As a beginner affiliate I never thought that training the mind for success was at least as important as my affiliate marketing strategy. So I kept on trying (and failing) over and over again. I was trying the same strategy over and over, and things didn’t change.
As the quote by Albert Einstein goes : “The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same things but expect a different result”.
In 2014 I found an online mentorship community and I dutifully joined it. Despite having been an affiliate for some time, I still wasn’t having much success. I knew if I gave up then failure was inevitable! So, I rolled up my sleeves ready to start again from scratch with an open mind.
While I learned some new strategies, there was also an emphasis on mindset and training your mind for success. This was definitely an aspect of affiliate marketing I was unfamiliar with and I believe one of the missing components which hold many affiliates from the success they desire.
Training The Mind For Success – Growth Mindset
With a growth mindset and full of self belief and the right knowledge, anyone can make a success of affiliate marketing. But that’s the biggest problem. Most people go in with over confidence, false expectations and a lack of knowledge and with self limiting beliefs. They soon quit! Their belief takes a hammering as they come up against the reality of making a living online versus their fantasy version of it.
95% of affiliates will quit which is testimony to the fact that affiliate marketing is not an easy business. But consider how many people can “give affiliate marketing a go” and this number isn’t all that surprising. Most businesses fail and it’s not just online businesses. But the fact that an online business is easily accessible to anyone with a laptop, means that a 95% drop out rate isn’t so discouraging.
Those who succeed with affiliate marketing are those who don’t quit, despite the difficulties, and this comes down to mindset, not techniques.
Training The Mind For Success – Belief
But how exactly do you train your mindset? Can you really work on your mindset, or are you just always going to be the same as you are? This question has huge implications because if you believe you can grow and change, you have a growth mindset. If you believe you can’t change, you won’t even try!
Henry Ford: “Whether a man believes he can or he can’t, he’s right”
If you believe you can build a profitable online business, or not, you’re right! Belief is the catalyst for motivation and action because the actions you take are driven by a belief. Try and think of an action you take in your affiliate business which doesn’t have conviction behind it. Without conviction/belief in what you’re doing, you’ll soon give up!
When you lack conviction about something, you stop taking action. So it’s pretty important for affiliates to focus on building and maintaining their belief in what they are doing. Otherwise, they will quickly lose interest, focus and drive.
Training The Mind For Success – Autosuggestion
Mantras and intentions are a good method of instructing the subconscious mind. This happens whether you’re conscious of it or not. In Napoleon Hill’s book Think and Grow Rich, Hill likens the the subconscious mind to a “fertile garden spot..” where “..weeds will grow in abundance if they are not replaced by a more desirable crop”.
In this analogy, he is referring to your conscious “chatter” and the thoughts and intentions which are allowed to enter into the subconscious mind through autosuggestion. Our “garden spot” is our subconscious mind and we ‘feed’ it through the thoughts which we give the most energy to.
While this analogy might seem over simplified, and thoughts only have a subtle impact on our lives, over time they become attitudes and characteristics which define our very nature and reality.
To take charge of our thoughts is a good first step towards communicating what we want to our (more powerful) subconscious mind. It is our subconscious mind which delivers the “crop” to us over time: whether that’s a successful online business or a failed one!
Training The Mind For Success – Autosuggestion
For most people, the conscious mind runs mostly on autopilot, and we generate millions of random thoughts every day. Many of these are already heavily influenced by the major events in our lives and our childhood programming. This programming happens before we have the conscious facilities to override negative beliefs and limitations which might hold us back in life.
Therefore, if a parent continually spoke in terms of limiting beliefs, it’s likely you have picked them up. “Life’s a struggle”, “Money is the route of all evil”, “Money doesn’t grow on trees” and so on. Through repetition, we have embedded many negative beliefs about money, life, love and happiness.
To change them you can use mantras and visualisations. A good mantra can help you overcome a lifetime of negative repetition of a limiting belief. But only if you make a habit out of it and repeat it over a long enough time period:
For example: “Money comes easily and frequently” might be used to replace a negative belief about limitation of money such as “money doesn’t grow on trees”! “I love and approve of myself” can be used to overcome a negative belief like “I’m never good enough”.
Mantras For Success
A mantra is something you consciously choose to replace/override some negative programming you might have running in the background of your mind. So, for an affiliate business, you might choose an empowering mantra such as:
- I now make 10 sales a week/day
- I easily make affiliate sales
- I am a successful affiliate
- I now make $10k a month in affiliate sale
- I now make a living from affiliate marketing
- etc.
Although it can be difficult to start telling yourself these things when it isn’t yet true, that’s exactly how you created your current reality – through repetition of mantras, many of which were negative in nature. Such as “I’m not good enough”, “I can’t seem to succeed whatever I do”, “It’s too hard” and so on. When you repeatedly tell your subconscious mind that idea which you want to appear in reality, your programming shifts and you’ll come up with ideas and brainwaves which will allow it to happen.
For this to work, you need to make it a part of your daily routine. Remember, you’ve probably been telling yourself something negative for decades! If your old mantras and inner dialogue are things such as “I’m never good enough” and “money doesn’t grow on trees”, you’re painting the reality you’re currently faced with. To change that reality you need to change the “paint brush”, that is your current mental chatter which perpetuates that reality.
Using Visualisation
For a long time, I used an “away from” motivation. I was motivated “away from” fear, debt and scarcity. But there’s a problem with this motivation. When you reach an oasis of abundance, calm and peace, and you’ve recovered from the stress, your motivation wanes. You fall back towards doing less, because your motivation is gone.
A more powerful way to self motivate is through a positive visualisation of a long term worthy goal. For example, the actor Jim Carey wrote himself a check for 10 million dollars and dated it 10 years into the future in 1985. 10 years later in 1995 he got the movie role in Dumb and Dumber and was paid $10 million for the film.
He regularly visualised himself meeting directors and getting work as an actor in Hollywood. He kept his check in his wallet and looked at it frequently, while visualising his goal.
Visualisation is a powerful tool for affiliates because it creates an attractive future which you can use to inspire you forwards. This is much better than running away from fear, scarcity and lack because you create a more positive and powerful “towards” motivation, rather than a fearful and negative “away from” motivation which continues to draw you to it, rather than towards something positive, hopeful and inspiring.
Focus and inspiration is what you need for success with affiliate marketing, not fear and scepticism.