I’m A Failure And You Should Be Too

Yes, I admit it. I fail all of the time at different things when it comes to my business. In fact, I wouldn’t be where I am today without failing. Just this week I’ve made a lot of mistakes and I am glad I did. It has helped me so much and I believe everyone should fail at something.

This past week has definitly been a tough week as it seems that not much has gone my way. My campaigns that made me a few thousand last month have tanked and I’ve been scrambling and trying new things, which for some reason haven’t been working either. Since I have been in affiliate marketing full time, I would have to say that this week I have failed at more things than any other time and to be honest, I am extremly glad about it.

While a lot of people fail, many just give up without thinking much about why they failed. The reason I love failing is because it means I am trying new things and I always learn from my mistakes. You can go to any affiliate marketing forum and see thousands of questions from new affiliates that spend all of their time asking questions. They never jump out of the boat and get their feet wet. They’re afraid to try anything until they understand things completly. What I’ve learned is you will never know everything, and the best way to learn is to try things yourself. Not sure how Google AdWords works? Why not start up some campaigns. Chances are you may fail at it, but I guarantee you that you will learn from your mistakes.

I may have failed a lot this week, but I’ve probably learned more this week about marketing than any other time in my business. If I hadn’t tried new things, I wouldn’t have the knowledge that I have now.

So what failures did I have this week? Well, there have been numerous things that I tried that didn’t work, but I learned from. Here are a few.

Failure: I launched a PPC campaign and split tested 2 landing pages. Apparently on 1 I didn’t check the main link well enough as it was invalid so I was sending traffic to a bad page. This cost me about $100.

What I learned: Triple check every link on landing pages. When you are sure the links are working, check again.

Failure: I launched a campaign for a new merchant without really spending much time checking the merchant out. While the conversion rate wasn’t bad, the average order was only $6 and I only made about 15% back from what I spent.

What I learned: Spend time analyzing every new merchant I launch a promotion for. Yes it may be easy to convert, but will it be profitable?

Failure: This one I am ashamed of, but I launched a campaign without having the proper tracking installed. So now I’ve had some conversions, but have no idea what keywords they came from. I had to go back and install tracking and start over gathering data on the campaign.

What I learned: Don’t be lazy. Always install proper tracking on campaigns. I highly suggest Prosper 202.

These are just a few of the things I messed up on this week, but I’ve learned a lot. I’m trying new things, failing at a lot, but learning a ton which is putting me closer to some big successes. Don’t be afraid to fail as with every failure comes something learned.

Here is a final quote from Michael Jordan.

I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.

Have you failed this week? If so what have you learned?