What are the affiliate marketing requirements as a beginner?

As a beginner, what are the basic requirements needed for affiliate marketing to start

There are two possible ways to answer this question. One is to explain what affiliate marketing is and how it works for beginners, including about choosing your niche, selecting the right tools and then promoting the right products. However, in my opinion a much better way to answer this question about what the affiliate marketing requirements are as a beginner, is to view it from the perspective of your personal attributes instead. Let’s take a look…

Affiliate marketing requirements in 15 seconds…

Affiliate marketing requirements as a beginner includes having the right mindset in the first place. Your reason “why” is also key to your success, together with the ability to be dedicated, consistent and focused to ensure your success in online affiliate marketing. But then it is important to get the right training to begin with, in order to prevent the big mistakes that many newbies make, but also to speed up your chances of success in a shorter time-frame.

Affiliate marketing requirements as a beginner

The affiliate marketing requirements or personal attributes include the following:

1. Having the right mindset.
2. Your reason “why” is key to your success.
3. You must have the ability to be dedicated.
4. You must be prepared to be consistent.
5. Focus on one niche at a time.
6. Avoid the shiny object syndrome.
7. Get good quality training under your belt.

Let’s now take a look at each of these requirements and attributes in more detail.

1. Having the right mindset

Having the right mindset is very often under estimated when it comes to starting any business, let alone an affiliate marketing business. You may think that anyone who talks about mindset stuff is a bit woo-woo, but it does make a difference and it can mean the difference between success or failure.

For example, without realising it are you afraid of success? Or are you scared of failure? Whilst its common for most to understand that many people are afraid of failure (that’s normal right?), but you may think it’s crazy to think that anyone would be afraid of success. Surely not. But yes believe it or not, many are scared of success or even afraid of money! This is what’s known as your limiting beliefs.

So let me ask you, is your wealth compass set in the right direction, or does it need a little help?

Time to reflect on success

When I reflect on my own successes, I look at when this truly began to change for the better. I can honestly say that my own wealth compass changed in a positive direction when I spent time listening to self-help CD’s and after watching motivational and transformation videos.

One very simple, but effective subliminal software I still continue to use is Mindzoom affirmations. This works very well with an online business, as you’ll be spending more time in front of your computer. Mindzoom flashes up subliminal messages that reprogram your mind for all aspects of positivity. In fact it’s flashing positive affirmations at me as I write this article.

When I observe or speak with my counterparts who are equally as successful or even more successful than I am, be it in business in general, in property, in affiliate marketing or eCommerce, the one consistently is been mindset.

But the other similarity is the acceptance of how important it is to invest in themselves. Be it in self-help and mindset training, or in a training course on advancing their knowledge and skills. See below where I discuss more about training.

Be prepared for failures, but be more prepared to stand up again after each time you fail

People, or more the point entrepreneurs that succeed in any type of business tend to have the attributes of tenacity and determination. The same attributes are necessary for affiliate marketing too.

You have to be prepared for being knocked back or to have failures along the way. But you also need to have belief, no matter what. Which means that each time you fail or get knocked back, you must stand right back up again. I’ve lost count of the many failures that I’ve had, the lost money, the mistakes and setbacks that I’ve had, but it never stops me. It’s never nice to fail, but if you think of each failure as another step towards your success, it helps.

If you want to succeed in affiliate marketing, you have to have the mentality of not accepting failure as an option. Where failure is defined as giving up, and not as the individual failures along the way. There’s no doubt that like anyone new to something, you will make mistakes, but the important question to ask is; how will you respond to failings?

By having the right mindset and to truly believe in yourself, whereby you are able to treat each of your mistakes as a part of your learning curve, will make the difference between the make or break of your success as an affiliate marketer.

2. Your reason “why” is key to your success

There will be times in your journey to become a successful affiliate marketer when you’ll feel like you’re getting nowhere. You’ll put in hours of hard work, but with no positive results. You’ll feel like it’s not worth it and you’ll probably want to give up!

It is for this reason that you have that all important “WHY”. It is your ‘why’ that will help you to push on when you hit those brick walls.

My ‘Why’ is to have the freedom to be creative. This became even more apparent to me after going through cancer. It’s almost impossible to go through something like cancer, to face death like that and to not want to change your life.

