Seven Habits of Highly Successful Affiliates
January 5th, 2009 | 
Author: In an earlier blog post, I described the Ten Habits of Highly Successful Publishers. Through my conversations with our top affiliates, I discovered that they also shared many important habits that have led to their success.
1. Promote products that address specific needs: While most fledgling affiliates tend to focus on the Internet Marketing vertical expecting to make quick money, there is a wide range of products on the ClickBank Marketplace that cater to a huge variety of needs. Products that address a specific need or answer a particular question sell extremely well.
2. Promote widely: Many successful affiliates rely on a wide range of promotional methods-e-mail marketing, blogs, review sites, and pay-per-click advertising-since each type of promotional method works well with a particular demographic.
3. Promote seasonally: Successful affiliates tend to vary the products they promote based on the season. With New Year’s resolutions being made at the start of the year, a lot of people look for self-improvement products at that time, while in the summertime products relating to outdoor recreation tend to be more popular.
4. Persevere through hardship: Many novice affiliates tend to assume they cannot be successful if their initial attempts to promote products don’t go well. Nothing succeeds like perseverance. Stick with the effort and don’t allow early disappointment to deter you. Many of our most successful affiliates have attained success after disappointing early results.
5. Broaden your portfolio of products: In general, all products don’t do well at the same time. When some products are doing well, other products are not. Promoting a variety of products will allow you to benefit by smoothing out the peaks and valleys in the life cycle of each product.
6. Test relentlessly: Since your commissions depend on the links from your site to the publisher’s site working consistently, test everything and test regularly. Simulate a visitor’s journey from your site to the publisher’s site and then on to the ClickBank order form, and make sure that the order form displays your nickname as the affiliate. You should also test and tweak the language you use in your promotions to make sure it is compelling.
7. Make realistic claims for the product: Refunds are high when products don’t meet the claims made by the promotional material. By making extravagant claims for the product you may be able to get more people to buy the product initially, but this success is short-lived when customers end up refunding the product if it doesn’t measure up.
Our top affiliates generate several million dollars worth of business each year, even in difficult economic times, by adopting these seven simple habits. Perhaps now you can too!
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I just listed my first e-book with Clickbank “The Professional Contractors Guide To Prospering In Niche Markets”. How do I alert the “Highly Succesful Affiliates”? Or do they have to trip over it by accident?
As a novice affiliate myself, just like you said, I am focusing on Internet marketing products. I’m doing that because the program I’m using to learn Clickbank marketing says to choose products with high gravity. Well, almost all of the high-gravity products I found are Internet marketing products. Can someone please explain just exactly what gravity represents? Does a high gravity number mean that a lot of other affiliates are promoting that product, or that it has a high conversion rate, or what? Right now FAP Turbo has an insanely high gravity rate of over 800 – does that mean it’s really flying off the shelves, or just that all the affiliates think it’s the hottest thing? Or something else altogether?
Ed,
You might want to check out our series on “Becoming an Affiliate Magnet.” It has some good advice for getting your product noticed and promoted.
If you want to make sure affiliates see your product, you might consider advertising in the Marketplace. You can see more about that in Part 5 of the “Affiliate Magnet” series.
Hi Teri,
For some advice on what gravity means and things to consider about Marketplace stats when deciding what to promote, please take a look at Terra’s new post, “Sort Your Way to Success.” It has quite a bit of detail about what all the different stats mean.
I have been blattling out to make a success of affiliate marketing. I was make some little moneuy in the beginning but died dow. I don’t know whether the slump has to do with Google changing the rule that allowed to advertise the affiliate to and directly at Clink bank or there is another reason?
thanks for the words of incouragement i’m one of those affiliate thats struggling to make money, but i refuse to give up. I feel like i must be doing something wrong or i just havn’t got it all together yet. But you know what they say nothing before the time. So i’m hanging in there waiting for that first sale, i know i’m getting closer with each passing day.