There’s a huge drop out rate in affiliate marketing – around 95%. This means only 5% actually stick at it and not all of them make a profitable business out of it. But affiliate marketing is very forgiving. You can always start again another day. So you have never truly “failed” until you quit. Even then, you don’t have to call it a “failure”. Affiliate marketing just might not be right for you. So moving on can be a good decision – everyone is different!
How you view “failure” is an important thing to note, too. Top earning affiliates have “failed” more time than most will even try. They see “failures” as learning opportunities, rather than absolutes. Don’t quit your affiliate marketing business. Instead, learn from your “failures” and see them as stepping stones to greater understanding and ultimately more success.
Before I had any semblance of consistent success with selling affiliate products I struggled for several years. Not months, but years. That being said, I was mostly working only part time as an affiliate, around employment. I suspect this is true for many affiliates. Here’s some of the reasons I think this is the case.
You Have Never Failed Until You Quit – Why Affiliates Fail
So why do so many affiliates quit? Affiliate marketing is the easiest business in the world to get in to. Just join an affiliate program and hey presto, you’re an affiliate. Making sales online is another story though. So even though it’s easy to get set up with an affiliate link, the hard part is actually getting someone to buy through it.
This is where, I suspect, most affiliates hit a wall. They can’t generate sales and through the process of trying to get information to learn, they are inundated with information overload. There’s millions of affiliates trying to sell you on their “system”. So just getting simple information is pretty difficult. Once you show an interest, your email inbox will fill up with affiliate links for you to buy products through! You’ll likely jump from one system or course to another, trying to piece together some kind of strategy to sell.
Even with consistency and hard work, those sales don’t come easy; especially at first. You’ll likely be battling with some doubt and scepticism too, which doesn’t help. Friends and family (well meaning as they might be) will likely put you off and try to convince you to avoid “the scam”.
You Have Never Failed Until You Quit – Keep Going
If you manage to keep going past the doubters and overcome your own scepticism, you still have a journey ahead of you. The first major milestone is your first online sale. Once you make your first online sale, consider yourself way ahead of the people who quit. Even a small commission is worth celebrating because you’ve proved you can do it! This is no small feat and this success can give you belief and motivation. Belief is the most important asset to your succeeding at affiliate marketing, in my opinion.
Without it you simply don’t try. As Henry Ford is quoted as saying “Whether a man believes he can or he can’t, he is right”.
My doubt and scepticism held me back for some time too. Once you start seeing results, not only does your doubt disappear but your motivation and belief grows.
This is a major turning point because it should fire you up to focus on those activities which produced the sale. The more sales you get, the more data you have that a particular strategy is working for you; the stronger your belief in that strategy.
You Have Never Failed Until You Quit – The Valley Of Disappointment
In James Clear’s book Atomic Habits, there’s a great image I’ll share here.
He calls it the plateau of latent potential. As time rolls on as an affiliate, you expect your results to be linear and match your efforts. But this isn’t true. In fact, most of your work as an affiliate amounts to nothing at least initially. Pareto’s principle states that 80% of results will usually come from 20% of your efforts. This is very true, so as a beginner in affiliate marketing, your job is to find out where that 20% lies.
When you start out, you might very well be doing everything right, but still you don’t know which efforts produce the sales (until you actually make those sales). You won’t know, until you’ve been at it for some time, either. It’s during this time where affiliates will start to drop out. (On the image above this is shown as “the valley of disappointment”). Here, affiliates only see their efforts amounting to nothing, not that they are discovering what doesn’t work (and building their knowledge).
At a certain point, once you understand how to make sales, you can shift and focus your efforts on the 20% of activities which bring you 80% of your results. This is another major turning point for affiliates. Once you get to this stage, things really begin to take off. Again, look at the graph above and you see results rising exponentially.
The Problem
The problem is, most new affiliates don’t know this and are desperately trying to get results without having any data or experience. Instead of studying, they quit. It’s super frustrating when you’re at this stage as an affiliate because you desperately want to make those sales. Taking a step back and focusing on failing forwards is key. Failing forwards refers to trying out things which may not work, but which bring you closer to finding those things which do.
Only by going through a lot of testing things out and trying things you haven’t done before can you learn. The analogy I talk about in my previous article “don’t quit your affiliate business” is that of a toddler. A toddler never thinks, “ah well I guess walking isn’t for me”, even after many fails at standing up and placing one foot in front of the other. They know they can, and just keep trying. They have absolute belief in themselves and keep going until they achieve it.
The same is true of the 3% of affiliates who build profitable businesses online. No amount of “failures” will stop them from reaching their goal.
