Fake mentors advertise themselves everywhere the following way: “I’ll teach you how to earn and help you to gain profit!”. Nobody, in turn, teaches how to lose money: invest it into information, tests, experience. If I really wanted to teach a newbie how to achieve the goal – I would predominantly teach how to lose money steadily and without regrets.
The main message is simple – learn to lose money:
operating at a loss in order to gather needed data (statistics) to know the direction for optimization;
operating at a loss in order to create black lists and white lists of traffic sources;
operating at a loss in order to eliminate the ineffective ads.
Everyone agrees that media buying is 90% of testing. Never the less, there are few people who get to the root – 90% of the time is the loss of money, not earning. At this stage, the majority of the so-called businessmen drop out. They are those who have no patience or resources to carry the work to completion.
Each penny invested in buying traffic is an investment in your future. It is the investment in your knowledge, experience and optimization. The fear of newbies is quite understandable. Many publishers are the people who don’t consider media buying as a primary activity. Losing $200-300 can be crucial since many of them have families; they have to pay for their education, rent and etc. It is always easy to say they just shouldn’t work in the sphere of media buying. It’s not a way out. They just need to get over their fear of money loss.
Neither fake mentor nor true mentor will teach you torisk money all the way. You can develop this feature self-dependent only. There is no methodology which will convince you to pour money down the drain. You are aware of that you will lose money and you are scared whether it will come back or not. And there is no guarantee of success. And you bear the responsibility all by yourself. It is really scary, and I’m sure that many of you are so close, but not able to drive a nail home to the head.
I like making comparisons. They help to see the truth. Let’s analyze the experience of overweight people. Each of them knows that if proper nutrition and physical activity will be added to the daily routine – everything is going to be alright: he will become fit. Never the less, the experience of numerous unsuccessful diets makes him think that it is not possible. Although, there are professional sportsmen who are able to control their weight gaining and losing it several times a year in turn. They consider such an activity as commonplace, if, of course, doing it the right way. The same thing is with media buying. At first, you lose huge amounts of money, more than you have expected. And then, you target the audience in a right way, the combination brings profit, and here is your money. Those, who have experienced such situations hundreds of times, understand that it works this way and there are no other ways. Those, who have succeeded to master their fear of loss, are given a green light to work in affiliate marketing.
You can always hear successful webmasters’ stories, but there are very few stories of failures. It's not that common to say about that, so as a result newbies get the impression that profit always comes easily with good conversion rates.
Case studies related to media buying which are written in the style of “I was sitting on the couch and suddenly decided to start sending traffic and, lo and behold, got my first 1000% ROI (+ hot chicks, popularity and so on), using plain creative” do not teach anything useful. They just mislead newbies who are absolutely sure that they can get good conversion rates using the first creative they have produced. Alas, it is an unusual occurrence. A webmaster can be highly intuitive, but all the fuss is about the experience which can be gained only with the help of testing, ups and downs.
Start working in the sphere of media buying without intention to conduct tests – it’s like being on thin ice. It might be successful, but most likely it is not. Moreover, even if you have managed to earn some money with your first combination, as you go forward, you will definitely lose some money in the future, it is unavoidable.
Attention, a reminder: among all the accounts registered in an affiliate network 10% of them are active webmasters. It doesn’t mean that others do not work at all, but the majority of them haven’t managed to overcome the fear and start working gaining profit.
Without losing money one can’t earn it. It’s our business. No, there are no losers in affiliate marketing, but there are numerous attempts which were not carried through. Do not fear of losing money and money won’t fear of finding you.
