Set your mindset straight
Starting your own business is always both an exciting and frightening experience. Spending your money on the idea of future profits is something that only true entrepreneurs can do without flinching.
Many beginner entrepreneurs are afraid to invest their money into digital commodities. This is natural.
Generally speaking, people do not have objections to spending $6,000 per month to rent a venue for a restaurant, pay for staff and supplies and wait 8 months to turn any profit, but have objections to spending $200 a month on traffic.
This is because a restaurant is tangible while digital stuff is not. Digital or not, investing money into your online business will always bring you something in return.
Even if you don’t turn any profit.
How’s that?
Think of it this way:
You are not losing money, you are buying data.
Profitable or not, data you purchase tells you something. It allows you to optimize your campaign and adjust your traffic targeting settings.
Data purchase is an investment towards future profits.
Once you understand that, most of your mental blockages will be gone.
I will take this a little bit further. The problem is not that you have failed, the problem is that you have not failed enough times. Feeling uneasy or a little bit angry with that statement? This is what I am talking about! You need to fail as many times as it takes to succeed. Why is failing so important?
It teaches you what does not work. If you fail enough times, you will be able to tell what won’t work with a quick glance and pick more promising offers.
You get data. Unprofitable data is still informative data. You get reference levels, audience sizes, CTRs of your landing pages. All foundations that you can build on.
It gives you mental resilience. Both success and failure are not a given. People that run successful campaigns for some time tend to lose their edge and start failing. You need to always be ahead of the game, no matter if you are currently winning or losing.
Even when failing, you still learn about the technical or business aspects of running an affiliate campaign. You learn how to create landing pages, how to set up tracking, how to research keywords or write content. You get better at every aspect of it.
No one will try to run a restaurant and fail 10 times in a row. But starting 10 campaigns to begin seeing positive numbers is a normal procedure to be a successful affiliate marketer. Do not be afraid of a failure – be afraid of not getting back in the game. Failure is not a final result, but rather a byproduct of the whole process.
How not to lose faith
It’s easy to talk, but losing faith is a serious issue. But again, you are not alone.
You are a part of something bigger. You work in an industry where there are many people like you. They have their flaws and various agendas, but they are very much like you. What you are feeling, what you are struggling with is or was a part of their experience as well.
Remember that you also have people around you. Family members, friends, colleagues. Construct the circle of significant others that will lift you up, provide you with support and teach you. Don’t bother with people that try to bring you down, often doing so to hide their regret that they aren’t following your independent path. Choosing the right people as companions is also a skill.
