What Is The Hardest Thing About Being An Affiliate Marketer

The hardest thing about being an affiliate marketer is dealing with the failures.

And every marketer has them.

Failures include:

  1. Badly researching your intended audience. That might mean you end up targeting the wrong demographic or not realising that while you’ve found exactly the right kind of audience, they just don’t spend money in your niche.
  2. Building a website to promote products that just never gets any traction despite your best efforts.
  3. Having your website drop in ranking (so less visitors = less sales) because your competition is better at the SEO game or Google tweaks its algorithms again and your site falls foul of them for some reason.
  4. Picking the wrong products to promote because they’re actually poor quality or don’t resonate with your audience.
  5. Not building an email list.
  6. Not constantly engaging with your email list if you have one.
  7. Picking too many seasonal products to promote rather than evergreen ones so income fluctuates wildly during the year.
  8. Relying solely on single commission sales rather than getting recurring commissions. It’s tougher to make consistent income if you’re always chasing the next sale rather than having the cushion of at least some monthly recurring commissions.
  9. Having unrealistic expectations. Some new affiliate marketers think that they can get rich quick online; that the internet is full of ATMs spewing money if you just know where to look. Affiliate marketing isn’t as easy as it’s often made out to be. It takes time to build an online business, months rather than days or a couple of weeks.
  10. Not being prepared to put in the work to build an online business. Learning the skills needed and doing the work required takes focus, determination and self-motivation.
  11. Giving up too easily. Every affiliate marketer will hit obstacles and hurdles at one time or another. The successful marketers don’t let these stop them from moving forward. The unsuccessful ones do.
  12. Not setting goals. If you don’t have goals, you can’t create plans to achieve those goals. And then you’re easily distracted into wandering off the path you thought you’d laid out for yourself.
  13. If you’ve bought a training course or found a mentor, not following what they teach. Basically, not staying the course, especially if things get difficult.
  14. Falling prey to Shiny Object Syndrome. This is one of the affiliate marketer’s banes. When things get difficult, along comes another course, product or tool that promises that it’ll be easy to make money with it. And when things get difficult with that, rinse and repeat the process.
  15. Not being prepared to go outside your comfort zone. If you’re not prepared to push your boundaries, how are you ever going to grow as a person or as an affiliate marketer? If you’re in a rut now but you don’t want to go outside your comfort zone, why should anything change with your current position?
  16. Not having a vision. Goals are stepping stones on the path to a vision. What’s your ultimate goal with affiliate marketing? To make a few bucks to cover some bills? To build an online business that pays you a salary so you can fire your boss? To make oodles of money so you can live like the uber-rich? Or do you intend the money you make to be a means to an end? Do you want to fund local programs in your community? Do you want to fund medical research? Do you want to support programs that help deprived communities around the world, and so on. Having a vision reminds you of what you ultimately want to achieve. Remember that getting money is not an end in itself. It’s a means to an end that should have some positive impact on the world.
  17. Being in the affiliate marketing game only for yourself. If all you’re interested in is making sales and money, that will come across to your audience and they’ll just avoid you. It’s actually a self-destructive paradigm in the long run. A far better approach is to genuinely want to help people. That builds trust and then people are far more likely to want to buy from you.

These are just things to be aware of and they should not put anyone off affiliate marketing. It’s a great business model that can generate a life-changing income.

Success isn’t guaranteed because a lot of that comes down to hard work and applying yourself, but when things do work out, you have the time and monetary freedom to live life on your terms.

One of the best ways to become a successful affiliate marketer is to find a good mentor and follow what they teach.

Here are two mentors I thoroughly recommend – they both provide free classes on affiliate marketing that are well worth watching:

Zach Crawford's Free Affiliate Marketing Webclass

Spencer Mecham's Free Affiliate Marketing Webclass

 

All the best,

Gary Nugent

Check out my Instagram posts and reels here:

Follow me (@aiaffiliatesecrets) on Instagram

 

P.S.: Don't forget, if you want to create an internet income of your own, here's one of my recommended ways to do that:

LeadsLeap All-in-One Marketing Platform  

Tagged with: • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Filed under: Affiliate Marketing