Dec
Woah! 30 more minutes and I would have failed at my post for 30 days challenge. That was close! It has been a long, but wonderful Christmas Day, and I am just now getting home and unwinding. I will sleep good tonight! I hope everyone else had a great Holiday as well.
I am teh Suck
The affiliate marketing world is a wonderful and mysterious thing, but I am just having a hell of a time with it. In fact, to be perfectly honest, it is down right frustrating and depressing. I have always succeeded at anything related to computers, and ever since I was 10 years old I have been creating web pages and have had a presence on the web, but this whole affiliate thing is just blowing my mind.
Anyway, the point is that I think I need to take a step back, clear my head and start from the beginning. I am obviously doing something wrong, and I need to analyze myself and figure out what it is, or I’ll never make any money in this business. So I have made a list of things that I think I am doing wrong or I could be doing better. Observe:
Afraid of losing money!!!!!!!
I’ll start with my biggest and most important flaw. I’m scared. The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem, right? Well, i fully admit that I am chicken shit when it comes to this stuff. I am seriously worried about spending money, and i really think this is the main reason that I am not having any success. I really thought setting my budget of $250 would help me with this problem but It hasn’t. All i can think of is “oh no, I just spent another $5.00. thats another $5.00 out of my budget, so i better cut back and start spending less”. What I should be saying to myself is “I only spend $5.00 today, how am i going to make thousands of dollars a month by spending $5.00 a day? I need to spend more!”
In order to solve this, I really need to start finding a new mindset. I once read on StevePavlina.com (good writer, although I think a lot of what he write is complete bullshit) that if you want to be a millionaire, than you need to live and think like a millionaire. So I am going to give this a try for a while and see how it works out. I’m going to try and train myself to be an affiliate “baller” and move away from these $3.50 per day campaigns and step it up a little bit. This is going to be very difficult for me, so we’ll see how it goes.
Bad Niche
I have always read that you should stick to a niche that you know a lot about, and hence why I have chosen the Honda tuning niche. What they fail to tell you is that some niches just suck and are without hope. I am starting to thing this is one of them. People are so stingy and just don’t buy anything. So I am going to try and reach out into different niches and try them out to see if some of my poor success can be attributed to a stale niche.
Some other niches I am thinking of entering are designer purses and bags (a friend of mine just bought his girlfriend a tiny little Coach bag for like $500 and she looooved it). I saw some R.C. Helicopters at the mall the other day and people were all huddled around and buying them like crazy. I also saw an interesting post on JohnChow.com entitled “the Passionate blogger” which is about a guy who created a blog about a future electric car from Chevy, and is doing really well for himself. This reminded me of an article I came across a while back about a hydrogen powered car being be released by Honda in 2009 called the “Clarity”. I did a quick search on Google and there is VERY little adwords competition for this car, and wordtracker says there is a good amount of search volume for it. I think I’m going to try and see what I can do with that idea, especially because I own a relevant domain with the word “Honda” in it.
So Those are the big two problems I think I am having. I’m going to start here and see how things go. I may end up loosing a lot of money, but I need to keep reminding myself that its not a big deal. If i can turn $1000 into $1001, its better than nothing. That is the mindset I need to keep!!!
4 Responses so far to "Campaigns Fail, Frustration Ensues."
December 26th, 2007 at 6:41 am
Hi Eric,
Love your posts.
I’m afraid of losing money - join the boat you are like 99.9% of affiliate marketers and people in general.
I have always beleived if you spend/invest scared money etc then you will lose it.
The mindset that worked for me was right i can afford to blow/gamble/smoke/ $200 this month, money i could afford to lose, money i would of fritted on crap.
Its just the crap i bought was adwords clicks.
The next step in my progression was like you target niches, hard work, i have more success now by doing 20 campaigns on anything and seeing what works.
As an example i did one campaign last week that ad cost was $50 and made $55 each day, so $5 profit, then did a test on another niche and ad cost was $5 per day but made $20 a day, so $15 profit, i would now prefere to do ten of these campaigns per day than one campaign to make $5.
I hope it helps, i struggle every day, but as long as you keep trying then it will come right (hopefully)
Kevin
UK
December 26th, 2007 at 10:11 am
Thanks Kevin, its nice to hear I am not alone! I guess all you can do is force yourself to keep going and never give up.
The worst part of this is I could easily afford to blow $200 a month (for example), but I was brought up in such a froogle household that I am almost “brainwashed” to believe that every cent will determine whether you have food on the table or not.
If I can just retrain myself to think differently I will have a much better chance at success.
December 26th, 2007 at 1:30 pm
You’re definitely not alone. I just got into the affiliate marketing game (if you can call what I do “getting into it”). I just started with a yahoo search marketing account and a CPAEmpire account and have been creating campaigns there linking directly to the merchant landing page while I get my feet wet. Well, I’ve seen quite a few impressions, some clicks here and there, and zero money coming in. I’m like you in that I just don’t know what I’m doing wrong. Everyone seemingly makes it seem so easy. You pick a niche, choose some keywords, make and ad, and watch hundreds of dollars roll in, right? Errr…so you’re telling me it’s not that easy? hehe
It’s definitely not that easy. I’ll have to keep working at it. I just want to make one sell/lead just to prove that I can do it.
December 26th, 2007 at 2:14 pm
Hi Eric,
Its all about the mindset, as a kid i was told always to put away 10% of anything i earned into the rainy day fund, can not tell you how many times over the years i glad i did and how it has helped me out.
try percentages ie what ever you earn a month say 10% will go on adwords, or even 5% and then build it up a % every month to you get to your total of $200 a month.
I would say though anything you do earn from Affiliate marketing try put in a percentage to rainy day fund for the times when things are tough. even if you only earn $1, put away 10cents, it does build up.
Hope it helps,
Kevin
UK