Are You a Victim of Affiliate Marketing Shiny Object Syndrome (SOS)?

Wednesday’s Wisdom:  Avoid becoming a victim of affiliate marketing shiny object syndrome by committing yourself to evaluating your marketing efforts thoroughly and tweaking your marketing techniques extensively before moving onto the next new shiny opportunity.

Shiny object syndrome (Objectivius Shinium Syndromus) (SOS), a condition that is defined as the attraction to glassy, polished, and otherwise shiny objects.  This syndrome also exist with shiny new ideas, snazzy new networking programs, and sparkly new affiliate programs. 

SOS can keep a victim jumping from opportunity to opportunity as each new shiny opportunity presents itself.  The problem with this is one, it could become very expensive, especially if you don’t make enough money to cover the costs of involving yourself with one opportunity before getting involved in the next opportunity.

Shiny Object Syndrome (SOS) and Affiliate Marketing

If you spend weeks, trying to make money with affiliate programs to no avail it is easy to fall prey to SOS.  Your answer to your lack of profits would be to get rid of the affiliate program that you are using and to adopt a new shiny affiliate program in its place.  Writing off the marketing costs that you lost with the old affiliate program you begin to invest in the new shiny affiliate program.  Using the same marketing strategies that you used with the old affiliate program you try to market the new affiliate program.  When a week or two goes by of no success you may notice a new shiny affiliate program with all of its new shiny promises and you think, I’ve just got to have it.  So you get rid of what has become the old affiliate program, the one that has now lost its luster, that you have been diligently working on and you adopt a new shiny affiliate program.  You keep the same marketing techniques that you have been using all along and you begin to try to market the new affiliate program…

A Solution to Affiliate Marketing SOS

Do you see a pattern that is followed with those of us who are struck by SOS?  The tendency is to jump from shiny affiliate opportunity to shiny affiliate opportunity hoping for a change in “luck” without ever changing contributing factors, like marketing techniques.  In the case detailed in the previous paragraph, each time the change was made to a different shiny affiliate program the marketing technique remained the same.

A solution to SOS with a shiny new affiliate program is to assess all contributing factors that could be contributing to your lack of success before adopting the next new shiny affiliate program.  Do some research on marketing techniques and tweak your marketing efforts.  Often, it takes several different ads, articles, blog posts, etc. before you find that winning combination that will attract traffic to your affiliate link(s).  Try different combinations of marketing efforts before getting rid of an affiliate program to start a new one.

Conclusion

The temptation to fall prey to abandoning your current affiliate marketing program and adopting the new shiny affiliate marketing program that you see can be very real.  Falling into this temptation can send you spiraling into a pattern of continuing to start new programs but never making a success out of any one program.  The one way to protect yourself from falling prey to affiliate marketing shiny object syndrome is to evaluate each contributing factor to your failure and make adjustments.  Once you have made several adjustments to your marketing and advertisement efforts, and maybe even have researched other techniques and you are still not having any success that is when you might want to consider trying a new opportunity.  If you make a commitment to always make the effort to make changes to your advertising, content marketing, etc. prior to changing affiliate programs you will have a better chance of gaining traction in your marketing efforts and not falling prey to Shiny Object Syndrome.

If you learned anything new from this article then please leave a comment.