kind of mindset is needed to overcome the many hurdles and challenges you’ll find on route to a successful affiliate business.

Affiliate Mindset: The Beginners Mind

In the beginners mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few –Shunryu Suzuki, Zen master.

As a beginner in affiliate marketing you’ll need to spend a good proportion of your time in learning mode. Once you have understood some concepts you’ll need to apply what you have learned and develop some skills through trial and error. Depending on your choice of marketing strategy, this could lead you to create content, or run paid ads. You could find a social media strategy, or decide to focus on blogging or SEO, (search engine optimisation).

Whatever you choose, remember you’re still a beginner. Even after you’ve spent months on a strategy, and things aren’t going so well, remember the quote:

“In the beginners mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few”.

Beginners Mind

When you hit a roadblock in affiliate marketing you’ll be tempted to think : “affiliate marketing does not work!” When this happens, and it will, you should remember the quote about the beginner’s mind. In Buddhism, the beginners mind refers to a state of acceptance of not knowing. Therefore, in this state, there is the allowance of something new to be learned.

Originating from Japanese Zen Buddhism, the term ‘Beginner’s Mind‘ (or ‘shoshin’) refers to a paradox: the more you know about a topic, the more likely you are to close your mind to further learning.

This is what is meant by the quote “In the beginners mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few”. For a beginner affiliate, there’s the possibility of success. But once you have hit a few roadblocks and struggled, you become an “expert”, at least in your own mind. You cast out the possibility of further growth and quit, rather than investigating the cause of the “failure”.

There’s no real failure in affiliate marketing unless you quit. Failure is only feedback on the road to success! Hence “failing forward” is a term used by affiliate coaches, who encourage you to fail many times in order to learn.

Affiliate Mindset: Patience

You need to be very patient to be a good affiliate. The path to success is littered with all the other affiliates who quit! Depending on your situation and marketing method, getting traction with an affiliate business can take months or even years. Blogging, for example is a much longer journey for an affiliate than paid marketing strategies. However, if you’re using paid marketing strategies you’ll need to let go of the fear of losing money while you’re testing your ad campaigns.

For some, working really hard creating content (risking their time), is much more appropriate to their situation as those who would rather spend the money learning paid marketing. Either way, you’re going to need to be really patient when results don’t come immediately.

With blogging, you’ll need to create a lot of content and get good at promoting it. With paid marketing, you’ll need to test and measure different adverts and learn from the feedback you get – whether positive or negative. If you bring a expectation of an immediate return to affiliate marketing, you’re likely to be disappointed!

Having an “entitlement” attitude will give you more problems. There’s only cause and effect. Your job as an affiliate is to learn how to cause the outcome you want. This is done through experimentation after having studied a particular marketing strategy.

Affiliate Mindset: Desire Vs. Comfort

Another reason affiliate’s quit is because their desire to succeed isn’t large enough to overcome the status quo. If your life is pretty good, your desire to succeed in affiliate marketing won’t be as strong as someone who is in desperate need of change.

When an affiliate business is the very bedrock from which you intend to build your life, you’ll be very motivated to succeed. But if your affiliate business is only another passing fad, that’s a different kind of motivation.

When you meet a challenge in your marketing, which person will be more likely to overcome the difficulties? Will it be the person who needs to make their business work or the one to whom it doesn’t really matter? Of course it’s the one who’s desire is strong enough to overcome the difficulties.

Why put yourself through the challenges and difficulties of building an online business if you don’t have to? Your answer is your reason for doing affiliate marketing in the first place. Are you currently happy in you life and comfort zones, or do you want more? The degree to which you are comfortable has a large say in how hard you’re prepared to work at your affiliate marketing business.

Employee Vs. Entrepreneur

As an employee transitioning into an online business, there’s plenty of hidden challenges. The mindset shift from employee to entrepreneur is not an easy one. The two are very different. As an employee you get used to being paid a monthly wage; regardless of your performance. With affiliate marketing you only get paid performance related pay.

