Affiliate marketing in theory is a simple concept. Your job as an affiliate marketer is to drive traffic to a product or service that you’re promoting. If the person likes the product that you’re promoting and buys it, then you will receive a commission on the successful referral.
Is Affilate Marketing Difficult?
No, I personally don’t think it’s difficult. Affiliate marketing in of itself isn’t difficult, but it does require a solid Strategy, Persistance and Patience to be successful at it. If you are determined to learn the skills to pursue this career, your efforts will be rewarded exponentially.
Reasons Why Affiliate Marketing Is Difficult For Beginners?
1. Not Having A Good Strategy
There is a Chinese proverb that says, “To know the road ahead, ask those coming back”. What this means is that you don’t have to learn something the hard way, by trial and error. You can master any skill much faster by learning from someone who has already been successful in what you’re trying to achieve.
This is where educating yourself is so important if you are looking to make affiliate marketing a career choice. There are many courses that you can take to make this happen, and my favorite one of all is Wealth Affiliate.
Their online course combined with outstanding web hosting, and thousands on expert mentors is the best I’ve come across for long term success in this industry!
2. There Is A Lot Of Competition In Affiliate Marketing
As time goes by there are more and more websites are entering the online marketing space, and competing for page one of search engines. People are flocking in big numbers to this industry because of the amazing earning potential, and flexible working hours that it offers.
It’s very important that to stay ahead of your competition, your website has to have the best content out there. You have to make sure that your audience stays engaged to the message that you’re trying to get across.
Besides great content, your site should also be visually appealing with pictures and videos. Another thing is making sure that your website is easy to navigate, this will help people stay on your content for much longer, and explore other articles.
Making sure that your website is optimized for the best user experience will at the end of the day will keep you ahead of your competition.
3. Why Having Patience Is Important?
We often forget that everything that we’re really great at today took a certain amount of time to learn. We practiced, fail a lot, practiced some more, and in the end ultimately achieve our goal, because we made a decision to never give up on it.
Some things in life are just worth the time and effort that we put into them, because the rewards for doing so are so great.
One of the most difficult parts of Affiliate Marketing is having the patience to do the hard work with no visible monetary returns in the beginning. The secret to this is never to give up, and just keep on creating the best content for you audience that you can.
The only difference between the super successful people in this world, and everyone else, is that the successful ones made a choice that no matter how difficult something got they would never give up. You can too live your dreams if you never give up!
4. Trust Has To Be Earned
This is another reason why affiliate marketing is getting so much more difficult today. There are so many competing websites entering the online space, that it’s difficult to know if their content is actually honest and factual.
There are still many websites out there that are scamming people out of a lot of money, and search engines like Google are trying their best to isolate these and push them out of their search results.
Search engines have to make sure that you are the real deal, and know what you’re talking about. They do this over time by checking how people engage with your content, how long they spend within your website, and see how many back links that you get from other websites that think that your content is a valuable resource for them.
One of the best ways to build trust with your audience is to be honest, and as helpful as possible. You want them to feel that they are receiving great value from your content, and this will also translate into great rankings for your website on search engines.
5. You Haven’t Produced Enough Content
As they say in the online world, content is King, and the more content you have, the more likely it will rank in search engines. Whether it’s blog posts, social media posts, podcasts or videos, you will most probably have to create a lot of them to start getting traffic.
If you made 10 Videos, or wrote only 20 Blog posts and expect to make lots of money from this, you most likely will be disappointed. The bottom line is that it’s all about quality and quantity, both are very important in getting a lot of traffic.
A great way to make sure that you keep on putting lots of quality content out, is to have Daily goals and Weekly goals. If you make a schedule and stick to it, then you will find that you will be able to get a lot more done than if you didn’t do this.
Hard work and consistency are what separates the successful affiliate marketers from the ones who will ultimately fail, because they gave up.
6. Not Promoting High Ticket Products And Services
High ticket products are expensive to buy, but are really valuable to the person that is buying that product. Anything high ticket product could cost many hundreds, or even thousands of dollars to purchase.
The important fact to take note of here is that even if you don’t sell that many of these products, they are so valuable you will have made a very nice profit off of these sales.
An example would be if you promoted a laptop that cost $2600, you would only have to sell one of them compared to selling a kettle going for $26. You would have to sell 100 kettles just to make the same kind of commission.
This means that even if you have less traffic within a month you will still have the opportunity to make a huge profit by the end of the month.
7. Promoting Products You’re Not Passionate About
If you don’t believe in the products that you’re selling, and are not passionate about them, then how can you expect other people to be interested in purchasing that product. Your lack of belief in your product will show up in the quality of your content in an unfavorable way. It will also drain your energy writing about something that you’re really not interested in.
This is why it’s important to make sure that you choose a niche that you are passionate about, and find great products to promote that you yourself would buy and use. This will make creating content a pleasure for you, and your audience will love keep on coming back for more of what you have to offer.
8. Caring More About Making A Sale Than The Person
It’s important that you have good intentions behind anything that you do in life, and the same goes for your online business. If you only care about making a sale, then people will pick up on this. You will sound like you’re being a very pushy salesman, and anyone on the other side of that will be put off buying anything from you because you will lose their trust.
If you on the other hand, show that you care about the people that follow your work, and instead of just trying to selling them something, rather give them the honest truth and show them the advantage and disadvantages.
If you love the product show them why you love it, and also why you think the product will improve their life for the better.
People don’t mind spending money if they believe a product or service will bring great value into their lives. As an Affiliate Marketer it’s your job to convey that message to your audience as clearly and honestly as possible.
9. Not Asking Your Readers For Their Email Address
Email Marketing is one of the best ways to keep in contact with your readers and viewers. Almost everyone with an internet connection will have created an email address and actively uses it. Apps like Gmail for example make it so easy for anyone to get an email on their computer or smartphone.
It’s important that you don’t spam them, but rather send them quality content that they are genuinely interested in. This could be for example, a Weekly or Monthly News letter showing off the latest gadgets, or price specials on great products. If you send your audience content targeted to their needs, they will more likely engage with it and possibly make a purchase.
A great advantage of email marketing is the ability to reach your audience anytime with very little effort. It’s also more affordable than you think with many options and subscriptions to choose from including free starter subscriptions.
Summary
Affiliate Marketing is here to stay and is going to reward anyone who puts in the effort to create quality content for their followers and readers.
Affiliate Marketing may feel difficult in the beginning but if you focus on the right strategy, work hard and never give up, then you will be well on your way to achieving financial freedom and live the life of your dreams!
It’s an amazing journey, and it would be great to have you along with me.
If you interested in learning more about my number 1 resource that I used to leverage my Affiliate Marketing success, you may want to check this review out.
I hope that you found this post helpful, and feel free to contact me if you have any further questions.
All the best
Luciano, AdventurousWealth.com