is affiliate marketing hard Archives - Affiliate Marketing Mentors

How hard is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is a business model in which third parties get paid for promoting products and services online. If they don’t make any sales, they don’t get paid, anything! Although some affiliates are able to make millions of dollars through finding customers for other people’s products, around 95% of affiliate marketer quit!

This should give you some idea about the difficulty of earning from affiliate marketing. Despite this huge drop out rate there’s also a very low bar for entry in affiliate marketing. This means almost anyone can “give it a go”, so it’s no wonder most of them don’t make it work.

To succeed as an affiliate you need to be fairly patient and resilient. It’s certainly not a get rich quick scheme. There’s also a few things which can make the affiliate journey more fruitful and less painful. Here’s a few pointers.

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.

Access an online resource here to learn more and get started.

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?

is affiliate marketing hard - your knowledge

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.