What Is Your Biggest Challenge In Affiliate Marketing Today? (35)
What Is Your Biggest Challenge In Affiliate Marketing Today?
Doing a little poll here folks....
Kinda curious what exactly road blocks you form being more successful....
Feel free to be as honest as you wanna be.....
Treat this as a way to improve yourself and give us some ideas of ways in which STM can help you stack more paper....
I will go first.....
For me personally its focusing and organizing and staying on track....its hard to do day to day....
What is your biggest challenge?
initially technical but now more workflow and focus
Getting PoF to work and generate steady income while keeping quality high.
making stable IM $ to quit the 9-5
more beefy programming php knowledge, database, and better copywriting skills
1. Techy stuff forsure
I think #2 is something that's a bit less specific, but generally choosing a traffic source, and really getting down to testing 10 offers. I aim to do it fast, and it just never happens like i want it to. This isn't something that can really be taught but picture how much work you would get done if you lived in a 1 bedroom basement for 1 month, without a cell phone, or connections to any friends, family or responsibility whatsoever, thats the work level i want to sometimes do and just can't get it to happen.
mindset.
been stuck in the trying mode for so long...
when it comes to starting campaigns and knowing i will lose money... it's tough to press go.
i also want to do things perfectly from the start... which prevents action.
i don't want to fail and not going at it 100% means i will never fail... just not make progress. it's sad, but true.
Originally Posted by harrypotter
Technical for sure. I am still struggling trying to get my CPV lab tracking correctly also only have some rudimentarty html in my tool-belt. I am over the failure thing. Been in the IM game for a few years and I have taken my bumps and bruises and not scared to get a few more because successes have come and will come again.
Also being diligent like mentioned above. How far along would I be if I created 3 new campaigns every day. WOW! but I still dont do it. lol
My main issue is staying on track and not drifting into spending time doing nothing, I do kinda set daily goals I want to hit and make a list of them on a notepad and get them done - but that's being sat infront of my laptop from when I wake up to when I go to bed pretty much. I have too many distractions at home (the tv is enough to take me off course) so my work per hour suffers.
For example today I've done a fair bit but been working for about 14 hours (minus a few hours to chill out, eat food, etc). I think I could have done what I have today in 4-5 hours easily if not less if I was concentrated enough.
- Not hitting my targets
- Not being able to scale campaigns as much as I'd like, wanting to attack Facebook with some offers but not sure what to run as I'd prefer to avoid cloaking if I can
- Not realizing my potential to make LOTS of money and being stuck on small numbers for quite a long time now.
- Wasting valuable time building / blogging / reading stuff that isn't going to make me money.
- Not knowing what offers to run
- Giving up too early on some campaigns
My biggest day has only ever been $1200 and I only ever hit that once. I want to do this consistently, and hearing of people making 10k in one day just obliterates my mind as to how I can achieve that too.
Luckily, technical stuff is easy for me as I've spent 5-6 years programming, cracking and being a flat-out nerd, lol.
I test too many variables at once and spend way too much money testing.
Or, I don't test enough variables and end up with way too much useless data at the end of the day on a campaign that doesn't work well.
It's always either one or the other; I don't have an in-between level.
Getting something stable running.
thats my roadblock to succes. I get campaigns to work but they always die quick.
Also i don't have good contacts with guys in the biz, i need to network more
Definitely, getting stable is the hardest part.
Doesn't matter how many precautions I take, something will go wrong. The offer gets pulled, the advertiser gets stricter, or the campaign simply dies out.
I might be able to deal with the fact that campaigns are short lived if I could get lots of campaigns rocking but my success rate isn't that great yet.
cashflow
procastination
get things focus
It used to be my lack of structure...I look back and say "oh I've been doing AM for around a year...and I don't have a whole lot to show for it"...but I didn't actually work that whole time. I spend about a year making campaigns on my couch or in bed (or not) until I didnt feel like it and occaisionally getting in a good flow for a couple hours on the weekend. That led to me just throwing shit at the wall, sometimes things would stick, sometimes they wouldnt. when they didn't stick immediately, I would just say fuck it and stop it early or not change anything and let it go too long like something was going to magically click. I've improved my structure and organization 100%+ by working in my home office, either working or not working, not multitasking, keeping better records and working on 'myself' a lot in terms of productivity, personal responsibility & elimination of the magic bullet search. This is a business, treat it as such.
Current challenges are:
1. Not focusing enough on volume. (again probably a little fear of loss at play here). Lately, when I find myself piddling around with bullshit campaigns I see the Angry Russian in my head ranting about volume vs ROI.
