How To Get Good At Anything ~ Even If It’s Affiliate Marketing (You’ll Be Surprised How Simple This Is)

Ok, so I get it. You’ve tried affiliate marketing and you didn’t have any success with it. Or is it just that you gave up too soon?

Affiliate marketing as a business model gets a bad reputation. If you say to someone that you do affiliate marketing, they’ll either look at you blankly or say something like “oh so you just sell to your friends and family”.

The fact is that affiliate marketing is a great way to start and grow an online business, but so few people that get into affiliate marketing actually make any money. Why is that?

The number of people who have said to me since I started, “Oh I tried affiliate marketing, but it didn’t work”. They say it in a way that implies “yeah don’t waste your time”

When I hear that about about anything, “it didn’t work”, I usually think, you mean it didn’t work for you, probably because you went about it the wrong way or you didn’t have the patience to stick with it.

Before I got into the world of digital marketing I worked in the recruitment industry for many, many years, eventually becoming a sales coach.

Recruitment consultants can earn good money and for many years (when I was exchanging my time for money) I did as well. I had a great recruitment career that paid for my house and funded lots of snowboarding trips!

Lots of people were attracted into the job by the lure of the earning potential, but in my experience, very few people actually made the big money. There was a high churn rate and over the years I saw a lot of people come and go.

There was a common theme amongst the people who were successful and still are; they stayed in the job for more than a few years and they worked at it.

That’s it. No special set of skills, no particularly complicated process, they just stayed and worked.

We’ve all heard the saying “practice makes perfect”, but people seem to forget that. That in order to get good at something you actually need to practice. It’s no different with affiliate marketing or recruitment or anything else for that matter.

You hear it all the time “Oh I’ve tried that, but it didn’t work”.

Is it a generational thing, can we blame it on society? Is it the millennials, the Y generation? Do people expect things to come too easily these days. Yes I think they probably do.

Shows like the XFactor always made me laugh when they’d show the backstory of some 16 year old kid talking about how hard they’d worked and how this was their big chance and it means so much to them because they’ve given it everything. Sorry but, but get over yourself and keep trying. I’m sorry, I just don’t buy it!

There’s a great book, by Matthew Syed called “bounce, the myth of talent and the power of practice”

In book he talks about how he and his brother were lucky enough to have a table tennis table in their garage when he was 8 years old and his brother was a few years older. Because of this they got really good as they literally played for hours every day after school.

Matthew went on to become British number one at table tennis in 1995 and he attributes his success, not to talent, but to consistent practice.

In the book he also gives numerous similar examples of people who have become great at one thing and become hugely successful, purely through their ability to focus, practice, learn and essentially “stick with it”

I do think that that is one of the main reasons that most people don’t succeed whether it’s with affiliate marketing or anything else for that matter. They just don’t stick with it. They give up when it gets a bit difficult, a bit challenging, a bit like hard work.

They tell themselves it’s the “thing” they’re doing that doesn’t work, the business model itself, when actually it’s them.

They weren’t willing to learn from their mistakes.

They weren’t willing to make changes to improve what they were doing, make it better.

They weren’t willing to look inside themselves to see what they were doing wrong.

They weren’t willing to find a better way, find a more efficient way, so that they could become successful.

So coming back to affiliate marketing, there is no reason why anyone needs to fail. You just need to stick with it, keep learning, keep improving, keep trying and eventually you will succeed.

There is so much free training out there, so much good advice and information to help you to get started and you can always pay for training. I myself have spent thousands of dollars over the last 5 years on training and every penny has been money well spent.

Put the blinders on

Keep laser focused

Keep away from the “shiny objects”

STICK WITH IT!

Now go and make some money.

In the interest of transparency, I want to let you know that I occasionally include affiliate links in my posts. I will only include links to products that I have found interesting and useful in my journey and which I believe will be of interest to you on your journey towards a “passive income” lifestyle. If you purchase an item using my affiliate link, I will receive a commission.