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14 Simple Traits to Attain Affiliate Marketing Success

Updated on March 18, 2020

10 Min Read
Affiliate Marketing Success

You know a thing or two about Affiliate Marketing Success, but you feel your progress has become stagnant? Perhaps you’re not entirely satisfied with your earnings.

You’re probably wondering how Pat Flynn, John Chow, Jeremy Schoemaker, or Neil Patel made it big. You have already read their personal story a number of times and dream to see yourself there among these names.

Let’s look at Neil Patel’s storyNeil Patel

Neil Patel’s is one of the popular success stories for all the aspiring affiliate marketers, who want to follow his footsteps. His proactive approach to learning online marketing helped him attract 10,000 visitors to his website. 

Currently, he has a net worth of over $7 Million and starts his journey like most ordinary people. Earlier on in his career, he built a website – Advice Monkey, a job board that helps recruiters find suitable candidates. To understand effective online marketing he picked up online courses and implemented this knowledge on his websites which is how he successfully secured 100,000 website visitors.

You’re probably asking yourself, how did he become a successful affiliate marketer?

  • Is it because he went to high school and took courses from Community College simultaneously?
  • How did he become famous enough to be amongst top-100-entrepreneurs selected by US President Barack Obama and by the U.S House of Representatives?

How has he managed to change his fortunes? It all boils down to attaining affiliate marketing success.

Successful Traits for Efficiency

Successful Traits for Efficiency

The concept of efficiency here pertains to getting more output while minimizing the efforts invested. This is possible by working proactively, setting smarter goals and finding time-saving solutions without reinventing the wheel.

Plan Short-term for Long-term Goals

To achieve success in any industry, planning is of utmost importance and affiliate marketing is no exception. If you want to become a successful affiliate marketer, you must set both short-term and long-term goals. 

A short-term goal can be to improve your authority in a forum or a discussion group by engaging with members. This short-term goal will help you achieve the long term business goal – such as improving conversions, as this directly impacts their commissions and earnings.

Analyze and Evaluate New Tactics to Promote Campaigns

Marketing experts often have blogs or a platform where they talk about providing people information about industry relevant news. These experts want to stay on top of their game and grow their followers at a constant pace, hence, you’ll find plenty of new tactics and smarter alternatives to run-of-the-mill tasks that consume time. You can find new tactics and novel ideas from their podcasts, interviews, webinars, blogs, and social media platforms to aid you in attaining affiliate marketing success.

Say you’ve come across a new idea, and plan to adopt it in your next campaign. To measure its success, you can set up website tracking tools like Google analytics to measure and compare the impact of this new idea that you’ve integrated. During the post-campaign analysis you’ll get a clearer picture of what tactic works and how it can be replicated again in the future. 

Earn at your own pace.

Refer customers and set up your passive income stream

For instance, Sharon Tseung; an affiliate marketer who blogs around the topics of Effective Affiliate Marketing Strategies. She often picks up on tactics and novel ideas from webinars and discusses them in her blog. In her recent blog, she talks about ‘Smart Passive Income’ from Pat Flynn’s webinar. 

Use Tools That Improve Efficiency

There are multiple tools out there (Free and Paid) that help improve the pace of your work and assist you in achieving preset objectives. Some tasks are more time-bound and require more attention than others, so how do you prioritize what’s more important and decide what tools to go ahead with in order to succeed in affiliate marketing?

For starters, in order to improve efficiency you’ll need to improve your overall productivity. Run-of-the-mill tasks are mundane and lack creativity or a challenge and can end up taking a lot of your time. Automating such tasks can boost your productivity and help you focus on bigger challenges that are also more rewarding.

If you wish to up your marketing game by improving the quality of content, increasing email subscribers, improving conversion rates, or widening your pool of potential customers there’s a tool for everything. This means that you essentially take out some time to break free from routine work and research on tools that can automate routine tasks in order to save time.

Take Legal Precautions: Affiliate Terms and Agreements Along with FTC

This depends solely on the country you’re in and it’s regulatory authorities regarding offline and online marketing. For instance, the US has the Financial Trade Commission (FTC) takes care of raising consumer awareness in online advertising. 

As a marketer, you have a legal obligation to abide by certain policies and terms of agreements when you promote certain products/services. For instance, before talking about a Nike shoe, you’ll need to disclose that you’re doing this as part of a ‘paid promotion’ activity. 