As an employee you have a specific role to play in a larger organisation. With an affiliate business you’re on your own, with many roles to learn. If you don’t make any sales as an affiliate, you don’t earn any money, so your time spent in your affiliate business needs to be laser focused. It can be easy to get caught up in a number of mental traps:

Shiny object syndrome – looking for the “easier” path continually by jumping from one course to another; but never gaining traction in any one direction.
Being a busy fool – spending time on activities which are enjoyable but not profitable.
Trapped in learning mode – initially you’ll spend time learning. But you don’t want to stay here, thinking you’re being productive but trapped in continual learning without action.

It’s easy to bring a bunch of attitudes and mindsets from employment into your business which will hamper you:

Being paid just for turning up every day (entitlement).
Expectation of reward for old habits and “expertise” which don’t translate into an enterprise/online business.
Misunderstanding of the needs of your customers – see customer avatar worksheet.
Not understanding that your business needs to be driven by purpose and vision, and an aggressive marketing campaign.

Affiliate Marketing Mindset

Your affiliate marketing mindset is either your biggest asset or your biggest liability, when building an affiliate business. Not everyone will succeed with affiliate marketing. Those who do, and turn it into their main source of income, are in a minority. Around 97% of people who “try” affiliate marketing will quit – see affiliate marketing failure rate.

But that’s partly because so many can “give it a go”, without much investment of time or money. But to succeed, you can’t have a “give it a go” mentality, you’ll need a “whatever it takes” attitude instead.

Affiliate Marketing Mindset – Your “Why?”

As an employee, you do the work and you get paid regularly for showing up; you trade your time for money. Affiliate marketing is different in that you don’t get paid unless you make a sale. The goal of affiliate marketing is to learn how to get paid on autopilot for the work you have done previously.

But before you can reach this stage, there’s a whole host of roadblocks and hurdles standing in your way. As a beginner, you’ll doubt whether it even works at all. In this state, it’s very hard to work towards something in a meaningful way.

The early days are the easiest to give up because you have no (personal) evidence that your work will be fruitful. You watch training videos and read blog posts. You may even make a start and join a program. This is all costing time and energy. If you’re also juggling family life, a full time job, a commute etc., it can be difficult to maintain the necessary motivation and enthusiasm to continue down this path – especially when you’re making no money from it.

You’ll need a strong reason to keep going. Otherwise, you’ll probably quit! A good reason is always something which makes you keep going no matter what. For many, this is the possibility of becoming financially independent and leaving their job.

Affiliate Marketing Mindset – Your “Why?”

Knowing your “why?” is a useful motivational support when things aren’t going as expected. If you have a burning hatred of your boss or job, or of simply feeling financially powerless, you’ll overcome a lot more adversity in affiliate marketing than if you are fairly happy in your life and in what you’re currently doing. If life is generally “ok” and you don’t have a strong desire to change your circumstances, you’ll probably have less drive to become successful as an affiliate.

You’ll likely come across plenty of adversity as a beginner while you’re learning about affiliate marketing. How you handle this is what’s important. Those who consider setbacks as important learning exercises will use it to further their knowledge, and move forwards. But some will look upon setbacks as failures, and use them as a reason to quit.

Entrepreneur Thinking Vs. Employee Thinking

The mindset of an entrepreneur is different to that of most employees. As an employee, you know you’ll get paid for performing a certain set of activities. But as an entrepreneur, which is effectively what an affiliate is, you’ll need to set goals and have a long term vision. The mindset shift from employee to entrepreneur is an important one if you’re to succeed as an affiliate. If you bring an “employee mindset” with you to your affiliate business, it can block you from realising the dream of becoming self employed and financially independent. But why is this?

An employee knows they can get away with as little as possible. Granted not every employee has this belief, but many know this to be true. With affiliate marketing, you only get paid for sales you make. So you’ll need a different approach to succeed online. With an online business you’ll need to work much harder for far less, at least in the beginning. But what you’re working for as an affiliate is freedom, rather than a steady pay package! If you keep this in mind, it can help motivate you beyond the initial startup phase, into actually making money as an affiliate.