2. Not keeping a presence of mind. Getting too caught up in this or that and missing out on something obvious or going down a useless path on a campaign, just because. Also sometimes thinking I'm smart enough to understand exactly how things work instead of keeping an open mind for other possibilities.
3. fear of loss. fucker sneaks up and makes me do stupid shit to campaigns...stop to early, run too long
4. Flippy floppy network reps (JT) one second my rep will be johnny on the spot, then disappear for a week. Makes it really hard to do business like that. I'mma handle that though.
Hmm tooo many ways to make money in AM (IM), thus stay focused. It's tax season, people are fat, people are old, people are lonely, they need out of debt, their teeth are yellow, they want to make money online by pushing a button, they want cheap electronics ect ect ect. AHHHHH! Everywhere I look at see money trees of massive opportunity.
So I need to stay focused and scale my business and try to keep the noise to a minimum. Internet Marketing ADD is a common issue.
And I do not enjoy being banned. But that is something I have to live with like slow Internet.
Could someone hack Facebook and give me back my accounts please.
:-)
getting ads approved and the cycle of being banned by networks and figuring how to get new accounts
You NEED support from your traffic source as well as support from your offers/affiliate network. If you don;t have that in place it can be tough.
Definitely focus. The workflow webinar you held recently helped a HUGE amount though.
Managing my money.
Need to learn some technical stuff, but I'm going to buckle down and study that.
I'm down from going to the gym 4 days a week to 1 a week since I started IM...
Going from 10k a day to only 100 a day.. 0_o
Motivation. At the end of the day this is a very boring job (and one I have no intention of staying in too long, it's a stepping stone to better things). Makes it hard to knuckle down and do some work, especially when you know you are going to have to wade through failed campaign after failed campaign to get to something good.
@polishedturd There is no excuse for you to make this boring. You have all the freedom in the world to make it interesting for yourself. Run an offer that interests you, or an angle, or a traffic source. I don't touch search or SEO because I find that shit boring as hell. I try to come up with really creative fresh ideas, because that is what stimulates and motivates me. You will struggle to make AM work if you are bored out of your tree. You gotta wake up in the morning and be excited to do this stuff.
Getting Accounts Banned Finding New Traffic Sources
Trust.
It's hard to find companies in the industry that you can trust to keep your stuff private, as well as not running it themselves.
Originally Posted by Mr Green
Someone wise once told me that in any endeavour, you give 90% of everything you are capable of giving in the first three years. After that, it's downhill all the way. Hard to be excited about the same old same old. Offers and traffic sources come and go, but in the end it's still just the same shit, different day.
^^^ the guy who told you that doesnt deal with athletes i imagine?
@polishedturd. Affiliate marketing has been a ten year stepping stone for you? Why are you still in it if you are so bored of it? Surely you could use the skills learnt in a field a bit more stimulating for you.
@polishedturd
I'm with Green on this one. If its boring find something else. You have a skill set that some people would die to have. Or take your business to a new level, outsource parts that bore you etc.
This is pretty much why I started the network, running offers is fun, but working affiliates and advertisers directly is a whole new challenge and now I can take what I know and help dozens of other affiliates find success.
Stop moping about and do something about it, just like you switched careers 10 years ago you can still do it.
I'd say biggest is traffic sources are restrictive/ban happy.
For me as an offer owner, I want to find some way to work long-term with these sources and have them be viable, reliable sources of traffic
Yeah this is the same for me. I'm not someone to multitask and sometimes I get caught up talking with AMs, affiliates, etc that I will forgot what exactly what I'm working on. I started to not log on to skype/aim/etc while I'm working so I won't get distracted.
Staying Focused when the weather is good
1.) Procrastination
2.) Money/Security (Scared to have a few negative days/weeks on new campaign, even if my capital is in the mid xx,xxx)
3.) Noise (Easily distracted to chase popular campaigns and not making anything unqiue)
4.) Copying landers and ad copy.
5.) Not reading enough.
6.) Chasing fast money and not stability/longevity.
7.) Easily distracted. I can work 1-2 hours in a day and play games/reddit for the rest. I have rescuetime to prove my point with my productivity at 23% 
1. Staying Focused
2. Need to focus on more long term than short term (not really sure how to do this though as all my campaigns are dependent on offers or traffic sources, third party players who are out of my control and could essentially end or severely hamper my business if they changed their policies or optimized me off etc)
3. Not really sure what to do with the xxx,xxx profit that I have saved up (i want to invest it in non affiliate stuff but not really sure where to start)
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