Before you go running for the hills, I want to give you a little background about what happened and give you some lessons learned along the way you and I could both take into 2022 and become successful affiliate marketers.
How I Became A Failure
Now a little bit of the backstory… 2021 launched. I was launching my affiliate marketing career and trying to do all the right things: I was putting content out, I was blogging, I’d actually started a podcast. And then a lot of things happened all at once. We’ve all been dealing with this pandemic for a long time and it was finally starting to have a monetary impact on my family.
While at the same time my wife was going through a problem that she had with her heart and she had to have a heart procedure done. And so we needed to have some money coming into the house more consistently.
I had an opportunity present itself when I took it and decided to go ahead and get a regular job.
The downside was, I was not emotionally prepared for what that opportunity would mean long-term. So I wound up not doing the right things, which is, as you know, carve out a couple hours in the in the early morning or late evening, and keep moving forward on my side business. Instead, what happened was I didn’t really do anything because of overwhelm, exhaustion, and honestly.. a bit of depression.
My wife is dealing with some of her own issues and we were all just trying to survive. And the first thing that fell away was the side hustle.
I was completely failing, but there are some things that I learned from mistakes I make along the way that you can learn from. And the first thing that I learned is: if you don’t take it seriously, you will not succeed.
You Must Take Your Side Hustle Seriously
If you don’t take your side business, your affiliate marketing, Etsy store, eBay business, or whatever it is that you’re doing, a little extra money or replace your salary, you must take it seriously, you are doomed to failure. When you don’t take it seriously, other people won’t take it seriously and you’ll never get off the ground.
You have to give you business the time and attention it deserves. You wouldn’t ignore a one-on-one meeting with a multi-millionaire investor. Why would you ignore investing in yourself and your business?
Do You Believe In Your Business?
You have to completely believe that you will succeed with your business because there’s a lot of people who don’t want you to. Put the time in, put the work in, and do what you know you need to do consistently. And do that over and over again and be patient because when you try to force it, it’s when things start getting out of hand. And remember if you don’t believe it, the person next to you is not going to believe it.
Whether that’s your friends, your spouse, or even complete strangers. You’re going to find that you’re typically the only one who thinks that you might be able to do it.
It Takes Time
The next thing I learned is that it takes time whether you have a job or whether you don’t, you have to be patient. Consistently. Over a long period of time.
You hear it all over social media, you read it in your books… You have to put the time in. I already mentioned that I took a job and because of the requirements of that job, I was ill-prepared for being able to put the time in. And because I didn’t put the time in my business didn’t succeed.
So no matter what you do commit right now to working your full-time job, if you have to, and then putting the time in and working your side hustle, because that’s how your side hustle becomes your full-time.
You cannot make up for lost time. There’s no special formula. There’s no secret pill. There’s no special code that you can put in your website. You just have to be patient and put in the time, day after day. It’s not a secret.
And when you really dig deep into their story, it was not an overnight success you can’t make up for lost time. If you start and stop and start and stop and trust me, I am the embodiment of that. You have to put in the time. Always over and over and over again. And that’s when you succeed.
Stay Focussed
As I started building my side hustle into a business, I found that I was not focusing as hard as I needed to because I had all these other things playing.
When you go to work on your side hustle, affiliate marketing business, or your Etsy business, you have to be focused and you have to be as focused as you can for the time that you’ve. So if you’ve allotted one to two hours, be super focused for that one to two hours, close the door, let your family know that this is special time that you need to be focusing on what you’re doing.
Try to turn off the TV, try to turn off any distractions and really focus on putting your best effort into what you’re doing. When you do that, you will find that that focus will help you pay off because that’s one of the only things that will give you an edge over other people.
Know Your Why
And then finally, the last thing that I learned is you have to find your ‘why’ and remind yourself of it many times throughout your day.
Now, if you don’t have a strong, ‘why’ you’re going to let things slide away. I already mentioned how I was struggling with belief and I wasn’t sure that I could really do what I was thinking that I could do. And because of that, things fell away.
To be honest with you. I’ve learned now over the last few months my strongest ‘why’ is: I do not want to have to live at the beck and call of another person or another company. My wife and I have been able to travel over this past holiday season and we’ve enjoyed the time we had together. And we were both day-dreaming about how great it would be to work remotely. That’s my ‘why’.
The conversation that my wife and I had was about how great it would be if we had mobile jobs so we could travel all over the country, all over the world and just work remotely. Unfortunately, I’m not in that place now and neither is she, but we both have very strong ‘whys’ on how we can make that happen.
And we have to remind ourselves of it, even in the midst of the storms of everyday life, through all the storms and challenges of work and daily life. We have to remind ourselves that ‘why’ and we have to hold onto that memory of traveling and enjoying it.
So that’s my confession and many of the things that I learned. I probably should have done a whole lot of things differently and I’m going to. I’ve already started putting pieces into place, but hopefully from the challenges that I’ve had, you can learn from my mistakes and move forward.
Start Immediately
If you’d like to start a business and you have no idea where to start, I’ve got a great suggestion for you. It’s not free, but it’ll only cost you $7. It’s from a company I trust called Legendary Marketer and they have a 15 Day Business Builder Challenge you can take. This program will give you the foundation you need to build a successful online affiliate marketing business.
It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to flip on Amazon or you’re wanting to do high ticket affiliates, or even if you’re wanting to do a combination of all the different types of affiliate marketing, the Business Builder Challenge will give you the basics for how to, find, market and, really build a successful online business.
To learn more about the Business Builder Challenge Go Here.