What is your motivation for affiliate marketing? Is it a fear based need for the desired results? Or is it an intention to take consistent steps towards your goals, while remaining unattached to them? One of these is desperation and the other is determination. If you’re trapped in fear based motivation, you might find the results seem further and further away. You create more and more of the same energy: frustration, anxiety and fear.
On the other hand, if you can maintain focus over the longer term, while remaining in a non attached state, results can come more easily. You look for ways to achieve your goals without striving. The energy of struggle doesn’t exist and you overcome difficulties more easily. You see problems as challenges rather than insurmountable problems.
This sounds all very well but most affiliates will struggle from one time or another. Most will fall into a pit of despair at one time or another. I definitely have too! The key is to notice and control your state when this happens so it doesn’t stop you moving forwards.
Motivation For Affiliate Marketing – Your “Why?”
What is your “why?” for doing affiliate marketing? Write it down is great detail and look at it when you’re feeling like quitting! Here’s a few of the reasons I started (and continue to pursue) affiliate marketing as a career:
- Financial independence – a job will never offer the financial independence you can have by making money independently of an employer
- No boss – I had hundreds of jobs and many bosses. Not having a boss was always a priority for me
- No commute – I commuted hundreds of miles while pursuing a career as a stunt performer. I was fed up of spending my life on the road. An affiliate business can be run from anywhere which means no more need to commute to a job.
- Financial freedom – is different to financial independence. Financial freedom (for me) means to no longer have to worry about money and to always have more than I needed. What does it mean to you? This is something that affiliate marketing can deliver.
- Greater choice – in terms of how you spend your time, who you spend it with and how you live. Affiliate marketing is the ultimate freedom lifestyle business once you get it working for you. Well worth pursuing in my opinion.
Whenever I was struggling with motivation in my affiliate business, I would look to my list of “why’s”. I simply couldn’t quit after I read them over!
Motivation For Affiliate Marketing – Lessons not Failures
Your experience as an affiliate isn’t entirely about what you achieve on the “outside” in terms of financial success. It’s also about what you learn about yourself on the journey. When you look to your affiliate business in this way, you can never fail unless you quit. “Failures” are actually lessons and when you’re “failing” you’re learning. There’s an expression in the community I’m a part of which is “fail forwards”.
Unless you fail at affiliate marketing, you’ve no experience to learn from. So the more you fail the more you learn and the faster you progress. When a small child falls down when learning to walk, she/he doesn’t give up! But affiliates will. When you look at your struggles in the same light as a child falling over when learning how to walk, you won’t quit! You’ll learn from the difficulties and eventually you’ll achieve success.
Count Small Successes
Most affiliates want the big wins and to make large size commissions and scale up to a global audience, replacing employment income as soon as possible. But this isn’t realistic. Instead, count the small successes like a hit on your website, or a lead on your email list. Celebrate the small wins as if they were big wins (which they are)!
If you do this, you can’t fail. You keep moving forwards, learning and growing and patting yourself on the back when you achieve something noteworthy. Eventually the small wins will take you to the larger wins.
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” – Lao Tzu
Count the small wins:
- Access a free video series & learn more about affiliate marketing
- Build a website
- Get a free email autoresponder for affiliate marketing
- Upload some content on a website or a YouTube channel
- Watch a training video
- Join an affiliate program and get your affiliate link
A small win in affiliate marking might be just to get started. If your affiliate marketing strategy isn’t working, you could try something different instead. See 22 ways to promote affiliate products.
Build Supportive Habits Around Your Affiliate Business
You can build supportive habits around your affiliate business which help you stay consistent and motivated. Motivation doesn’t last, much like will power. So use your limited will power to create supportive habits which hold you accountable to your online business. Here’s a few ideas:
- Read/listen to self help and motivational books – see motivational books pdf free downloads. You can also access these on audible.com
- Join a community of like minded people. Access through this free video series.
- Make a daily habit of doing something productive on your business – blogging, or watching a training video for example
- Start a gratitude journal – gratitude helps you stay in a positive state of mind
- Write down your goals – short term, medium term and longer term. Then assign daily habits which line up with your goals in every category.
Don’t reply on motivation to keep you going, it won’t! Build habits which you can do even when you’re at a low ebb.
Motivation For Affiliate Marketing – Alignment With Your Intentions
If you’re out of alignment in your intentions with affiliate marketing, it can be a more frustrating experience than it needs to be. For example, are you proud of the products you are promoting? Did you purchase them yourself? If not, ask yourself why someone would buy from you. Promoting products you have no interest or enthusiasm for is much more difficult that selling those you’re genuinely inspired by.
Likewise, if you’re struggling with your promotion method, or can’t really afford to use paid marketing, is this becoming a problem? Would you be better off using content marketing and building a blog, or building a YouTube channel? There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing and your experience will change once you’ve found a strategy which supports your lifestyle, budget and natural leanings. If you’ve been doing something for some time with little to show, try looking for another product or marketing strategy.
It can take a long time to find your feet with affiliate marketing. But choose to never quit and you’re already ahead of the 95% who drop out!