Employees trade their time for money, and income is therefore finite. Affiliates see things differently; they know that by selling products online, there’s a point in time, (if they keep going long enough), where their systems will generate income automatically. They won’t have to work anymore, and they will still generate an income.

If you understand this deeply, and want this outcome badly enough, you’ll do pretty much whatever it takes as an affiliate to achieve it. You’ll have a “whatever it takes” attitude. This is the affiliate marketing mindset you need to make a success of it!

What You Need To Succeed As An Affiliate

In the free video below, Stuart explains what you’ll need to become successful as an affiliate. If you bring a “give it a go” attitude towards your affiliate business, your results will reflect this attitude.

If you bring a “whatever it takes” approach, likewise you can expect something more fitting. Like with life, you get out of something what you put in. If you’re just “dabbling” in affiliate marketing without taking it seriously, you can make some pocket change. But if you take affiliate marketing seriously, you can replace your income and become financially and geographically independent.

Not everyone has the same motivations of course. Some people want only a secondary income from affiliate marketing. But the benefit of learning affiliate marketing is the ability to work from anywhere and generate an income from your laptop. During the current times, this is a pretty good reason to learn, whatever your motivations are.

For more articles on mindset on this site visit this link.

Super Affiliate Mindset

Just what is the super affiliate mindset? How do super affiliates become super affiliates and what sets them apart from the underachieving masses? For starters super affiliates think differently to low achieving affiliates. Most affiliates will rush in with a “get rich quick” mentality, hoping for an easy win. When things don’t go according to plan, (which most likely they won’t), many just quit. But super affiliates look at failure differently. They look at failure as an opportunity to learn and get better.

Super Affiliate Mindset – What Super Affiliates Do Differently

Super affiliates have figured out how to make sales in huge numbers. They can do this in various ways but do nothing much differently to normal affiliates. Super Affiliates simply think bigger and take it more seriously than most affiliates. They have the same struggles and problems which other affiliates have. The difference is in they approach their affiliate business with a different mindset. They have an attitude of “whatever it takes”, rather than one of “I’ll see how it goes”.

Many come into affiliate marketing with the approach: “I’ll give it 6 months, or a year – If I’m not profitable by then, I’ll quit”.

But the super affiliate mindset doesn’t entertain such thoughts. Instead, they have already succeeded (in their mind) and seen the outcome. So their sole driving purpose is to overcome the barriers and problems inherent in their affiliate journey, no matter what. Failure isn’t an option for a super affiliate. But they start exactly where every affiliate starts. The main difference being the super affiliate mindset.

Super Affiliate Mindset – Get Support

Super affiliates don’t succeed in a vacuum. They get help and support from others who are far ahead of them. They surround themselves with people who have already achieved what they are setting out to achieve, and with others on. the same path.

I’ve met several super affiliates who at one time or another were doubtful and frustrated. But through support and help were able to push through beyond their mental hurdles.

Without this, it can be easy to get drawn back into doubt and hesitancy. Without belief, it’s easy to stop or hesitate due to self doubt. Get help and support of an online business community. Access a free video series to learn more.

Super Affiliate Mindset – Scalable Strategies

There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing. You can use paid and free marketing strategies. Super affiliates follow those who are achieving, and do what they do! They model success.

Not all super affiliates use the same strategies, but in order to sell a high number of products, you need to have a strategy which works and which is scalable. It helps too to have a business model which offers a scalable and recurring income. Using the right kind of products helps massively too. With low value products, it’s more difficult to scale up with paid marketing, for example. But with high ticket affiliate products and recurring commission affiliate products, it’s easier to use paid marketing and come out with a profit.

On a $1000 commission item, for example, you can spend up to $1000 just learning marketing strategies to sell your product, before losing money. With a $40 commission through, this can be much more difficult. See affiliate marketing commission rates. With $1000 marketing budget, you can test a number of adverts to see what works best. Once you are in a positive return position, you can scale up very quickly.

