There’s likely more than 10 reasons why you’re failing to earn online. But these will probably highlight a cause for you. Once you discover the reasons why you’re failing to earn online, you can more easily succeed!
Failure gives you the ability to start again, only more intelligently – Henry Ford.
95% of affiliates will simply quit instead, but if you’re reading this, you’re one of the ones who will succeed – because you don’t give up! So here’s my list of 10 reasons why you’re failing to earn online with affiliate marketing.
10 Reasons Why You’re Failing To Earn Online #1 You’re Not Serving Enough People
The money you make online (or otherwise) is a direct reflection of the number of people you serve (with your affiliate products). So, unless you can find customers for your products in big enough numbers, you’ll fail to earn a real income online.
This might sound obvious but when I started out online I had a totally unrealistic idea of what was possible. I imagined myself posting blogs online and making tens of thousands relatively easily. But if you’re a blogger, you will know the amount of work involved in only attaining a single sale.
Why is that? With blogging, you can only get your blog in front of a certain amount of people organically. So even if you write with SEO in mind, target long tail keywords and get ranked on Google, your traffic will still be limited. It’s also a big “if” whether you rank or not for your keywords.
If you’re paying for advertising, but don’t have a large budget, that’s also a limiting factor. So what’s the answer? Well if you’re marketing organically, expect it to take longer. If you’re running ads, you must find a way to recoup your budget early on, such as with an entry level product within a product range. This offsets your costs and allows you to cheaply acquire customers.
10 Reasons Why You’re Failing To Earn Online #2 – You’re Attracting The Wrong Audience
Your audience must be aligned with your product and your marketing efforts need to lead them to it. For a long time I didn’t understand this concept and in my early days as an affiliate, I simply thought everyone would want my product because I knew how good it was! I was sadly mistaken. In fact, the large proportion of the internet doesn’t want your product, whatever it is!
You must keep this in mind whenever you’re crafting an advert, specifying who it will show to or creating some content. If your content isn’t a good match for your product (to attract the right kind of person), you’re better off creating something else. You can spend a huge amount of time creating content. But if it doesn’t attract the right audience, you’ll seldom make any sales.
A good example is that of a product review. Sales can come easily from a product review because it attracts a very specific person to your website. It attracts that person who is looking to buy a specific product (your affiliate product). But some generic “how to” guide won’t attract the same buying customer. So if you’re spending all your time on generic content which attracts visitors not buyers, you’re going to be spending a lot of time which is unrewarded by affiliate sales.
To attract the right audience you must know who they are first. Checkout the customer avatar worksheet pdf here.
10 Reasons Why You’re Failing To Earn Online #3 – You’re “Tinkering” With It and Not Treating It Seriously
If you are really serious about building a serious income online, you would give it the seriousness that it deserves. After all, it can replace your existing income and you can be completely financially independent, and have financial freedom. There’s no limit to the number of affiliate products you can sell online with access to the global economy! An online business can give you complete geographical freedom too, and you can choose where to live anywhere globally once you’re running at a profit.
So ask yourself, are you taking it seriously? Do you really want it, or, are you just “playing at it” without really believing that it will work.
Perhaps you don’t really need the income, so you can justify not taking the actions which are uncomfortable to take?
10 Reasons Why You’re Failing To Earn Online #4 – You Are Repeating The Same Actions Expecting A Different Result
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” – Albert Einstein
Are you continuing to do the same things over and over again, such as posting your blogs on social media? Do you expect your results to change?
While some content marketing strategies do take a bit of time, there’s also other actions you can perform which can magnify your results. Blogging and building a YouTube channel are examples of longer term strategies. You can’t expect to suddenly have a booming affiliate business overnight after a few blog posts, or having uploaded only a few videos.
These tactics can and do work, but they are longer term strategies which require a lot of work initially and often for very little return.
If you’ve been doing this for some time, it might be worth considering using some paid marketing, or using automated syndication tools to help you gain more traction, for example.
10 Reasons Why You’re Failing To Earn Online #5 – You’re Caught Up In The Minutia Of Your Business
Here’s other possible reason why you’re failing to earn online. You’re caught up doing the small, tiny things which don’t really matter to your business – the minutia, small things which don’t count! This could be things such as:
- Watching endless training videos without taking any action
- Designing your logo or website to make it perfect, but without driving any traffic
- Creating lots of content, but not promoting it and therefore not getting any traffic
- Constant re-evaluation of your marketing tactic, procrastination and non-action
- Overthinking your business without acting in your business
- Working in your business in small useless actions and avoiding the important meaningful actions
Working “in” your business has many potential actions many of which don’t count for much. The large meaningful actions which move the needle on your income are the actions you should be focusing on, not the small meaningless innocuous ones!
If you’ve been doing action after action for some time without any change in your outcome, it’s probably time to reinvest in your education. Here’s a program which helped me.
