Knowing When to Quit & When to Keep Going
In business, as well as internet marketing, failure is something we have to deal with more often than we would like. Whether it be launching a new campaign, a new project, or a new product/offer, things will inevitably go wrong sometimes.
During my 5 year career in internet marketing, so far, I have had to deal with more failure than I would really like to admit. I would also be lying If I said there weren’t times where I’ve become discouraged, and even given up (temporarily).
However, I’ve learned over the years how important failure is to the learning process and making money.
One great thing about this industry is that you can fail 50 times in a row, before finding a profitable campaign you can scale to 7 figures. It is important to realize that not everything you do is going to be a home run.
As a matter of fact, 90% of the time it won’t work at all. So, the important thing to figure out is when should you quit, or when should you continue.
When I launch a new ad campaign, I’m looking to make it as profitable as I can, as soon as I can. When I’m launching tests, I generally want to see, at the lowest, a 50% loss before I continue.
If a campaign is losing 60% or more almost immediately, it’s going to be a long shot to turn it into a profitable endeavor. If the losses are that big, I will generally pivot relatively quickly to try something completely different (new niche, a new offer, etc).
However, if the loss is 50% or below right off the bat that gets me excited. That’s when I go into “mad scientist” mode.
I know at that point I am no more than a few more tests and tweaks away from being profitable, or breaking even. At that point I will go ahead and do the following to get into profitability:
– Test 10-20 more ads
– Test a few more landing page/funnels
– Test different offers within that niche (as many as I can find)
After following all of these steps I am usually able to optimize enough to find something that works.
I’ve seen way too many internet marketers quit just because they were losing 20% or even BREAKING EVEN.
The truth is, when you are at that point you are just on the cusp of breaking through. This is where work ethic and creativity come into play, where you should be testing consistently until you are in profit.
These general rules for when to give up on an offer and when to persist have helped me out tremendously, helping me to focus my time and energy on campaigns that have high potential.
One skill you are going to have to develop if you want to persist through the consistent failure is to stop being afraid of losing money. When I launch a campaign and it starts losing money right off the bat, I have adjusted my mindset to consider that I am buying data, rather than losing money.
You are buying data to discover what works and what doesn’t for that specific campaign, so you can analyze that data and make optimizations from there.
In the testing phase of any new campaign, there are many data points you need to be analyzing while allocating spends.
Does your landing page conversion suck? Make a new one.
Is your CPM high & driving your click costs up? Make a better ad.
Are only women clicking on your ad? Change your message to tailor towards females.
There are endless more examples, but the most important thing to do when you are on a downward trend is to analyze the information available to you and make data-driven decisions on how to improve things from there.
Most importantly, don’t get discouraged.
If making money online was easy, everyone would do it.
Trust me, once you finally figure things out the success will taste so much sweeter as you remember the failure you endured along the ride.
Thanks for reading this blog, I hope it has been a source of useful information for you. At Optimize to Convert we are always looking to deliver relevant affiliate marketing guides and motivation to our readers.
If there is anything you are currently struggling with or questions you have about affiliate or digital marketing, don’t hesitate to reach out to us and we will do our best to cover any relevant topics in future posts.