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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.

Is affiliate marketing difficult? Affiliate marketing is a business model which rewards the sale of products and services online. It’s a performance based business model. This means there’s a huge potential to earn with affiliate marketing and no income cap! However, if you don’t make any sales, you don’t get paid! So affiliate marketing becomes beneficial only for those affiliates who stick at it for long enough to start generating consistent commissions.

How long this takes will depend on a number of criteria such as:

Your individual marketing strategy
The products and services which you choose to promote
The number of hours you can put in every day
Your marketing budget, or lack of it
The training and coaching you get or whether you get help or not

Many affiliates find affiliate marketing so difficult they quit before even getting a single online sale. The affiliate marketing failure rate is high – around 95%. But for the small percentage of those who stick with it, affiliate marketing is a challenge which gets easier over time.

Once you break past the difficult beginning phase of affiliate marketing, and start generating consistent sales, it gets easier because you have a reference point for what works! Before this happens, you are doing it all on faith! This can be tough and if you don’t have a strong enough desire to succeed, or belief in yourself and what you’re doing, this is often enough for someone to quit completely.

Is Affiliate Marketing Difficult? Yes It Can Be!

Affiliate marketing can definitely be difficult yes. It’s a business and businesses are tough. But you can definitely make it easier for yourself. When I started affiliate marketing in the early 2000’s I tried many tactics. I didn’t know what worked the best, the best products to promote or how to promote them. So I floundered around, jumping from course to course not really getting anywhere! It was incredibly frustrating. You can have a look at some of the courses I took and my experiences in this article.

I had what I now know to be called “shiny object syndrome”. Shiny object syndrome is the tendency for new affiliates to jump around looking for something easier that what they are already doing! With the many marketers out there telling you how “easy” it is to make money with affiliate marketing, it can be a hard pill to swallow when you find it to be difficult.

So instead of working hard and studying, you abandon the course you’re on for an “easier” one. The trouble is, it isn’t easier, someone just sold you another course with their marketing spiel! Now you’re back at the beginning again starting from scratch – potentially with another strategy which could take months before you see the fruits of your efforts. Which of course won’t materialise if you jump ship when you see another “shiny object”! It’s a viscous circle which you don’t see when you’re a beginner!

The “Busy” Fool

The “Busy Fool” is another problem for affiliate marketers. When you are a beginner, you can become overwhelmed by information and spend time on useless activities and unproductive habits. If you’re used to being an employee, you can bring your employee mindset to your business. But of course an employee is rewarded for their time, but an affiliate is only rewarded for performance.

The trouble again is you don’t know you’re wasting time as a beginner. You can spend months watching training videos without taking a single productive action, feeling like you’re getting somewhere. Or you might enjoy making your new shiny website look nice, instead of driving traffic to it! So as nice as your website might look, it’s useless without any visitors! The time you spent polishing your website would have been better spent learning a productive marketing strategy to get more visitors.

Making Affiliate Marketing Less Difficult

So, affiliate marketing can be difficult yes. But it can be a lot of fun too! Learning new skills and putting them to work can be an interesting and creative endeavour. You can use several strategies which will gear your affiliate efforts towards a greater outcome:

Use subscription affiliate programs – which pay ongoing recurring commissions
Build an email list – which gives you more control over your traffic (see free autoresponder for affiliate marketing)
Use paid marketing – if you can because it gives you more scalability and control, plus it’s faster
Choose to promote high ticket affiliate items – which pay the largest commissions.
Get help from coaches and mentors

Affiliate marketing can definitely be tough and it’s definitely not for everyone. So if you’re serious about making it work, the points above will make it easier to accomplish in a shorter period of time. The beginning part of affiliate marketing is most definitely the hardest. You have no experience or results to learn from. You’ll need to take many imperfect actions which may or may not lead to affiliate sales. Once you have learned some strategies which are working, it can become easier to repeat that success.

If you have chosen an affiliate business model which is more lucrative (subscription and high ticket products), when this does eventually happen, your work will be for a much larger prize!

Equally if you invest in your education, it gives you a better base from which to build an online business. Getting help from coaches and mentors is well worth this investment because you’re much more likely to stay the course if you do.

Why Affiliate Marketing – Motivation & Mindset

So the short answer is Yes – affiliate marketing is difficult! But if you want to control your destiny, work under your own terms, live anywhere and quit your job, you didn’t expect it to be easy did you?!

Affiliate marketing can give you complete autonomy over how you live. Many affiliates quit but that is for a number of reasons. Affiliate marketing is a super low cost business opportunity which almost anyone can “have a go” at. So of course many will drop out when they realise that it’s not an easy fix!

The top 5% of earners in affiliate marketing have typically been at it for much longer than the rest. See how much doe the average affiliate marketer make?

To succeed at affiliate marketing you therefore need a strong reason to keep at it and overcome the initial hurdles. As a beginner it’s very easy to lose enthusiasm and give up. That’s why it is better to get help – getting help from a community can hold you accountable and put you in among other business people and entrepreneurs. They can give you the tools and mental clarity to keep going when times are tough, which they will undoubtably be at some point in your journey!