There’s a few reasons why belief is so important for success, especially with an affiliate business. There’s this old adage from Henry Ford of course:
“Whether a man believes he can or he can’t, he’s right”
If you don’t believe that YOU can make money in affiliate marketing, you won’t even try. Self belief is the most important belief. If you don’t believe in YOU, you’ll find some way to fail.
But then there’s also belief in what you’re doing. It’s easy to struggle if you don’t believe in your direction online too, or if you don’t believe in the product you are promoting.
Of course there’s the belief that you might not know what you’re doing, too. But if you believe in YOU and that YOU can make money online with affiliate marketing, you can acquire all the necessary skills to do so because of this belief.
Why Belief Is So Important For Success – My Journey
I started learning affiliate marketing tactics back in the early 2000’s and it wasn’t an easy journey for me. I struggled from the very beginning. Having jumped from Forex marketing, and having a stint trying to make money on eBay, I stumbled upon affiliate marketing while trying to promote an ebook I had written. With a room full of unsold eBay stock, affiliate marketing seemed a simple solution. No stock necessary! A simple referral of someone else’s products/services.
I liked how clean it was, so set about building multiple websites in a bid to sell affiliate offers, most of which I found on Clickbank, as per my earlier training back in the day! Having built multiple websites most of which didn’t work at selling a thing, I felt like quitting. If it wasn’t for an early sale in affiliate marketing, I would have probably joined the percentage of those who quit (around 95%).
But the idea of selling thousands of a digital product (originally my ebook) wouldn’t let me go! I was hooked!
Why Belief Is So Important For Success – The First Sale
The first sale is an important milestone for any affiliate because it proves to yourself that it can be done. When you can sell an item online, you’ve proved not only that affiliate marketing works, but that YOU can make sales online. Before this happens, it’s easy to carry around some scepticism and doubt.
But that doubt mustn’t grow, because if you allow it to, it will stop you from moving forwards. To stop doubt and scepticism from growing and destroying your future affiliate business, you must focus on building your belief. Here’s the dilemma.
Without proof that something works, most people have very little time for it! But the seeking of the proof has the seed of doubt within it! Affiliate marketing does work, there’s no doubt. The question is whether affiliate marketing will work for YOU. Knowing all this, there’s very little point in the various online “gurus” showing you how well they’ve done. Although that can spur you on, earnings proof only shows one thing – that someone else made it work for them, not you!
Why Belief Is So Important For Success – My Blogging Experience
When I started out as an affiliate I didn’t have any money so organic (free) methods where what made me my first sale online. I wrote a product review and made $40 commission! It was to be a major boost to my belief around affiliate marketing and the idea that I could make it pay.
Before that I had tried a few other methods of earning online, one of which was using Google Adsense. With Adsense, you place advertising on your website content. When someone clicks on it, you earn a small commission. By small, I mean very small. I earned a few pence (cents) which was nothing compared to my $40 for my affiliate sale.
So I chose blogging partly because of my earlier experience and this small, early success. As a beginner, I was fired up with enthusiasm after having bought an online course. But this enthusiasm quickly waned when I didn’t make much beyond that. I would blog and blog and blog, but still no more sales. So I would quit and throw in the towel! Then, a month would pass, and a sale would drop into my inbox! Wow, I would think, this really works. So I got back to blogging again. This time, with more confidence.
It was my belief, (or lack of it) which drove/killed my activity. And it was my activity which drove the sales.
Why Belief Is So Important For Success – Focus On Activity Not Results
One of my former mentors from a network marketing company I used to be involved with (Kleeneze in the UK), told me:
Don’t focus on the results, focus on your activity.
This was difficult in the beginning because I didn’t fully believe I could make affiliate marketing work for me. So I was looking for evidence that it could work. So, I would build a website or write a blog post, share it, and then sit back waiting for something to happen! I would wait, wait, wait! Sure enough, nothing much would happen. So I would doubt whether affiliate marketing worked!
But after a block of blogging frenzy, backed either by fear or belief, a sale would drop in! This gave me further evidence that not only did affiliate marketing actually work, but that I was making it work with my content and that I could actually replace my income with it.
Once this started happening more frequently, my confidence and belief grew. So I would write more frequently. Eventually, I let go of looking for confirmation and focused on fuelling my belief, once I realised I was in this stop/start pattern of behaviour.
Why Belief Is So Important For Success – How To Fuel Your Belief
For many affiliates, they never get the confirmation that a sale is possible for them, because they quit before that happens. But affiliate marketing is a performance based business in which you only get paid when you sell something. In the first instance this means you must do the work upfront.
Unless you do the work upfront, you won’t make any sales, but in order to do the work upfront, you must have some faith/belief that it will amount to something!
Therefore spending time building your belief is pretty important for affiliates and this can be done through a number of avenues:
- Overcoming uncertainty, doubt and fear by getting the right knowledge.
- Goal setting and intention journalling
- Visualisation, focus and inspiration
- Introspection and mindfulness – uncovering limiting beliefs/attitudes
- Reading positive and psychology/self help material
When Things Don’t Work
There are always times when things just don’t work out in affiliate marketing. As a business, not every month is going to be pay check month, as in a regular job. I have some good months and some not so good months. In the beginning phase, there were long stints when I was earning nothing from affiliate marketing. Since I chose a largely organic marketing route, things were definitely slow for me. Paid marketing is much faster, but that’s a topic for another post.
When things don’t work out you will fall back into doubt and scepticism. That’s where you need to go back and build your belief again. This is where most people quit. They try something, it doesn’t work and they assume it will always be like that. But those who stick, learn from those “failures” and use them to start again with greater knowledge.
It’s the knowledge which is valuable, because you can build on that to ultimately create a solid income from affiliate marketing. The fact that gaining that knowledge can be a painful process, perhaps explains the high drop out rate among affiliates. When things are painful, and you feel like giving up, is where you need to find that belief again, and come back even stronger (and better armed this time).
Small Wins, Long Game
It’s easy to want the big prize of making a tonne of money online. After all, that’s what so many “guru’s” are selling with their courses. But I have found the desire for megabucks can actually be a bit of a distraction. The wanting can create disappointment when it doesn’t happen straight away. You look at your results and are dissatisfied. This doesn’t lead to wanting to do more work, quite the opposite.
While a big goal can help motivate towards action, small goals can also be helpful when it comes to building belief in what you’re doing.
When you want a large outcome from an affiliate business, but all you have is small results, it’s discouraging. But if you focus on the small wins, you can more easily build confidence. A small win might be building your first website, for example. Or getting your first website traffic somehow. It might be purchasing your first online course, or running an advertising campaign for the first time.
Small wins are the path to big wins. Focus on the small wins and over time, the big wins will come! The best way to succeed with affiliate marketing is to decide not to quit. Stay the course and focus on small wins which build your belief and confidence.
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