This one’s going to be straight to the point.

As a Full-time Affiliate, I’ve made almost every mistake in the book. ‘Almost’, because I’m sure there are plenty more I haven’t made yet.

I’m going to quickly cover a bunch of things that would hinder my progress and were basically ‘hurdles’ I had to learn how to jump over.

Here we go,

Spending Too Little

Now I understand $1 U.S can be of different value based on which country you’re from. I’m from Melbourne and financially we do pretty well so spending in U.S dollars hasn’t been much of an issue but for people in other countries where $1 can be a lot in their local currency, it’s a bit harder.

Whatever the case, the principals are the same. You’re not going to get anywhere analysing with $2 or $5. Having a $5/day campaign will teach you things but at a very slow pace.

I would be testing Teespring campaigns at $30 spend on it’s first day. I had 5-10 campaigns every day on test mode so you can imagine, I’d be spending $100 – $300/day JUST testing! It might seem like a lot but when you do the math in the long term, my Teespring model would allow me to learn quickly and find winners quickly.

The more you spend, the more data you’ll get back on how you perform as an internet marketer and this data will tell you what you need to improve on. This is how it works and once you figure this out, you’ll want to spend more often.

I would advise anyone that wants to get into internet marketing to have a daily budget they are willing to lose. $20 – $30/ day is good. Aim to spend this amount every day on a campaign and after 1 month you would have learnt a lot!

Spending Too Much

Opposite to the above, sometimes people spend way too much. I’d see people spend $200 on a campaign when they’ve only had a few sales. Throwing more money isn’t going to flip the campaign into a winner.

You need to tweak and retest. Unless you’re not tweaking just stop and move on.

Have a stop loss budget. For many, it’s $30 – $50 per campaign. If there’s no hint of success then stop spending and move on.

Too much Reading Not enough REAL Action

This one’s a biggie. People love to read and devour information. I get that. I was like that too and in many ways still read a lot. No matter how much you read, no ones going to do the actual work for you. It’s not enough knowing about things. In order to achieve it, you HAVE to dedicate painstakingly long hours learning/practicing/implementing/replicating what you’ve learned.

You have to do the hard work and grind it out. This is what I call ‘REAL Action’.

People get confused and falsely satisfy themselves working on tasks that seem like they have a lot of value but in essence, don’t do much. These tasks can be,

• Writing blog posts
• Reading eBooks, watching tutorials, listening to podcasts
• Working on projects for months/years without testing the market first
• Building websites for months/years without testing how traffic responds to the idea
• commenting on forums/discussing things

The above are NOT real tasks. They’re good and have some effect but won’t directly impact the front end of your business. There’s no customer to business connection there and the effort is usually unseen by potential customers. This is why their in the above category.

REAL tasks however are the following,

• Driving Traffic to your Business, seeing what parts of your website people like and not like
• Split testing different products
• Launching campaigns
• Launching campaigns
• Launching campaigns

Anything that tells you how people are responding to your product/service is what’s going to give you real information about where and how you need to improve things.

Most people making a killing are really just launching and split testing a tonne more campaigns then you are.

Impatience, Jumping Around

I’ve lost count of the number of business I started and ended within a 2 day period. Why? Because another, better, shinier idea came along of course. This process repeated itself for 6 months till I realised I was stuck in this awful merry go round.

I realised that it takes time to adequately learn enough skills to make something work and jumping from one thing to another restarts this process.

Once I decided to stick to something until it worked, I started to see ongoing success. They started as small successes at the start but with persistence and focus I broke into pretty much anything I wanted to.

Stick to one thing that you KNOW someone else is making money off and don’t give up until you’ve seen the same success.

The best things about this industry is that the skills you learn are mostly transferrable so you’re never wasting time.

Caring About what Other People Think

This one’s more personal. Some people have experienced it, some people haven’t.

Affiliate marketing is a whole lot of nothingness for a while. People think you’re just wasting time behind a computer doing god knows what. They’ll give you that, ‘this guy’s wasting his time’, look all the time.

Don’t worry about them or anyone else. Take your ego, put it into a little box and don’t touch it till you’ve made it.

A lot of people hesitate to try affiliate marketing because they’re so fearful of what others would think if they left their prestigious jobs or down sized their car to have a healthy affiliate marketing test budget.

You have to be ready to be looked at funny, to be questioned and generally people not understanding what’s happening with your life.

That’s fine. It’s MEANT to be like this. Affiliate Marketing is a secret. It’s not a secret because people don’t tell others. It’s a secret because people are so brainwashed into thinking the possibility of someone sitting behind his computer for 4-6 hours a day can potentially bring in more money than the CEO’s of most companies is zero.

Connect yourself with other affiliate communities if you need to.

– Mateen

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