With a good business model, scalable paid strategies are much more within the reach of an affiliate. With low value product which pay low commission rates, it can be more difficult.

Super Affiliate Mindset – Analytical

Super affiliates are able to analyse their own strategies and behaviour and look at data to determine the best campaign they are running. Those with a get rich quick mentality will throw up a single advert and hope for the best. Super affiliates run multiple adverts, and test and measure. They know they are likely to fail many times before they get it right. But they are full of belief and certainty of their outcome.

Many affiliates, (including myself), can come up against a problem and let it destroy their belief. They get demoralised and disillusioned by their perceived failure of not making a sale, and/or of losing money through running advertising. But super affiliates see the bigger picture and always pick themselves up again. They realise that when they get a winning advert, their journey won’t matter, so long as they get there eventually. The money they spend on advertising won’t matter either, because they will win eventually when they get an advert which gives them a good profit consistently.

Super affiliates don’t get lucky and rest on their laurels! They test and measure advertising; they cross test different messaging and follow ups. Super affiliates commit to the learning involved in their skill set.

This stage of affiliate marketing can be particularly difficult. If you’re uncertain, or doubtful already, and you run a number of campaigns only to lose money, it’s difficult to keep going. With a super affiliate mindset, your belief outweighs these difficulties and you keep going. If you’re doubtful and hesitant, small set backs can destroy your belief and faith in what you’re doing.

What’s Your “Why”?

Many affiliates go into affiliate marketing with the wrong attitude. They’re looking for a “get rich quick” scheme, and don’t really want to put in the effort required to make a long term viable business from affiliate marketing. I was the same when I started. I was broke and looking for a way to escape the rat race and work from home for myself.

But my fear drove me rather than my passion for building something of value. As such, I was always looking for the quick route. Because of this, I jumped from course to course, always on the lookout for something faster and easier. You can read about the courses I took in my article digital profit course review.

Super affiliates align themselves with products they truly believe in. It’s so much more difficult to sell products you don’t know about or care about. But when you are aligned with a product or service you promote online, you go the extra mile in terms of what value you can add as an affiliate.

Super affiliates go the extra mile. They don’t look only to the sale. They foster an attitude of trust because they truly believe in what they are promoting. Have you ever noticed how when someone doesn’t really believe in what they are telling you, you don’t believe it either! This is a huge problem for new affiliates who are trying to promote things they don’t know or care about.

The Glass Ceiling Of An Affiliate

There’s an unconscious “glass ceiling” which stands in the way of many achievements. It is no different with affiliate marketing. The super affiliate understands that it’s their mindset which is their biggest asset or liability. If they don’t believe they can achieve something, they won’t even try. If they doubt it, they’ll waver.

As you come up against challenges your mindset will be tested. If you default back to doubt when under pressure, you’re more likely to quit. Or, you can simply lose your drive and become more jaded. The super affiliate mindset continuously stokes the fire of their belief and desire through self development and improvement. They surround themselves with other people on a similar wavelength so as not to become demoralised.

The glass ceiling of a business owner can also appear through their self image. If you doubt yourself, or hold certain self-denigrating thoughts, this can massively hamper your potential. It may not be obvious how you are sabotaging yourself, but it’s the subtle workings of the mind, and your poor self image, which can slowly but surely undermine your efforts on the “outside”, while your mind works against you on the “inside”.

Super Affiliate Mindset – Summary

There’s many things which set super affiliates apart from most affiliate marketers. One of the main ones to consider is the way they think about their online business. They treat their affiliate business as a career and do what’s required. They have a long term plan and not a get rich quick mentality. Super affiliates have a “whatever it takes” mentality, rather than a “I’ll give it a try” mentality!

If you’re serious about taking your affiliate business to the next level, or starting from scratch with other mentors and super affiliates to support you, sign up for a free video series and join an online community for help and support.

