There are many pitfalls that one must overcome when trying to make a living as a self-employed affiliate.  One of the toughest is conquering the little voice in your head.  You know, the one that says, “What’s the point of designing that new website, it’s just going to fail anyway.”  It is very good at talking you out of each and every good idea that you come up with before you even get started.  To be successful in business, not just Affiliate Marketing but any business, you must conquer the paralysis of analysis.

I can’t tell you how many times I have sat and stared at my LCD screen just waiting for something to magically happen.  It’s not that I think I can’t pull off the idea that I have cranking in my head, it’s that I worry that it won’t work and the time I spent will be wasted.  This is only reinforced each time an idea doesn’t pan out.  We’ve all heard the story about how it took Edison over 1,000 different tries to invent the light bulb, but Edison I’m not.  One failure can set me back days or even weeks.

One of the main reasons that this is fresh in my mind is because it happened to me just recently.  I had put a bunch of work into a website that I thought had a lot of viral potential, and I was using eBay Partner Network to monetize it.  It was fully designed, and I was just beginning to promote it and start doing the SEO work of link building and all that when I realized my mistake.  Like an idiot, I had forgotten to read the Terms & Conditions for EPN to see if they were ok with an affiliate using a website with “ebay” in the domain.  Little surprise, they are NOT ok with it…

Not a big deal right?  Wrong.  Mentally, it is a big deal because now I can’t get rid of that nagging feeling that it’s all pointless and that I’ll never recreate the success I have had with other similar sites.  This is where I kill myself every time.  I try to think about every possible way that it could fail, instead of thinking about every possible way that it could succeed.  I visualize Cease & Desist letters instead of Commission Checks.  It is almost impossible to turn everything around once you have dragged yourself through the mud like that.

However, one day you will wake up and lo and behold, there it is!  The burn.  The spark.  The hunger.  The idea.  When that happens, don’t fold your arms and start picking it apart, fire up your favorite web design program (or good ‘ol Notepad) and get cracking!  You’ll be glad you did.