If you’ve spent much time doing affiliate marketing, you know the perks: the flexible schedule, the low startup costs and overhead, the potential for passive income and quick scaling, and the beauty of not having to fuss with employees, fulfillment, or customer service.
On the other hand, you’ve probably bumped up against plenty of challenges and discovered why most people fail at affiliate marketing.
If you love all that’s good about affiliate marketing but want to ditch the other stuff, you’re not alone.
“This is a great field to be in with tremendous profit potential—if you’re doing it right. If you’re not, it can do the same thing as the 9 to 5 you were trying to avoid—take too much time and bandwidth without giving enough of a reward,” said Chris Reader. And Reader should know. He is a rising star in the affiliate marketing industry with 8-figure earnings as well as the man behind Profit Singularity’s course, which simplifies and automates the affiliate marketing process.
Here are the chief beefs about affiliate marketing and how to solve them:
1 – My Creativity Juice is Running Thin
If you’re the creative type, affiliate marketing probably called loudly to you from the start. Creating dazzling ads? Writing compelling copy? Churning out Oscar-worthy videos? Yes! Yes! Yes!
But creating ads and content day after day can really take it out of you. Even the greatest artists can burn out on things. Michelangelo took plenty of breaks from painting. Marcel Duchamp gave up art altogether to play chess. You’re not an outlier if you’re running low on ideas and need a creative assist.
The solution: Use your resources, and there are plenty of resources to help you stay in the game.
“If you can harness it well, AI is a gift to affiliate marketers,” said Chris Reader. “It can generate outstanding copy that you can use as-is or build off of.”
You can also look for affiliate marketing courses that offer a wealth of templates for tested and proven ads, landing pages, videos, and more. They can offer fresh inspiration to keep your campaigns on track.
Templates can be especially helpful in areas like video creation. If you like making videos for YouTube and other platforms but don’t want the hassle of creating them from scratch and dealing with all of the technical logistics, templates are invaluable.
2 – This is Taking More Time than I Planned On
The big perk of working for yourself is that you get to do what you want when you want (at least to a degree), and you aren’t a slave to the 9 to 5. But it’s not uncommon to see entrepreneurship become just as burdensome as a traditional job. You’re still a slave…just a slave to your own business. That may sound slightly more appealing to you, but it’s not the answer.
The dream of working just a few hours a day at the times you choose to work—it’s entirely possible when you know how.
The solution: Affiliate marketers live in an eat-what-you-kill environment where people are applauded for outworking the competition. To be clear, you shouldn’t do affiliate marketing if you don’t have a strong work ethic, but that doesn’t mean you get brownie points for working yourself to death. “Work smarter, not harder” is the perfect mantra for affiliate marketing.
“I help students in my Profit Singularity course find untapped corners of the internet where competition is low,” said Reader. “I also lead them to high-value offers so that they’re just managing a couple of high-yielding campaigns vs. a couple dozen low-yield ones. Where and what you advertise can make a huge difference in your quality of life.”
3 – I’m Sick of Platforms Moving the Goalposts
Banned on Facebook again? We get it. It’s hard to stay out of the danger zone when you don’t always know what the danger zone looks like from one day to the next. Many affiliate marketers report living in fear of getting banned on multiple platforms for things they didn’t even know were infractions and then having to go through the hassle of getting their accounts reinstated.
The solution: Templates can help here, too, as you work with proven ads rather than re-inventing the wheel and stepping into “banned” territory. You can also work with mentors who can help you choose your platform and your niche wisely to minimize your chance of getting banned.
4 – Competition is Too High
Affiliate marketing is a dog-eat-dog world in some niches. You might feel like there’s no way to distinguish yourself in this intensely competitive environment and make a decent profit.
The solution: This goes back to what you choose to advertise and the platform you choose to advertise on. Yes, some of the internet is saturated, but not all of it.
“I have many students who just couldn’t break in consistently on Facebook, and we took them over to some undiscovered areas of YouTube. Now they’re crushing it,” said Chris Reader.
If you’re not sure which direction to go in, don’t just throw spaghetti at the wall. Talk to a mentor or take a course with experts who keep a finger on the pulse of the internet. The last thing you want is to go full steam ahead—right into a dead end.
5 – My Profits Are Too Uneven
The low overhead and scalability of affiliate marketing open up the door to high profits—sometimes. Remember that you’re at the mercy of a lot of variables: the merchant’s rules, the amount of competitors in your niche, and the overall market trends. Without a fixed income, it can be very hard to plan and budget your finances.
The solution: If you want a steady salary, affiliate marketing is not the answer. However, there are things you can do to make your earnings more consistent. First, seek out higher-value products to sell, preferably those with subscriptions. One challenge with affiliate marketing is that nobody will ever buy a second product from you—unless you can sell a product with a subscription that will renew, bringing you ongoing passive income.
Next, leverage testing and analytics to find that perfect ad. If you can come up with one to two ads that work well, don’t move on. Stay with them and scale, scale, scale.
6 – I’m Stagnating
“Plenty of people get stuck in a rut when it comes to affiliate marketing,” said Chris Reader. Whether for their personal time management, creativity, or overall strategies. They may feel like they’ve tried everything, but they’re just not hitting those high-profit days they used to rack up when they started affiliate marketing.
The solution: Consider joining a mastermind or community that can help you think outside the box. Mentors and fellow marketers can share ideas for jumpstarting your ads, content, and videos.
7 – I’m Always Wondering if I’m Doing it Right
Being a good affiliate marketer requires expertise in a lot of different areas. You need to write killer copy and engaging content, create compelling videos, build beautiful and intuitive landing pages, and rock SEO to get more traffic to the landing pages. You’ll also need some basic psychology to get into the brain of your target audience, a strategic mind for building game plans, and logistical smarts so that you can perform testing and check your analytics continually.
You may be good at some of these things, but most of us aren’t good at all of them. This is why impostor syndrome looms large in the field of affiliate marketing. There’s so much to learn, yet no one is looking over your shoulder telling you to “add this” or “tweak that” for maximum success.
The solution: Pay someone to tell you if you’re doing it right. Find a course or mentorship program where you can learn from people who have cracked the code of affiliate marketing. It may be an investment upfront, but it will pay off when you can master the art of creating consistently high-yielding campaigns.
“You can figure out a lot on your own through analytics and testing, but it can take a long time. It’s often a better investment to sign up with a mentor who can critique and fine-tune your campaigns. They can help you learn in a few weeks what it might take you years to learn on your own,” said Profit Singularity’s Chris Reader.
Source Profit Singularity’s Chris Reader Tackles 7 Ways to Make Affiliate Marketing Easier