If you ignore these terms and policies, you’ll eventually face a penalty and that can weigh heavily on your performance and ultimately your affiliate marketing success. 

Traits of Success in Product Marketing

Gain Product Knowledge

When promoting products/services in a niche, the best way to sell is to promote it with integrity. If your target audience doesn’t trust you, they will most likely not trust the product. So it’s important to have extensive product knowledge when pitching or talking about the product/service that you’re promoting. This will give you the winning edge against your competition, as you’ll have the knowledge of how your affiliate product/service benefits a potential customer. 

When it comes to product knowledge you’ll need to study the product, its features, benefits, and how it addresses the pain points of the audience. You can play your part in community forums and discussion groups by talking about how certain products (not just the products/services you’re promoting) are a better choice for certain customers.

Focus on Reputation/Build your Network

When it comes to making a sale, it’s important to understand a few traits when it comes to affiliate marketing success. Whether you’re an affiliate marketer, promoter, or an influencer, your reputation is everything. You don’t want to sound like a sales-person who’s promoting certain products/services just for the sake of earning money. 

Earn at your own pace.

Refer customers and set up your passive income stream

If you’ve joined a community forum or an online group pertaining to your niche, you’ll first need to engage with members of that group. Getting to know the people builds a personal rapport which helps increase sales conversions more than just spamming different discussion groups with links of the product/service you’re trying to sell.

The best part of being well acquainted in a group is when other members of the group refer potential customers to you. As soon as this happens, you’ve already picked up pace in establishing yourself as an authentic person in the group. To keep this reputation intact, you’ll need to provide solutions and advice that are useful to the referred person. 

Build a Team

If you’ve just started your journey to acheive affiliate marketing success, then building a team shouldn’t be your priority because your objective is to build authority. However, considering you’ve already been in this affiliate marketing game for a few years and wish to scale your earnings, that’s the perfect time to start building a team.

When setting up the team remember that its a team sport and you need a wide range of skill sets and competencies to convert your efforts into success. In many cases, these are the skills and job roles that play an important part in the success of your affiliate marketing campaigns.

Scout out other Affiliate Programs

When scouting out other affiliate programs it’s important to zero-in on their program’s Strengths, Weaknesses, and Opportunities (SWOT). In order to achieve affiliate marketing success, start with identifying your competitors whilst shifting perspective to the buyer’s point of view. 

It’s often easy to lose perspective when performing the SWOT, hence, it’s advisable to pick out causes instead of characteristics. For instance, website load time comparison between your website and your competitor, or the quality of content that’s being published.

Some of the easiest ways of monitoring your competitors is by becoming their customer and following them on social media. Furthermore, you can also use various tools that help in setting up an alert system when your competitor publishes a new blog post, video, or any such marketing activity.

While you’re monitoring your competitor’s activity, you can also conduct research about affiliate marketing niches and affiliate marketing programs. The research will help you in highlighting the profitability of different niches and identifying gaps that you can capitalize on to scale your earnings. This research will also help you in gaining a competitive edge over other marketers

Performing research on affiliate products within the same industry can help in understanding what the audience really wants. It’s important to understand the sentiments of your audience, whether it’s to do with products that you’re selling or your competitors.

Learn from Case Studies

A case study is a source of authentic information on how an individual or a group of individuals paved their way through successful affiliate marketing. Certain case studies from the industry help understand useful tactics and strategies that help achieve short term and long term goals. 

Most brands have a blog, a separate section, or a landing page for their case studies and press release. You can also find websites dedicated to case studies and learning outcomes for people that are interested in the work behind strategies and tactics behind some of the most popular marketing campaigns.

Build through consistency

Consistency is the key to achieving long  term goals. It’s frustrating, painstakingly slow, but we all know there are no shortcuts to achieving long term success. To achieve this affiliate marketing success, you’ll have to work on a calendar and stick to the schedule that you’ve made. 

You’ve run some experiments, figured out the best strategy that works on building conversions. The internet will give you a million ways to do the same thing, but you’ll have to zero in on what works for you and maintain that plan. 

You can plan out your calendar for a day to try out new experiments and adopt this strategy when you see positive results. From here on, the way forward is to build a yearly plan, add social media events and measure your progress on whether it was a successful affiliate marketing strategy..

Traits of Success to Stay Motivated

 

Traits of Success to Stay Motivated

Love What You Do

This can’t be stressed enough.

