Are you wondering “why is affiliate marketing so hard?” If so you’re not alone. Thousands of affiliates struggle to make anything from their endeavours online, even though some are succeeding. Affiliate marketing is a tough business and if you haven’t made a single sale, but have worked for some time, this can be incredibly frustrating.
Once you break through that barrier, and have seen even a small success, it can be the light at the end of a very long tunnel. This can be enough to motivate an affiliate to keep going. But in truth there’s a huge drop out rate in this industry. The affiliate marketing failure rate is around 95%. The term “failure” though is perhaps unfair because often these people simply quit.
Deciding affiliate marketing does not work, and quitting is the surest way to fail! Those who choose never to quit, will always be the ones who eventually succeed. So can be be a simple choice which determines who fails and who succeeds?
Why Is Affiliate Marketing So Hard? – The Gym Analogy
It’s pretty hard to get a six pack too, depending on your weight, metabolism, diet and exercise habits. But joining a gym doesn’t guarantee a six pack much like joining an affiliate program doesn’t guarantee financial freedom! It’s what you do with your gym membership that matters. Most people join a gym in January and by March have already stopped going. The same can be said for affiliate marketing.
Sales people also portray affiliate marketing as an “easy path to riches” in many cases. This gives new affiliates false hope. When reality kicks in it can be very demoralising, and this is when most affiliate quit.
There’s huge competition on the internet too. Any affiliate will have to face this when starting out. The beginning of this journey is the hardest part because you’re starting with zero knowledge and zero traction. To get traction to a website, or an email list you need traffic. This is either bought or built with hard work through content creation. One strategy takes money and the other takes time.
To get a six pack, you need to train hard and lose fat. This involves learning about diet as well as going to the gym regularly and working out. If you’re not that fussed over getting a six pack, you won’t go to the efforts required to make it happen. According to your body weight, body fat percentage, diet and exercise habits, this will take some people considerably more effort and focus than others.
The same is true for affiliate marketing. You need a big reason to stick at it when things aren’t going well.
Why Is Affiliate Marketing So Hard?
Affiliate marketing is hard for many because they don’t realise what it takes. It’s easy to pull out your wallet and purchase a course – much like joining a gym membership! The hard part is turning up, doing the work and staying consistent; particularly if you have nothing to show for your efforts.
When you have been working at affiliate marketing for some time, you expect to be earning from it. But this doesn’t always transpire as soon as you would wish. So the early few months of learning can be the toughest, especially if your belief is very low in what you’re doing.
If the steps taking your affiliate business forwards aren’t clear, you can spend months and even years in procrastination mode, doing nothing but doubting whether it works of not! To get traction takes consistent effort and a sting belief. If you bought a course, and still think it might be a scam, this is likely to eat into your belief that you can earn money from affiliate marketing.
When your belief is low, you don’t do the work. When you don’t do the work, you don’t get results. See also affiliate marketing does it work?
Why Is Affiliate Marketing So Hard? The Chinese Bamboo Tree Analogy
The Chinese bamboo tree gestates underground for 4-5 years. If you are attempting to grow one and didn’t know about this, you’d be tempted to throw it out! But after the gestation period, it can grow 90 feet in 5-6 weeks!
Affiliate marketing is like the Chinese bamboo tree in that the gestation period is where you are learning and implementing new skills. A good example is the email list, which an affiliate uses to built trust and recommend their products and services.
As a beginner, your email list will be built up over time, starting with zero subscribers. Long term affiliates have built up their lists to over 10,000 subscribers in many cases. They can send out emails and make multiple sales from them. But if your email list only has 100 subscribers, how can you possibly create this result? Rather than understanding this, many new affiliates will doubt the strategy works at all and quit.
Overwhelm
Learning anything new is difficult. But learning something from your computer, when you are mostly by yourself is very difficult. It can be easy to jump from one strategy to another, look at different ideas and get confused about your direction. This leads to overwhelm. The internet has a tonne of information on hand at any instant you decide to look. But if you’re learning something new, this can be very confusing.
Once you hit overwhelm, nothing gets done. You can’t decide what strategy to use, which course to join, and so you do nothing! Overwhelm is common among affiliates because there’s so much (often contradictory) information available at your finger tips. If you have joined a number of email lists, you’ll get bombarded with information to your inbox on a daily basis too!
The answer is to keep it simple. Focus only on the step in front of you and not the whole staircase. Affiliate marketing takes time. If you want money now, it’s not a good option. But you can build a good income from affiliate marketing if you approach it like a proper business and treat it as such. Treat it as a hobby, and you’ll only make a hobby wage from it!