Many (probably most) affiliate marketers share a common dream when they get into the business – quitting their day jobs and making affiliate marketing into a career.  Some may have more modest goals of creating a solid stream of recurring revenue every month to supplement their regular income.  But, whatever the goal, many affiliates also share another common trait.  They haven’t achieved those goals.  There are plenty of reasons why an affiliate marketing business may not have become as successful as possible.  But, I think that many of those reasons can fall into four categories that can create barriers to achieving success.

Fear of Failure
Fear holds us back from doing many things we want to do in life.  Some fears are helpful (don’t get too close to the angry rattlesnake when you are out hiking), but others are really just our brains trying to help us avoid things that seem momentarily unpleasant.  Failure is definitely an uncomfortable experience for most people and we often try to avoid doing things that could make us uncomfortable.  But, those who achieve true success in almost any endeavor (affiliate marketing, baseball, acting, music, or pretty much anything else) recognize that failure is a part of reaching their goals.  Failures are often the result you encounter when you push yourself beyond your current limits.  If you never attempt anything that has a risk of failure, then you will likely achieve very little.

The fear of failure may be the single biggest factor holding many people back from achieving their goals.  It isn’t an easy barrier to overcome, or everyone would do it.  But, if you want to stand out from the crowd and build the affiliate marketing career that you dream about, you must learn to embrace failure.  The key is to learn from every failure and build on that knowledge to keep moving your business toward eventual success.

Refusal to take Control
It is easy to blame outside factors for the fact that your business hasn’t taken off the way you wanted.  In fact, it is probably a basic part of human nature to want to focus on outside factors that are beyond your control when things don’t go your way.  But, one common trait you will find among successful entrepreneurs is that they focus on taking control of their situations rather than being at the mercy of outside forces.  When things go wrong, they look for solutions, not excuses.  Sure, things happen that you can’t control (your server goes down, you lose your best offer, etc.) but successful affiliate marketers look for ways to meet these challenges head-on and make sure they are less impacted by them in the future.  Remember that you are the only one who is responsible for achieving your goals.  There will always be hurdles and barriers thrown in your way.  Your job is to find ways to overcome them and make them less of a factor in the future.  This isn’t always easy.  But, if success in affiliate marketing was easy, everyone would be getting rich online.

Not Enough Motivation
Simply having a great vision of what you want to achieve isn’t going to get you anywhere.  You actually have to be motivated to put in the time and effort to achieve your goals.  Millions of kids dream of playing in the NBA, NFL, or other professional sports league.  They love playing baseball or soccer, and think it would be amazing to get paid to play their favorite sport.  But, to actually make it to the highest level of a professional sport, you need to put in an incredible amount of time and effort perfecting your skills.  Sure, there are certain physical tools that give some people a leg up, but just relying on natural physical abilities will only get you so far.  Successful pro athletes work incredibly hard on improving their skills with constant, deliberate practice to ingrain certain habits in their swing or jump shot.  While playing the game may be fun, hour-after-hour, day-after-day, month-after-month, of working on a specific skill isn’t likely to meet anyone’s definition of fun.  But, these players want to achieve success so badly that they will put in this kind of effort to reach their goals.  The question is, how motivated are you to achieve your goals?  Everyone wants to be rich, work on their own terms, and enjoy the lifestyle of their choice.  But, only a few people are truly motivated enough to do what it takes to get there.

There is Always Tomorrow
One last barrier that keeps many people from succeeding is a lack of urgency.  Everyone is busy and it is very easy to put things off until tomorrow.  If everyone who ever wanted to try affiliate marketing actually did it, I can’t even imagine how many millions of affiliate marketers there would be.  But, the fact is that most people will talk about it, but never do anything.  I’m sure we are all guilty of this at one point or another.  We talk about something we want to do, whether it is building an online business, learning to snowboard, writing a book, learning a foreign language, or any other goal we would like to achieve.  But, most of these goals simply fall by the wayside and never get accomplished because we never go beyond thinking about it.

The first and most fundamental step to success in affiliate marketing is actually doing something.  Stop talking about that website you want to build and start building it.  Don’t just think about running an offer, actually run it.  The one thing that all successful affiliates have in common is that they took the step to turn their goals into reality.  Starting is no guarantee of success, but not ever starting is an absolute guarantee that you won’t succeed.

Filed under: Affiliate Tips by Tom Wozniak