Mastering Affiliate Marketing: The Mindset That Sets You Apart

When you Google ‘How to succeed in affiliate marketing’ you will find many articles and videos on finding the right product and building the perfect sales funnel. And while these are very important tools to have to make it, there is one excellent piece of equipment that is indispensable in achieving success in Affiliate marketing: the right mindset.

In my earlier articles here I devoted my attention to mostly how AI tools like ChatGPT can help you in your various (Affiliate) Marketing endavours.  Here however I will elaborate on why having the right mentality or mindset is the most valuable tool at your disposal to succeed on the level you want to reach.

Treat Affiliate Marketing as a serious business

Some time ago, when I just started freelancing I was offered a part-time job as a copywriter with an online marketing agency.  For me this job sounded perfect: I would be working a maximum of 16 hours a week. This gave me the chance to develop my copywriting and online marketing skills while still having plenty of time to build up my business. It wasn’t to be. When I went to the agency for the job interview there was absolutely no chemistry between me and the interviewer. The moment I left their office I knew ‘I’m never going to work one minute there!’

But there was one thing the interviewer said that resonated with me ‘So, you want to become a freelance online marketing consultant? Nothing wrong with that, many of my employees have that ambition. But can I be honest here? You don’t strike me as an entrepreneur or business owner at all.’

First I was a little bit offended by this remark, but when I got home I had to admit she was right. I hadn’t been treating me building a business as a freelance online marketing consultant serious enough and for that simple reason she couldn’t take me serious.

Invest time and effort in your business and don’t forget to do research into successfull habits

It’s the same with affiliate marketing. Whether you’re doing it as a side hustle to make some extra money or if you really want become rich, you need to treat it as a serious business.  Why would your potential audience see you as a bona fide entrepreneur if you don’t see yourself that way?

How can you achieve that? First, put in the time and effort to build your affiliate business. The more content you create and improve, the better you become at what you’re doing, the more you will start feeling like a business owner.

Second, it never hurts to do some research on the habits of successful entrepreneurs. Tim Ferris’s ‘The 4 hour Work Week ‘is an excellent starting point. Or ‘Crushing it! How Great entrepreneurs build their business and influence and how you can to’ by none other than Gary Vaynerchuck. You can also watch him on YouTube or the less well known, but very successful marketer Miles Beckler.

Affiliate Marketing is not a Get Rich Quick Scheme

Now, don’t get me wrong, there is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to earn money and lots of it. If that’s the reason you became affiliate marketer kudos to you! This is also part of the reason why I went into this business. The other part is I really like doing this!

But don’t expect to start earning copious amounts of money right away.  There are marketing guru’s out there who will promise you this is possible if you just buy their courses. But trust me; it takes time and effort to build everything from the ground up. And as a beginner you have to take a learning curve into account. You can make a decent amount of money or even get quite rich if you so desire, but only if you’re in it for the long haul. This brings me to my third point:

Focus on both one long term goal and achievable short term goals

As I’ve stated above, building your affiliate marketing business will take some time. Focusing on what lies over the horizon, the long term goal will help you achieve this. One way to do this is to actually write your long term goal down. For instance, it can be ‘I want to earn at least $10.000,00 a month through affiliate marketing’.  When you write this down it makes it real, instead of remaining one of the many ideas floating around in the back of your head.

Aside from that, focus on daily and weekly goals which with a little work are easy to achieve. For example you can do the following:

• Day 1: find and research niche
• Day 2: find and research topics
• Day 3: build website
• Day 4: build social media
• Day 5: write and post first piece of content

Of course you can create and follow your own schedule. The main point here is not to do everything at once. You will lose focus and also your motivation that way.

Focus on your audience first, monetization comes later

This is in my opinion the most important part of this blog post

A fellow marketer once told me: ‘nobody cares about you or your product’. 

Meaning, that just sending out affiliate links left and right in the hope that people will click on them and buy stuff won’t get you very far. Why would they? They don’t know you can be trusted; you haven’t done anything to help them or to earn this trust.

