Affiliate Life: How to Bounce Back From Failure

It had to happen. You tried and you failed, and it’s not a bad thing.

You’re in good company. Even these spectacularly successful people have tasted defeat before.

Bounce back from failure with our top tips for getting back on track. We will show you how to benefit from your mistakes in affiliate marketing.

Go Ahead, Feel Sorry for Yourself

Pick a date sometime in the not too distant future and take some time off until then.

Don’t let denial tempt you. Don’t look for someone else to blame. Accept the full brunt of your failure and wallow in it.

Nobody likes to witness the death of a big idea, and you need to go through the process of grieving to truly bounce back from failure. Allow yourself to mourn – temporarily.

When your despair does start to wane, pick yourself up and start to prepare yourself for the next big thing.

Analyze What Went Wrong

There are many reasons why affiliate campaigns fail. Some of these are:

Poor Service

Affiliate marketing revolves around relationships. A company selling a product, you the affiliate promoting the product and the consumer. You need to work to maintain a great rapport with all parties but especially the consumer.

Your job is to honestly help the consumer get the best advice, product or service. If you don’t make a sale the consumer should leave your site with a positive feeling which will serve you in the future. Giving poor advice or promoting poor products will lead to failure down the road.

High Promotional Costs Versus Low Returns

Affiliate marketing is just like any other business, costs need to be managed and so do people. Careful strategic planning will ensure you get the best bang for your buck when it comes to paid advertising.

Poor Planning

Asking yourself the following questions may lead you to the answers you need about why your campaign failed:

• Have I written enough articles and posted them?
• Should I have built more niche websites?
• Did I do enough research into my chosen niche?
• Have I researched the correct keywords?
• Did I actively try to build enough backlinks each week?

Most likely, these are the areas where you didn’t do enough. Nobody became a pro sportsperson without at least 10,000 hours of practice – and nobody became a great marketer without unfailing effort.

Lack of Interest

Perhaps the clue to your failure is as simple as picking the wrong niche. Find something that interests and inspires you to use in your marketing, and it won’t seem like such hard slog.

Switching from One System to Another Too Quickly

Many Internet Marketing training systems advertise that you will be able to sit back and watch the money roll in. This is only partly true. Once you have mastered a relevant affiliate marketing training course and applied it, maybe.

Remember to be successful takes time, determination and patience.

Lack of Diversity

Don’t’ stick religiously to something that works now.  Keep your options open by constantly researching new avenues to promote your products.

Watching what your competitors are doing is a great way to get ideas for your own campaigns.

Bounce back from failure by marketing like a madman to get the most out of your paid advertising. You should be split-testing and re-testing, sending out mailers, and running promotions.

Start Over Again

Pick apart everything you did and didn’t do in an objective way. Don’t make excuses for yourself.

Ask someone with a clear outside view to pinpoint what they think went wrong. Admitting and owning your mistakes will help you to learn from them and bounce back from failure more quickly.

Be Realistic

Avoid panic mode. Be realistic about how bad the situation really is.

Again, an objective outside point of view can help you to clarify this. Try to look for the positive. Very few challenges are insurmountable, and a change of direction is sometimes all you need to bounce back from failure.

According to David Ballard, head of the American Psychological Association’s Center for Organizational Excellence, “People who have trouble bouncing back often see that challenge as completely insurmountable.” Don’t be one of those people.

Beat Down Negative Emotions

The power of positive thinking is a term that is often overused. However, scientific research has proven that staying away from negative thoughts does, in fact, influence your success and ability to bounce back from failure.

Visualizing what you want can actually help you to achieve it, or at least find a way to achieve it. Research shows that you can train your brain to activate the tools you need for success. Just follow those visualizations with action.

There are many ways you can keep those positive emotions coming and convince yourself that you are not that bad after all.

Embrace your Hobbies

Doing something you love and are good at will work wonders for your morale. Get out there and paint that still life or beat someone at chess if you must, but do something that makes you feel like a winner.

Get Some Exercise

Getting active is a great way to get those feel-good endorphins flowing. Take a walk or a run, go for a cycle or hit the gym. Exercise will clear your focus and prime you to bounce back from failure.

Meditation for Mental Power

Spending a few minutes meditating every day will improve your mental strength and resilience. By clearing your mind of doubt and worry, you free it up to come up with brilliant plans.

Make Gratitude a Habit

Don’t let failure consume you with feelings of inadequacy.

Instead, focus on all the things you have to be grateful for. Write them down in a journal and see if you can increase your list every day. Internationally-acclaimed motivational speaker, Matt Mayberry, mentions gratitude as one of the common denominators for successful people.

Focus on the Task at Hand

Immerse yourself in what needs to be done – one step at a time. Self-discipline goes a long way toward making sure you bounce back from failure.

Have Patience

It will take months of hard work before you see significant results. Treasure every small success and keep going.

Getting your mind in the right space is the most difficult thing that you need to do in order to bounce back from failure. Once you have those negative thoughts under control, all you need is imagination and some hard work.

A Growth Mindset Will Help You Bounce Back from Failure

Having a growth mindset means seeing your setbacks as an opportunity to improve. You aren’t doing yourself any favors dwelling in an internal state of ‘should have, could have’. Think about what you can do about your current situation – no matter how little it is right now.

People with a growth mindset do not believe that the world owes them anything. They do not believe in bad luck. They do believe in hard work, dedication, and determination.

Nobel Peace Prize finalist, Malala Yousafzai, is the poster girl for a growth mindset. Despite having to make her way to school amid gunfire every day, and even after being shot in the head, Malala stuck to one goal – to regain her position at the top of the class.

This single-minded approach to success, one challenge at a time, was Malala’s route to fame, and it can be your key to success. How much easier do your difficulties seem compared to hers?

Focus on what you need to do today to achieve your goals in your affiliate marketing business. Always remember why you started on this path in the first place.

Set Goals and Stick to Them

Write down each of these small milestones and revisit the list every day. Keep checking off the ones you’ve achieved and add more. Keep your list handy, so you can see how far you’ve progressed each day.

Behavior science expert, James Clear, suggests applying the Goldilocks Rule. That is, you want your goals to be just right – not too easy, but not unattainable either.

Think Big but Take Small Risks

Now that you are ready to get back into the fray, don’t be unrealistic. Attempt small moves at first to avoid yet another disappointment. That way, if you fail again, the lesson will be a little less severe and you won’t have exhausted your resources.

As success follows success, you can get more daring in your endeavors.

Remember, recklessness may be what got you into this situation in the first place. See our Not Recommended section for some advice on things you should rather not try.

Learn from the Experts

Get in touch with others who have experience in your field. Look up the success stories of other entrepreneurs who have made a success of affiliate marketing and heed their advice.

Golden rule – Stick with legitimate online business and training opportunities. You will learn how to:

• Choose a relevant interest
• Build a great website
• Attract visitors
• Earn revenue

Once you are up and running again, keep your focus on what you can give your clients, not your profits. Concentrating on how your products and services will help them should give new meaning to your business. Increased sales will follow close behind.

It may seem like you will never get over your current setback. Remember that you have made mistakes before, and you have learned valuable lessons from them. Somehow you have been resilient and resourceful enough to overcome these.

You are the same person as you were then, only with more experience, and you can overcome these difficulties as many times as you need to.

Good luck!