There’s a few reasons why most affiliate marketers fail and quit! Only around 5% of affiliates actually go on to earn a living from the business. So what happens to the 95%? Affiliate marketing is a great business model in which anyone can earn money through promoting other people’s products online. It can give you a means to earn from anywhere and a potentially unlimited income source. Surely this is reason enough to overcome any difficulties involved?
But initially affiliate marketing can be incredibly frustrating. The ease of entry and low cost means anyone can “give it a go” too, from anywhere in the world. When those sales don’t quickly start popping into your email inbox, it’s frustrating. Especially if you’ve done a bunch of work, for which you aren’t getting paid. Affiliate marketing is a performance based business model which means you don’t get paid unless you make a sale.
This is the crux of the problem for so many who try and quit in affiliate marketing. If only those people saw the bigger picture. If only they had the time, resources and patience to continue; they would see that they can earn passively, if they only stuck at it for long enough.
But for those juggling family and a full time job, it’s just too difficult and there’s no time left for themselves. They need income now, not in 6 months or a year!
Why Most Affiliate Marketers Fail – The Chinese Bamboo Tree
The Chinese bamboo tree offers a great analogy for affiliate marketing. The Chinese bamboo gestates under the soil for 5 years and during this time it needs to be watered and fertilised. But once it breaks the soil, it can grow 90 feet in five weeks. As with the tree, affiliate marketing has a gestation period. Depending on your method of marketing, affiliate marketing can take months or years before it bears “fruit”!
It is this gestation period where most will quit affiliate marketing. They work for a while and get frustrated with the (lack of) results. Most affiliates will give up before they even have built an email list to 1000 subscribers.
But it is when they numbers get up with either your website visitors, subscribers or sales that things get exciting for affiliates. Once they reach a certain critical point in their affiliate journey, they can use their activities to learn which actions create the most favourable results. Once they have data which shows which actions make the sales, they can do more of that, and create awesome results.
With subscription products you can earn recurring commissions, potentially for life. But you need to break through and make your first sale before anything tangible can happen.
Most Physical Businesses Fail Too
Most businesses fail, so affiliate marketing is no different. But because anyone can do it from a laptop, it is assumed that it’s easy. With a bricks and mortar business, there’s a huge failure rate too. The difference is that with a physical business there’s many more barriers to entry. You need a large investment for a physical business, business premises, staff, equipment. It’s a commitment. But with affiliate marketing this is much less so. You can even begin doing affiliate marketing for free.
The ease of entry and assumption that affiliate marketing is easy give people false hope. This quickly turns sour when things don’t go according to plan.
If there was a large barrier to entry, fewer people would try it and there would likely be a larger success rate for affiliate marketing.
Lack Of Experience
Without any experience in selling online, it can be easy to follow a flawed strategy. Low paying affiliate programs offer commissions as low as 1%, so even once you’ve made a sale, it’s very difficult to make a living with such low rates. I struggled for years trying to get traffic from a flawed strategy and didn’t know to build an email list.
Without a list, your traffic has to come from organic or paid sources, which are expensive or difficult to build. So you can spend a huge amount of time, or money, and without getting anywhere.
When you’re unsure of your direction, lack focus and don’t have anything to show for your efforts, it’s very difficult to sustain your faith and belief in affiliate marketing. So the likelihood is that you’ll quit sooner or later.
Trying Everything For Free
Trying to build a business completely on the cheap is another reason so many affiliates fail. I tried this for a long time too and did make some progress. But doing it all for free is very difficult. There’s free blog platforms such as Hubpages.com, Blogger.com and WordPress.com. YouTube can be used for free too. But getting traffic to your website or channel organically takes a huge amount of effort. You’ll need hundreds of pieces of content to get anywhere and even though you may make an odd sale, it’s very difficult to get consistency through organic reach.
Paying for training, software, an email autoresponder and hosting your own website should be the minimum if you’re serious about making a success of an affiliate business. If you’re unable to do this, it’s going to be much more difficult.
Paying For Advertising
With any business you need customers and affiliate marketing is no different. If you want to build quickly, you’ll need to pay for advertising. Since advertising is expensive, it’s worth buying a high ticket sales funnel so you can recoup your costs more easily and of course make a profit. With low value affiliate products it’s going to be much more difficult.
Some marketers recommend starting out with a $20k marketing budget! So if you’re trying to build a business on a shoestring, you’re already at a massive disadvantage compared to those who can afford such a budget.
The alternative to paying for advertising space is to build content. But there’s also huge competition for this. So you’ll need to spend a lot of time building and sharing content just to get a slice of the pie!
Summary
So there’s a few reasons why most affiliate marketers fail. Lack of experience, lack of funds, unrealistic expectations and impatience are just a few reasons why the majority of affiliate marketers fail.
Affiliate marketing takes time to learn and you aren’t paid for that time. Rather you need to spend time in “learning mode”, pay for training and then turn your knowledge into action too. It can take months or years before you start to see sales and commissions coming in.
Most people aren’t expecting this because they don’t have a background in business. Most people come from an employee mindset which is very different from the mindset of an entrepreneur – which is needed for affiliate marketing.
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