We have all heard the sales pitches claiming that all we affiliate marketers have to do is babble out some sort of content every day and we will get rich. And to top that, we can do it in our pajamas for just a few hours per week, leaving us with endless amounts of free time to enjoy life.
Heck, those pages say it is so easy that my two-year-old niece can do it, don’t they?
So, with this in mind, why do so many people claim that affiliate marketing is really impossible? What makes affiliate marketing so difficult?
If we take the over-hyped sales-pitch-pages out of the comparison and place this back into reality, each of us know that creating any new business, wether it’s offline or online, requires much more than just showing up a few hours per day and doing a couple simple tasks to be successful.
But on the other hand, when we are working for someone else to help building their business, many times just showing up is more then enough to get that weekly paycheck.
Adopting The Executive Mindset
There is not any risk when you work for someone else. Well, there is just one tiny risk — the risk of you losing that job. But, the main success of that business is not balancing on the shoulders of the employees, right?
With affiliate marketing, your bank balance depends on the outcome of our actions each day. Just showing up is never enough — it is completely on our shoulders.
I talk a lot about on TheMillionairesLife.com about mindset changes. Not really from a ‘if think it, you will achieve it’ kind of mindset, but more from an employee-mindset versus a business-owner mindset.
Most of us are raised by their parents to finish school and to get a good job and enjoy the securities from someone else making the decisions what we are worth each week via the numbers on our paycheck.
That feels very safe and extremely easy in a way, doesn’t it? Showing up, getting paid. Doing well, getting a raise.
Overcoming “The Employee” Mindset
But, how many of us were taught to get out there, starting a business, and be 100% accountable for the entire bottom line?
I can tell you that I surely was not raised that way. The idea of doing something that is so risky… extremely crazy… was not even worth a consideration.
That is why I personally thought affiliate marketing to be difficult – the complete mindset shifting. Getting all these things straight in my head was pretty challenging for me, especially when I first started out with affiliate marketing.
Good friends and close family would ask me stuff like, ‘You have been doing this online thing for a month now, so why can you not pay your bills with it yet?’
Shucks!
When you are still stuck in that employee-mindset mode, those kinds of questions are horrible and very defeating… and it is hard to handle that. Those particular questions lead to certain feelings of (dare I say it) failure and are de-motivational in all ways possible. In fact, I’ve talked to plenty of people who have stopped with affiliate marketing because they were simply not living up to the expectations of those close to them who spoke from their employee-mindset.
The moment I started reading and learning from those people that lived on the outside of the employee-mindset, things got excessively easier for me. Ok Sure, the overall learning curve is very challenging and the changes on the net fly at me each day at an high rate, but that is not the hardest part.
The hardest part, for me personally, was learning to shift and change my mindset to accept that this is what it is like to be a online business owner. That change in my mindset was freeing, empowering even! And after that, things suddenly became much easier.
What challenges do you find to be the most difficult about affiliate marketing? What mindset changes did you make to overcome it? Please Share in the comments below!.
Add Comment