If you don’t enjoy what you do, you can’t progress and achieve affiliate marketing success. If you don’t resonate with the product, you won’t be able to convince your audience either. 

Therefore, it’s important to try out the products/services that you’re selling before you actually start selling them. This builds a strong connection between you and the product that you’re selling. Your energy is very important as that’s what shows when you’re promoting products/services to your audience. You can feel this energy with the way your audience responds.

Be Patient, as success is long term

There’s an old saying, ‘patience is a virtue’ and that holds true in this case as well. Most affiliate marketers start their journey at a slow pace and lose out  before they start seeing any progress. 

In the first few months, you’ll be busy building a blog, a social media presence, or even a YouTube channel. During this time, you’ll have to bring in efficiency and more often than not, you’ll end up staring at a website traffic analytics hoping to see these numbers grow through a successful affiliate marketing strategy.

You’ll be overshooting your expectations to assume you’ll be getting any conversions during this time,  however, you can spend this time better by creating more content, building relevant links, etc. 

Affiliate marketing success is long-term, hence it’s important to get through the grind and optimize work processes wherever you can. The frequency of posts or uploads needs to remain consistent for your followers to grow while establishing authority in your domain.

Have a Hobby/activity to Destress

The rut of work will create stress unless you keep a healthy balance to give your brain time to relax. As an affiliate marketer, your work can get addictive, as you see results in real-time and it’s easy to lose track of time.

Find a hobby or a healthy outlet to destress. For instance, go for a morning walk, read a book, or watch a movie that will divert your mind to help break out from the monotony of routine tasks. This will help you stay analytical, creative, and fresh.

Earn at your own pace.

Refer customers and set up your passive income stream

Keep on Learning

The journey in affiliate marketing success is long and requires constant learning. It’s important to learn new skills and build your understanding of the industry. On this journey, you should enjoy the process of growing by continuously testing hypotheses like placing experimental banner ads and seeing the traffic that it pulls.

Some of these hypothesis  tests can also be something ambitious, like testing a new traffic source, or a new approach. Yes, this may somewhat end up making you lose focus on your current goal, but that’s what will add to your learning curve: to continually test new things, without actually losing focus on what you’re currently doing. This skill can actually be applied beyond the parameters of affiliate marketing. 

Share What you Learn

A big part of maturing in your niche is sharing what you’ve learnt in your community. If you’ve been through the initial grind of identifying and executing successful affiliate marketing strategies, this would be a great time for you to empower people who are new to affiliate marketing. 

As you continue to grow and learn, you can become an expert in this field by sharing your learning. This will improve your authority and reputation in the niche that you’ve been working in.

Mentor to Gain and Consolidate the Industry Knowledge

It’s one thing to teach what you’ve learnt on your journey in affiliate marketing success and it’s another to contribute to the online community. 

Imagine being able to access a library of consolidated data pertaining to industry knowledge. 

This opens up the opportunity for you to collaborate with other affiliate marketers to create courses that cater to new affiliates. Furthermore, you can also create specific courses on strategies and tactics that you have tested and learnt earlier on in your journey.

And that’s a wrap! You have now gained a perspective on some of the traits you need to build on in order to succeed. Moreover, you’ve also broken down the path to affiliate marketing success into efficiency, product marketing, and self-motivation. 

If you wish to add your two cents about this topic, feel free to comment below and we’d love to get in touch!

Attaining Affiliate Marketing Success in a Nutshell

Successful Traits for Efficiency 

  • Plan short-term for Long-term Goals
  • Research on new affiliate products
  • Analyze/Evaluate new tactics/ideas with every campaign
  • Use tools that improve efficiency
  • Join web affiliate programs
  • Keep a check on affiliate terms and agreements along with FTC

Successful Traits on Product Marketing

  • Gain product Knowledge
  • Focus on Reputation/Build your Network
  • Build a Team
  • Scout out other Affiliate Programs
  • Learn from Case Studies
  • Build through consistency

Successful Traits to stay Motivated

  • Love What You Do
  • Be Patient, as success is long term
  • Work on a hobby/activity to keep your mind fresh
  • Keep on Learning
  • Share what you learn
  • Mentor to gain and consolidate the industry knowledge
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Abdullah Asim

Abdullah is a Digital Marketing Executive at Cloudways. He is passionate about digital marketing and managing affiliate partnerships in the digital space. Marketeer at heart, he loves to discuss Video Games, movies and shows. His favorite TV show: ‘Friends’.

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