Why So Many Affiliate Marketers Fail at Affiliate Marketing?

Thousands of affiliate marketers try affiliate marketing every year, and only a small percentage of them make enough to quit their job or significantly change their lifestyle. I am not an affiliate marketing Guru. However, as I interact with so many affiliate marketers trying hands-on affiliate marketing and yet fail, let me share some of the key reasons that I think are the probable causes for so many affiliates marketers fail at affiliate marketing.

1. Wrong Understanding of Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a commission-based business model. The affiliate marketers earn a percentage as a commission of the total sale by the company or individual whose product he recommends.

The earnings of affiliates are purely based on the sales one can generate.

However, in the digital world, because the amount of commission often is very close to the product price, one thinks they can make a lot of money.

For example, if one recommends hosts, the commission amount is almost equal or sometimes even more than what customers may pay to the company. For a sale of $80, one may even get a commission of $100. On top of that, companies provide recurring commissions, which means affiliate gets paid as long as the customer keeps paying for the SaaS products.

I agree, Affiliate Marketing is an easy way to make money online, but one has to do it the right way. If you can’t make sales or don’t have active traffic where people are ready to buy what you have to offer, you will hardly earn sales commissions.

Affiliate marketing is not about a turn-key solution where all you need to set up a WordPress blog and boom – you are done.

I will re-iterate that affiliate marketing is a commission-based business model. You will make money if and only if you can generate sales—nothing more and nothing less.

So if you understand it right, the approach to affiliate marketing will be different now.

However, those who fail to understand and think they will make tons of money as affiliate commissions because someone else is doing are the affiliate marketers who fail miserably in affiliate marketing.

2. Lack of Long-Term Dedication Plan

Dedication is one of the most common things missing among the new affiliate marketers.

Let’s take an example of Sachin Tendulkar. You are not trying to be as great as Sachin Tendulkar but let us say you want to make a living as a sportsman playing cricket. Do you think you could go out, hit balls a few times a week, and expect to be a pro?

Author Malcolm Gladwell, who studied exceptionally talented and successful people of the world, in his book Outliers, wrote that to be in the top tier of any endeavor requires incredible dedication, and they have put in at least 10,000 hours of work over the years.

To be a successful affiliate, I am sure you will not need 10,000 hours, but you will surely need the same kind of dedication to be a better affiliate.

I have seen many people start an Internet Marketing training system, read it, and get really excited and then either don’t follow the course till the end or do it for a week or two and give up.

If you plan to make cricket as your career and the coach instructs to practice for 8 hours a day, understand from the cricket example. What can you say to those who are doing only an hour a day?

Can you blame the coach or the cricket as a career?

3. Not Investing in One’s Education

I see many people look for most of the things for free when it comes to online, and I am sure you will find a lot of excellent stuff for free. What if someone has bundled the same free stuff for you in one place and asking some small amount for doing that. It can save a lot of time searching for each of them. Isn’t it?

Successful people invest a lot of their time and money learning more about the business and then spend what is left over.

However, there are other sets of people who do it the other way round. They spend the vast majority of their time and money on other things in life and invest what is left learning something new for the business (online or offline).

I am sure it may sound too obvious, but it is a fact. How many books have you read this week, this month, and this year?

Make sure you are investing in your education and empowering your business. Learn from other successful people, avoid working alone, or even listen to people who can negatively influence you. If you cannot network with people face to face, try to learn as much as possible through books, DVDs, etc.

In educating yourself, you can have failures and successful affiliates enjoy the process of learning, even when they’re learning from their failures.

Appreciate the experience of failing to learn and grow. You have to learn to handle business failures.

4. Unable to Embrace the Competition

As an affiliate marketer, you should understand that affiliate marketing means competition.

You are not alone in the niche, and you will never be alone even if you start alone.

You can look for a small and unique niche to begin testing affiliate marketing. Still, in the long run, to make more money, you need to get into significant niches, i.e., health, wealth, and relationship.

Learn from the small niche and plunge into the competition.

Even if you prefer to remain in a small niche, it is essential to understand that competition will hit you. So you have to get better at it and still to beat the competition.

As affiliate marketers who you think are doing well are beating others on the competition.