The Leading Cause of Affiliate Death
posted in Getting Started |I’ve never seen any numbers but I imagine there’s an ungodly high death rate of affiliates within the first year of giving it a whirl. There are many reasons why the attrition rate is high, but I’m working on a theory that a leading indicator of why affiliates die an early death is how they answer the following question:
Why do you want to make money through affiliate marketing?
If your answer is “Because I want more money”, congratulations. Pass Go, collect $200.
If your answer is “Because I need more money”, my condolences. Would you like the extra Corpse De-Stinkifier added to your affiliate funeral package?
It’s a subtle difference but it speaks volumes, in many different tongues. Let’s unpack that a bit and see why there’s such a difference between “want” and “need”, and what that has to do with whether you’re ultimately successful or not as an affiliate.
When someone says “I need more money,” what they’re usually really saying is actually more complex, along the lines of “I can’t seem to get ahead, no matter how hard I work. I make decent money at my job but between a mortgage, car payments, kids, and just living life I can’t ever really get ahead. If I could just make enough extra money to pay our credit card bills each month we could finally have some breathing room, eventually paying off all our credit card debt and start saving some money. I’m not an idiot about saving or investing, I just need to find a way to get ahead of the curve for once. Something always seems to crop up, so we just pay the minimum we can on our debt each month, but it keeps growing as the interest is killing us. That’s why I need to make more money through things like affiliate marketing, as it doesn’t cost much at all to get started with that and can potentially produce the extra money I need.”
(Before I start pontificating in annoying, from-on-high fashion, believe me, I’ve been in exactly that spot. Almost everyone has at some point. It’s unfortunately a very natural place to find yourself in these days.)
Look at all the times the word “need” crops up. It’s as if the person doesn’t really have a choice in the matter, as if they’re not so much motivated by their situation but scared of the potential consequences. And they should be scared. Fear is a natural reaction to feeling trapped in a bad spot, just as feeling the urgent need to get out necessarily follows. You need more money to pay off your debt and get out of the hole. You really, really need it. And you need it now.
But the sad truth is that fear really isn’t much of a motivator. It adds a sense of immediate urgency, which can be mistaken for motivation, but if you don’t achieve immediate success at whatever you’re thrown yourself into, you tend to abandon it and look for something else that can rescue you, something to alleviate the fear. Motivation is good; urgency and need for immediate results is bad.
The problem with using affiliate marketing to try to satisfy that need is that it usually takes awhile to see the fruits of your labors. So if your answer is that you need more money, you’re predisposed to likely being in a hurry and not patient enough to plug away for months at the affiliate thing without seeing any substantial income from it. You’d otherwise have a great shot at making money as an affiliate, but you’re hamstrung and more likely to fail because of your surrounding circumstances.
If your answer was that you want more money, well, that’s a different ball of wax entirely. If you don’t need the money and have no internal or external clock that you’re racing against, when you have to make X dollars by a certain date to pay for Y, you’ve got a much better chance at succeeding as an affiliate. Not only that, but you’re also likely hard-wired in other ways for success, by the simple fact that you’ve already escaped the feedback loop to some extent.
So are you doomed to fail if you “need” to make money via affiliate marketing? Of course not. And, conversely, you’re not guaranteed to succeed just because you have no debts or other pressing fears and want more money. All I’m really trying to do is to slightly peel away some of the layers that separate success and failure in the affiliate world.
One of the biggest reasons I’ve been able to make over $100,000 in my affiliate career actually has nothing at all to do with affiliate marketing. When I got out of grad school and got a decent paying job in the real world, I busted my ass to get out of debt, living in a tiny efficiency apartment and driving a beat-up old pickup my grandparents gave to me. When I got out of debt, I didn’t move and I didn’t buy a new car. I started saving as much as I could for a down payment on a house.
All the while I kept plugging away at the affiliate stuff, because I wanted more money. It frustrated me when I wasn’t making money as fast as I’d have liked, but it didn’t defeat me. People much dumber than myself were making it work, so I kept stubbornly grinding away it, until I started finding things that worked for me. I kept trying new things and constantly dreaming up new ways to make the money I wanted. Most didn’t work but a few did. Of the few that did, most worked moderately well, with a handful working really, really well.
I don’t mean to sound like a blaring infomercial, but affiliate marketing has amazing potential, perhaps more so than any other start-up business out there. The costs are so low to get started and it’s absolutely perfect for people who have a day job yet want to make some additional income on the side, as you can do affiliate work from anywhere, at anytime, and you can scale it to the free time you have to sink into it.
It’s not a magic pill, though, especially if there are other areas in your life that out of whack. Affiliate marketing can’t stop you from spending more than you earn, nor can it cure you for a penchant for shinier, newer cars than any of your friends have. A lot of affiliate success or affiliate failure is actually closely tied to other areas of your life, so try not to look at affiliate marketing in a vacuum, as work in other areas of your life can dramatically improve your odds of making money as an affiliate.