With snowboard season (also known as ski season for all you two-plankers) right around the corner for us here in Colorado, I got to thinking about what it was like when I first learned how to ride and how I went from a total newbie to a pretty advanced snowboarder. In many ways, it is similar to the transition from a beginner to a successful affiliate marketer.
When I was first learning to snowboard, I was lucky enough to have a bunch of friends who had all been riding for years. On days that I hit the slopes with them, they basically dragged me along to whatever back bowl, double black diamond, or out-of-bounds tree run they felt like hitting. Needless to say, this forced me to improve my riding very quickly, end up wrapped around a tree, or going off a cliff (which actually did happen once, but that is a story for another day).
They had a saying that ?if you weren?t falling, you weren?t trying.? The basic idea was that if you spent a day on the mountain and didn?t have some spectacular wipeouts then you weren?t pushing yourself and trying to become a better snowboarder. The only way to improve as a rider was to consistently test your limits by trying new things on the board (steeper runs, moguls, the terrain park, deep powder, jumps, etc.). You would fall a lot, but you would also have learned something every time you picked yourself up and tried again.
Affiliate marketers face a similar situation in trying to grow their businesses. After you learn the basics, you could just keep running the same types of campaigns, using a set of tactics that you are comfortable with, but your business isn?t likely to grow with this kind of strategy. In fact, campaign performance will eventually start to fatigue and your business will shrink ? if you just keep utilizing the same tactics over and over again.
The only way to keep growing your business and become a more successful affiliate marketer is to step out of your comfort zone and market to new niches, test different verticals, etc. You probably won?t be immediately successful when you start running in a new vertical any more than you would make it down your first knee-deep powder run without falling. When some of your new campaigns fail, you may get frustrated and feel like cutting them off and going back to your comfort zone. But, if you keep learning from each failed campaign and continue testing and optimizing, your performance should improve and you will start generating more profit from your campaigns.
On the snowboard, a lot of beginners get discouraged when they can?t seem to figure things out on that first day. They spend the first day falling constantly, are incredibly sore the next morning, and decide to give up before things get fun. There will probably be times in affiliate marketing where you feel the same way. You try out a new marketing tactic and it just doesn?t work. You may even try a couple of different tactics, but you just can?t seem to make them profitable. You just need to remember that super affiliates aren?t made overnight. They didn?t just stumble onto instant success the first time they tried to use PPC, email, or any other tactic. Often the biggest key is that they stuck with it, learned from every failed campaign, and kept refining their marketing programs until they began generating positive results.
In snowboarding and affiliate marketing, if you want to achieve real success, you will often need to fail many times before you really succeed. So, if your affiliate marketing business hasn?t been growing the way you would like, remind yourself ?if you aren?t falling, you aren?t trying.?