Trust first, money later

How do you gain this trust? By supplying your audience with a steady stream of high quality content which helps them, gives them valuable information. Or entertains them at the very least. The point is: a successful affiliate marketer will offer value first!

If your audience knows you can offer them helpful information they will be more than inclined to take a look at the products and services you’re promoting. And maybe even buy them. 

Offering valuable information on a topic you yourself are already passionate about is also much easier and more fun than trying to promote products you don’t have any connection with. The easiest example I can give you is the Health and Fitness niche. Just writing articles or putting out videos which give your audience helpful tips on fitness, improving posture, what works for losing weight etc will earn you credibility and trust. That credibility in turn will make promoting the actual affiliate products quite simple.

Cut down on your daily distractions

This one should be obvious, but so many online entrepreneurs loose huge amounts of time with mundane distractions while they could have been working on improving their business. Not to be too gloomy, but your time on this beautiful earth is limited. So wasting your time on stuff that doesn’t get you anywhere when you’re trying to build a business really is a pity. Because when you’ve got everything up and running there will come a time to enjoy yourself.

Bingewatching Netflix, going out and partying with friends and suffering from a hangover the next day, while fun activities, really cuts into the time you could have been spending working. And I realize it’s sometimes hard to get yourself to do the work, I am a professional procrastinator myself. The trick is to see these fun activities as a reward after you’ve done the work. Create and post that great blog article first then treat yourself to a beer with friends. 

And look at this way, the average Westerner spends at least 2 to 3 hours per day watching TV. Every Day! Even if you use only half of that time to work on your business you will have an extra 14 hours a week of productivity. 

Take some time of now and then

This may sound counterintuitive to what I wrote earlier. I don’t mean slacking off. But working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week is not healthy. It is stressful and will give you tunnel vision. This doesn’t help in creating an excellent business.

A successful online consultant I know gave me this advice: every 3 months he takes a long weekend of work. A 4-day weekend. And most of the times he will also visit another city or go to a nice hotel in the countryside. Just to get his mind of everything.  Once he’s back he’s as refreshed as if he took a month long holiday.

So let loose every now and then! It’s better both for you and your business.

Failure is perfectly OK

You will make mistakes, especially in the beginning. Most successful entrepreneurs have a long list of mistakes and failures behind their names, before they got things running like they wanted. There’s nothing wrong with making mistakes.  Learn to not get frustrated, but to see mistakes and setbacks as opportunities to further improve as an affiliate marketer. 

Look at it this was -> most experienced entrepreneurs will treat a problem or mistake the following way:

• What caused this problem and how can I fix it?
• If I can’t fix it what’s the alternative?
• If there’s no solution or alternative, move on

Read! A lot!

Like any tool a mind needs to be sharpened and what better way to this then by reading. Most obvious are books that can improve your skills as a marketer. The classic ‘Ogilvy on Advertising ‘ for instance is perfect if you want to get into copywriting. Or ‘Permission Marketing’  by Seth Godin when you want to improve your content marketing skills.

But don’t limit yourself to just books about digital marketing. You can find inspiration for your business in almost any type of book: philosophy, fiction, history, you name it. I myself got very inspired by ‘Grant’ by Ron Chernow (yes, the same guy who wrote the book about Hamilton on which the famous musical was based).

U.S. Grant, as you may know, was struggling through a large part of his life before he became the successful general in the Civil War. Farming, becoming a clerk in his father’s leather store; all the while desperately making ends meet.  This struck a chord with me, a large part of my life I have been searching for the right career and way of life (and yes, I’ve found it!). Now, I don’t mean to say you need a bloody Civil War to make something of yourself. But just realize you can inspiration in almost any book.

Conclusion

Having the right mindset will make it so much easier to achieve success as an affiliate marketer, or any online business owner. All in all, just start doing the work and improving yourself along the way is the best method to make it. To have the mindset of an entrepreneur. Realize this: if you’re doing this for at least 6 months and you look back on what have achieved already you can be proud! Even if you didn’t earn a lot of affiliate commissions, you accumulated a boatload of skills you didn’t know you had in you 6 months ago!