Affiliate Psychology

Many affiliate marketers fail to create the success they desire because the affiliate psychology isn’t geared for success. There’s many reasons why someone’s psychology gets in the way of their business. It could be a sense of entitlement, fear of success or a poor self image which doesn’t allow for growth. Or perhaps you’re repeating unconscious behaviour patterns which don’t support your business.

The technical problems associated with building an online business can be easily overcome; especially with available software which takes most of it out of the equation. It makes an online business very accessible to everyone. However, someone’s psychology isn’t as simple. The invisible enemy of an affiliate marketer is their affiliate psychology.

Affiliate Psychology – Time For Money

Most affiliates come upon affiliate marketing in a bid to escape some job or career role which doesn’t suit them. In a job or a career, you trade time for money and get paid for your time. You’re therefore accustomed to getting paid for turning up. An online business, or affiliate marketing is very different. You get paid for the results you create. So if you’ve been used to getting paid for your time, it’s an easy assumption to make that by sitting in front of your laptop, you’ll start earning money from it. It’s not a correct assumption, but an easy one!

“Here I am working on my internet business”, you say. But in reality, you’ve poured 7 cups of coffee and browsed the internet for a while, chatting with friends on social media. Here lies one of the main problems when transitioning into an online business: being a “busy fool”.

Time on the laptop should be given the utmost importance when you start out as an affiliate marketer. You’ll likely spend time doing tasks which aren’t getting you paid, too. Time management is a skill and knowing how to spend your time with affiliate marketing is a hugely important skill.

Of course this all depends on your situation. Maybe you work really hard because you’re desperate to leave your job and want your affiliate income to replace that of your career. Your “why” is very compelling and you’ll do anything to escape the 9 to 5.

Affiliate Psychology – Affiliate Mindset

If this is the case, it leads to another potential problem – rushing in too quickly. You’re desperate to succeed so you work really hard and for long hours – but you work hard at the wrong activities.

Again, you take the strategies which have worked in a job or career and apply it to your affiliate business. It doesn’t! You’re not impressing anyone and if you’re in the habit of doing so, you’ll likely take that habit with you to your affiliate business. The “work hard play hard” mentality can apply to an online business. But you’re wasting your time working at some activities if they aren’t moving your online business forward.

Affiliate Psychology – Playing A Technician’s Role In A Business

In the book The E-Myth Revisited, Michael Gerber talks about this problem. As you transition into a business from the role of a technician in a company, it’s an easy mistake to make. You think you have a business, but you repeat your role as an employee and wonder why your business isn’t working. That’s because a business requires a different mindset to an employment. In an employment role you get paid to turn up and play a small role in a bigger picture. In a business, you must learn the role of the entrepreneur. You need to have a vision of where your business is going. You need to learn new strategies to drive your business forwards – marketing.

Are you playing a technician’s role still in your affiliate business? Do you favour activities according to how much you like them, or according to how they will grow your business?

Affiliate Mindset – Fear Of Success

Do you have a fear of success? “Of course not”, you say! But think for a minute how your life will look like once you have “made it” as an affiliate marketer. Where will you live? What will your typical day look like? Imagine making tens of thousands of dollars/pounds every month.

What will you do with your new found freedom? Is this hard to imagine? If so why is it? In many ways it’s difficult to imagine your perfect life because you have already identified with your struggle. Who are you to be so successful? Does money even matter? Your affiliate psychology determines the upper limit of your business and this also comes down to how you see yourself and how you relate to money.

If you have any issues with money and abundance, they will likely surface to sabotage your business in some way – even if it’s only to limit its growth. Have you noticed how when a successful actor reaches the pinnacle of their career and then self sabotages by getting into a fight? Or they get involved in drugs.

How can someone so successful, and which such a (perceived) wonderful life fall so bad? It’s the upper limit problem and it’s not uncommon. In “The Big Leap” Gay Hendricks talks about this in detail. It’s a great book if you’re interested in affiliate psychology and overcoming the upper limit problem.

