Affiliate Marketing Problems

There’s thousands of potential affiliate marketing problems you’ll face if you become an affiliate. The affiliates who succeed online get very good at solving their own problems and overcoming difficulties.

As an affiliate marketing your job is to get products in front of customers to make sales. When this happens it’s magical, and it doesn’t sound like it should be so difficult. But if you’re an affiliate you know just how difficult and frustrating it can be.

I’ve been an affiliate for a good few years now having got into it back in the early 2000’s. I’ve definitely had my fair share of affiliate marketing problems over the years too. Here’s some of the main problems I’ve faced and how I’ve overcome them.

Affiliate Marketing Problems – Free Traffic

My first sale came from using Hubpages.com and I wrote a review article about some website building software I had bought. Someone found my article and I made a $40 commission on the sale! Whoopee I thought to myself, I’ve made it! But then, just crickets and tumbleweeds! I had hoped that this would be the first of many sales I made from writing articles.

I didn’t pin all my hopes on that one article and so carried on building websites and creating content. Unfortunately the strategy I was using was massively flawed. I was relying on Google to rank my content, rather than promoting it myself. Needless to say nothing happened.

Ranking Websites

This was a tough lesson and I nearly quit after building hundreds of websites which simply didn’t do what they were supposed to. I had bought yet another course (there were many) which taught me to build sites with keyword domain names in order to rank them on Google for their main keywords.

Pretty much all of my sites failed and didn’t get any traffic. So I spent months building all these sites and the results were pretty disappointing. One site did rank and I sold a couple of products from Clickbank.about:blankImageUpload an image file, pick one from your media library, or add one with a URL.UploadMedia LibraryInsert from URL

It was a site called tedsheds.net and ranked for the search term “teds sheds” which I believe was a company name. It had a fair amount of traffic for that keywords, and very little competition. Which is why I managed to get a high ranking on Google and other search engines. But it soon dropped off and with all the work I had done, a handful of sales didn’t amount to much!

Affiliate Marketing Problems – “Buyer” Traffic

In the early days most of my affiliate marketing problems centred around not having any or enough traffic. I did get traffic eventually, but I was so desperate for traffic, I just got any old traffic. I threw up crappy websites which offered almost zero value and hoped they would “work”. My site Tedsheds.net got some passing traffic, but it was people looking for another company called teds sheds! So most of the traffic wasn’t buying traffic.

Then I built another website around the garlic harvesting topic. Whentoharvestgarlic.com was the name of the site as I recall! The goal was to rank my website at the top of Google, and get free traffic. I hadn’t thought much beyond this! Another affiliate marketing problem I encountered was the slow realisation that not all traffic is “buyer” traffic. Plus I hadn’t put much thought into how to monetise my garlic themed website.

I did rank this site at the top of Google for its main keywords (when to harvest garlic). But once you know when to harvest garlic, what are you going to buy? I didn’t think about this so tried to monetise with Google Adsense and some lowly paid affiliate program offering garlic and vegetable related products! It was doomed from the start!

Affiliate Marketing Problems – Ikigai

It was years later that I heard the term ikigai. Ikigai means “reason for being” roughly translated and is a Japanese term. It’s where your passion aligned with your vocation and you can make money from being “you”.

It was a solution to many of my affiliate marketing problems. Once I found my ikigai, I could focus on that rather than desperately trying everything, just to make money. This is one of the many affiliate marketing problems I had encountered. I was desperate for cash, so jumped around for years desperately “trying” everything and anything which could “work” – meaning make money.

Looking back at my garlic harvesting site I realised that I wasn’t aligned with my ikigai. I worked on the site for several months, building content. But I knew nothing of garlic harvesting, I had only chosen the topic because it seemed like a low competition keyword with a good amount of traffic – an “easy win”.

But after months of researching content before writing, I grew pretty weary of it and gave up on the site. Within a few months, it had fallen down the rankings and within a year it was gone! Another blogger took the top spot and was clearly a garlic growing enthusiast. Hence he could create videos and update his blog regularly from his huge database of knowledge on the subject. For me, working on the site was exhausting.

Making Money With Affiliate Marketing

Over several years I had learned several affiliate marketing strategies including niche website building, paid marketing, collecting emails through a landing page and several other skills. But I hadn’t really made any money. I had the odd affiliate sale here and there, but nothing really that was sustainable. The best success I had in the early days was promoting an affiliate marketing training courses by a guy called Peter Lexis. You can read more about his course in my digital profit course review.

This involved sending paid traffic from Adwords to a landing page and collecting emails. Then, I followed up with Peter’s pre-built email follow up series promoting his product. I made sale after sale!

I was getting pretty excited and about to increase my marketing budget when I got my Adwords platform shut down. Apparently I had broken some terms or something! I really didn’t know what I was doing. Back in 2010, or there’s about’s, if you got your account shut down, you didn’t get it back! I gave up for a while and just resigned to my day job.

Solutions

I still was desperate to escape the drudgery of working the many jobs I juggled to keep the wolf from the door; so I persisted down the affiliate marketing road. I bought several other courses before eventually finding an online mentorship company called The SFM Mentors.

I was sceptical of course since I had already bought so many courses and yet still struggling! But I was able to meet the founders of the company (Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek) and many other members in actual live meet-ups (pre-pandemic).

I was also given much more support than with other courses and so persevered for several years (2014-present 2020).

By following other leaders in affiliate marketing, I was able to understand why I had had so many affiliate marketing problems over the years. Having coaches and mentors gave me more confidence in what I was doing and following a path which works.

I learned how to find products which gave me recurring commissions, rather than using low paying physical products which was what I had been doing. I made my first high ticket sale within a few months of joining the SFM too (not a typical result).

If you’re having affiliate marketing problems I would highly recommend joining an online community to get help and support. It’s made the world of difference to me.

Access an online mentorship program through this link – (a free video series)

Or join Stuart Ross on a webinar here now!