In fact cancer did me a huge favour (although at the time it felt very different!). To get me through those dark days of chemo and being so ill, I decided to write a novel. It was by writing this novel where I found my love of writing (just in case you’re interested, the novel is Nothing Left But Fear and was written under a pseudonym of Adrian Russell).

But my other why is that I also love to help people, and by writing articles like this one, this is helping you in your journey to become a successful affiliate marketer. Or at least I hope so!

Your ‘why’ is likely to be totally different. For you it might be you don’t want to have anybody else in control of your life. You may be fed up with having a boss who you have to seek approval before being able to take a day off, or to go on holiday etc. But whatever it is, it’s important to find your “why”, but please don’t let it be money. It needs to be much more personal that that.

I think at this point you should watch this video, if you’ve not seen it before. It’s possibly one of the most viewed TED talks ever and is by Simon Sinek. Please enjoy…

3. You must have the ability to be dedicated

Many who start out in affiliate marketing do it when they are still at their day job. That’s okay, but you need to be prepared to come home after a day’s work and start again on your affiliate marketing business. In addition, you’ll ideally also need to work on your weekends too

I suggest as a bare minimum to work at least 10 hours each week. But of course, the more hours you put in, the faster your success will come from affiliate marketing.

In the beginning you’l be splitting these hours between studying to be an affiliate marketer, whilst working hard on your own online-business. This might be content marketing for example, which will include building your website or blog, writing content, promoting your content on social media and then finding affiliate products to promote, and so on.

4. You must be prepared to be consistent

Consistency is key to all success. You need to set yourself targets to reach, be it how many articles you write each week or how much training you’ll commit to. But whatever goals you set yourself, make sure to be consistent and commit to hitting your weekly and monthly goals.

But don’t set yourself up for failure from the outset and be realistic with the hours of work you set. Whilst on the one hand you need to work hard and put the hours in, don’t commit to a number of hours that’s impossible to achieve. Otherwise, you’ll become despondent and end up criticising yourself.

5. Focus on one niche at a time

There are many different paths to success in affiliate marketing, and you have to choose one. My choice was content marketing, because I love to write. But also, it’s important in the beginning to choose one niche and make that a success, before moving on to the next one. I’ll admit that this was one of my mistakes, I had too many websites in the beginning and not enough time to keep them all going.

Like me, you’ll probably have a tendency to start mixing & matching different niches and different strategies to try and make things work. This is especially true if you not getting results, but you need to stay with it or else you’ll actually end up diluting your efforts. This in turn will push back hoe long it takes before you become successful and could make you more despondent.

6. Avoid the shiny object syndrome

If you stick to the proven methods and don’t get sidetracked, for example by choosing content marketing and sticking to it, you are more likely to be a success at affiliate marketing. Don’t be the person with the “shiny object syndrome”. It’s all too easy to end up watching another video about another way to make money online (like doing eCommerce for example), to find yourself sidetracked and chasing another strategy. But try to resist the temptation.

If you’re susceptible to the shiny object syndrome, recognise it and stop it right away. It might be that until you read this article, you weren’t aware you were doing this. I’m willing to admit from my own personal experience that this can set you back many years if you don’t get a handle on this problem early on.

Make sure that when you choose your training (see below), that you combine training courses that are complimentary to your chosen method or strategy. There’s nothing wrong in taking multiple courses from different coaches or trainers in your chosen method of doing affiliate marketing, but please don’t jump ship whenever you “find something better” or “something more shiny!”.

Also, if you choose content marketing as a strategy, don’t try to launch five websites all at the same time, as this will dilute your time and slow your progress. You may find this difficult to adhere to, as I do myself. This is because there seems to be a tendency of people that are attracted to becoming an entrepreneur, to have attention disorders.

But by being focused, your journey to success will be shorter.

7. Get good quality training under your belt

The training you choose should be relevant to the strategy you’ve chosen to follow. But when you find the right training, make sure to stick to the path that they teach.

As a beginner, I suggest you begin with something relatively easy. Using ClickBank is a good starter and in fact they provide their very own ClickBank University Course too, well worth a look.

But for me, as I’m a content marketer, it was the Pathway 2 Passive Course that was most relevant to me.

But remember if you’re wondering whether or not to spend money on training, I always say “If you think paying for training to get educated is expensive, try making mistakes instead, and then you’ll discover which costs the most“.

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Happy content marketing!