Affiliate Mindset – Comfort Zones

If you’re a struggling affiliate it could be for several reasons. Perhaps you haven’t found the right help yet – get an affiliate mentor. You are promoting the wrong products and using a bad marketing strategy – use the SFM digital business system. Perhaps you’re losing focus or working too hard in the wrong areas. There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing and if you’ve been working for some time without results, it could be time to shift.

I worked for years in the wrong areas, doing the wrong things. Blogging was comfortable for me. I wanted to make money without spending anything. This was partly through necessity, but also because I had a poverty consciousness. I was afraid to spend money and trapped by only spending time in my comfort zone of writing content. Are you stuck in a comfort zone desperately trying to prove yourself right?

Wanting to be right about something is another mindset trap of the affiliate marketer. Do you want to be right or do you want your business to be profitable? Which do you want more? Investigate your affiliate mindset and you’ll discover that resistance to change will be based in fear. What actions are you avoiding to remain in your comfort zone?

Do You Have A Vision?

Having a vision for your future is a good way to look at what you want from your affiliate business. If you can’t see that far ahead, you may be too focused on the tiny details of your business. Work on your life, not just in your business. Ask yourself whether your business is working you, or whether you are working your business? Do you own the business or does it own you? A business is a tool to take you somewhere. If the business is only to help you feel better about yourself and keep busy, you may be thinking too small.

This is why many entrepreneurs have a vision board. A vision board is a notice board where you put up your dreams and aspirations which you want to create in your life – cars, houses, relationships, children etc. Whatever you want to create in your life, put it on your vision board. It will remind you why you’re working in your business and your reasons for doing what you’re doing.

Taking Responsibility

Are you putting the responsibility onto someone else outside of you? Are you plodding along expecting something external to save you? A victim mentality is another thing which will work against you in your own business. For a long time I was creating content (like this article) in a bid to build a six figure business from nothing! I was deluded and as much as I did, and as hard as I worked, this strategy was flawed. Google didn’t reward me, or at least not as much as I expected or hoped.

Are you taking full responsibility for all your outcomes in life? Who are you shuffling the responsibility towards? Your spouse, your parents, the internet? Once you get this, and accept full responsibility for your online business, you won’t accept failure and you’ll start making bigger steps towards the life you want.

If you’re in the habit of idling along, hoping things will eventually come your way, you may be in victim mode. Are you a passenger in the car of life or are you driving?

If you’re serious about building a long term sustainable online business, checkout the free video series available by signing up on this website. Or access one of my personal mentor’s (Stuart’s) webinar here.

Entitled Attitude

An attitude of entitlement seldom goes very far in a business like affiliate marketing. Affiliates get paid when they do the work and make sales. You can float about in a job without doing much work, at least for a while. But this kind of work ethic doesn’t work well in an industry where you’re paid on the basis of your results.

I’ve fallen into this camp too when I started learning affiliate marketing. I expected to get easy results – in part due to the advertising at the time when I got involved. Many marketers were pushing the idea that making money online was easy. You could just set up a push and play system and sit back raking in all the money. I fell for this complete lie and expected to earn money from little work. I did work, of course, but it wasn’t enough or at the right activities.

If you have an attitude of entitlement, you’ll easily give up too, or you’ll blame affiliate marketing instead of taking responsibility for your lack of results. I spat my dummy out a number of times when affiliate marketing wasn’t working for me too! Fortunately I was able to see my failures as stepping stones to success.

Poor Self image

A poor self image will always perpetuate results which reflect this back to you. If you have a poor self image and are building an affiliate business, your affiliate psychology can be a massive drain on your resources.

The reason self image is so important, in any aspect of your life, is that you take it with you wherever you go. It’s your constant companion. A poor self image will tell you that you can’t do it. It’ll tell you there’s no point in doing it anyway, and that you’re worthless even if you “make it”. But you’re much less likely to be successful in any business with a negative voice in your head 24/7.

See law of attraction self esteem for more on self image and how to improve it.