10 Reasons Why You’re Failing To Earn Online #5 – You’re Not Investing In Your Education/Growing Yourself
Here’s another reason why you’re not moving forwards with your affiliate business. You’re not investing in your education. When I found this course, I had already spent several years struggling as an affiliate marketer. I had some knowledge, but it was flawed. My understanding of marketing had many holes in it. But you don’t know what you don’t know. Reinvesting in your knowledge is a good place to begin, even if you’re an experienced affiliate.
Your business cannot grow beyond the thinking of its owner. So if you’re not investing in growing your knowledge and understanding, your business can only grow to where you currently are.
The thinking you bring to your affiliate business is the “glass ceiling” which stops it from growing. By expanding your thinking beyond where it is today, you can change the way you approach your business and approach it from a better vantage point. Access a training resource here.
10 Reasons Why You’re Failing To Earn Online #6 – Subconscious Blocks
Your business is a tool so that you can live more fully, and ideally help others on the journey. So if you’re not seeing your future as bright and abundant, you could be cutting off your potential with your lack of vision or false assumptions.
Be honest about how you feel about your affiliate business. Are you inspired to promote someone else’s products and services? Are you inspired for the financial abundance which is possible for an affiliate? What does inspire you about your affiliate business?
How do you see your life when everything is working how you want it to with your affiliate business? There may be a subconscious blockage holding you back from the success you desire. This is especially true if you can’t foresee your future success with affiliate marketing. Perhaps there’s something else you want to do instead?
Do you believe in what you’re doing as an affiliate? If you somehow doubt yourself or hold some negativity towards what you’re doing or where you are heading, you’ll sabotage yourself on the path. Checkout my ebook on money mindset for more on this topic.
10 Reasons Why You’re Failing To Earn Online #7 – You’re Not “Failing” Enough
There’s an expression in affiliate marketing known as “failing forwards”. Without these “failures” you can’t learn from your own experience.
Have you yet tried writing 100 blog posts, running 50 adverts, creating 100 YouTube videos or attending several training courses? If the answer is no, you probably haven’t “failed” enough!
Long term affiliates have tried a lot of strategies and failed at most of them! So if you’ve only just joined the affiliate marketing path, expect to fail some more before you find a strategy which works for you.
As the saying goes : “The expert has failed more times than the beginner has even tried”
Not only must you “fail forwards” to learn affiliate marketing, but you must also do it enough to find a winning strategy. Once you do, you’ll know which path to take.
#8 – You’ve Chosen A Product Which Doesn’t Sell
Bad products don’t sell unfortunately so it’s definitely worth doing your homework before choosing a product to sell. Even with all the marketing in the world, if you’ve chosen a product which doesn’t sell well, you’re setting yourself up for failure.
Before I found good products to sell I joined Clickbank and promoted a lot of products that I didn’t know anything about (neither did I care to). But it’s a mistake to promote products you have no connection to and haven’t invested in yourself.
That’s exactly what I did when I started out as an affiliate. I just wanted to sell and make money. I thought I could rush through the process of doing that, and skipped over a lot of necessary detail – such as choosing a hugely valuable product which sells like hotcakes! Choose necessary and important products which are in demand and needed. For example, one of the products I promote is Aweber autoresponder – a product which is vital for running an online business. You can access it free here.
#9 – You Haven’t Spent Long Enough On Your Marketing Method Yet
All marketing methods have a different timeline. For example, some of my latest blog posts have been on the topic of blogging. See how to make blogging pay.
With blogging, you are going to need to create a lot of content and over a long period of time. It can take months or even years to break through with blogging and even then you must align your topic with the right products. Otherwise, you’re wasting your time if you want to get paid!
Paid marketing methods can work much, much faster than blogging. But there’s still a period of experimentation where you’re learning. Unless you’re prepared to fail many times with your marketing method, while learning, you’re probably not going to break through and start making those sales.
It’s at the beginning point here where most people will quit. But it’s past the “frustration” mark where success is to be found – after you’ve wanted to throw your laptop through the window many times!
Are you expecting too much from too little effort? I certainly was when I began as an affiliate. Remember there’s 600 million blogs out there and more than 114 million active YouTube channels competing for attention online. What you get paid as an affiliate is a direct result of the number of people you serve with your affiliate products.
#10 – You Haven’t Found A Product/Niche Which Is Heart Aligned
This one’s a bit touchy feely perhaps but none the less I believe this to be one of the most important aspects of affiliate marketing. If you’re dedicated to a particular topic or niche, and in helping people overcome a certain problem perhaps, you’re much more likely to succeed than if you’re merely seeking to earn a bit of extra cash.
A passion project will continue much longer than a “get rich quick scheme” simply because of the integrity behind the intent of the work involved. When you’re heart aligned, you do the work because you are passionate about it, not because you might earn some money. This is the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is what keeps someone going long after everyone else has quit. If you only want the reward, you’ll quit much earlier.
The man who likes walking goes further than the man who likes the destination.
Find a project you can be intrinsically passionate about and you’ll go much further than anyone else. Find a product which aligns with your passion and you’ve found your passion affiliate direction!