Affiliate marketing is one of the easiest ways to make money online – surely you’ve heard that over and over again.
If this is so, why is it so hard to finally quit your day job and live on that income?
Only a tiny percentage of affiliate marketers actually make good money doing it.
It’s simple, it doesn’t involve any high-tech skills, and ClickBank practically does it all for you – so why doesn’t it work for most people?
If your affiliate marketing campaign stinks and makes no money, it is probably because you lack one of two things – the dedication to make it work and perseverance to see it through.
It’s All About Dedication
If you wanted to start something totally new, a brand new skill that you’ve never done before, and turn this skill into your career and means of support, how dedicated would you be?
For example, let’s say you decided to take up the guitar. In a few years, you’re want to be an in-demand session musician in the LA music world. Would you buy a guitar, learn a few chords and then expect to nail an audition?
Of course you wouldn’t! What you’d do is lock yourself in your bedroom for hours at a stretch practicing scales. You’d eat, live and breathe guitar playing until you knew what you were doing. THEN, you’d expect to get a gig.
In other words, you would find a training program and stick with it until you were good. You would study the instrument and locate your faults so that you could fix them. You’d see every failure as a learning opportunity.
Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, he studied the lives of exceptional people, found that in order to get the top in any field, it took an incredible amount of work and dedication. Whether it was in business, art, sports or any other field, he found that these individuals spent something like 10,000 HOURS working on their craft over the course of several years.
Now, affiliate marketing really isn’t brain surgery, and it’s not going to take you 10,000 hours to learn. But it will take dedication and work. What most people do is buy one “make money online” training program, and in a few weeks when the excitement fades and they’re still not making it big, they give up.
It’s much rarer to find people who follow a marketing system to the dot, and tweak the system over a period of time to perfect it. Or, they may develop their own system based on the program. However they do it, these people who work hard and stick with it are the ones who see results.
How To Make The Affiliate Marketing System Work
Most of the affiliate marketing systems that I’ve seen have been very good, but they involve tedious, repetitive tasks. I’ve met people on the verge of giving up who have been using perfectly good systems, and I always ask them:
– How many hours did you spend researching to find your niche?
– How many niche sites did you create?
– How many articles did you write and submit to directories?
– How many backlinks were you building per week?
Without fail, they answer, “Not so many” or “It took me just a few minutes.” And there’s where the failure lies. Do these things regularly, and you’ll see success. It’s like talking to a guy who wants to be a rock star but practices his guitar once a week.
Time Management
Most people will then tell me that they don’t have the time. After all there are only 24 hours in a day and you can’t make more. But studies show that the typical American watches over 4 hours of television each night! Can you imagine how quickly you could build a successful online business if you turned the TV off once in a while?
The good news is that you don’t need 10,000 hours and a decade of study to become a successful affiliate marketer. Just make the time, pick some affiliate marketing strategies that you can stick with. If you’re really serious about doing this, ask yourself if you’ve been doing everything you could to make your dream come true. If the answer is “no,” then it’s time to start.
What has your experience been with affiliate marketing? Are you ready to quit or just getting started?
