Seven Habits of Highly Successful Affiliates
January 5th, 2009
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!
About Beau BlackwellBeau is the Client Knowledge Guru for ClickBank and covers the latest trends, tips and techniques for building profitable Internet marketing businesses.
Take a look at these related posts:
Posted in 
Tags:
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.
Can I have a schematic view or flow diagram showing the process in order for me to follow carefully and understand very well? Maybe thats the time I can share my ideas and even improve the system while learning at the same time!! i want to help others also, this is not for me only. I am satisified with what I have right now, I only strive for more just for the family and for friends and others needing help whose learning speed level might not be able to understand this system as needed of them. I think I am a quick learner and I have these values you mentioned.
Thanks and regards.
>>
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.
>>
When i started out in affiliate marketing it took me a LONG time (at least a year) to make money. Just don’t give up. As with almost anything its also a learning process. Failure is NOT a reason to stop – failure is actually good since it helps indicating what works and what doesn’t..it belongs to the learning process.
Also..don’t have unrealistic expectations. You wouldn’t also go out with a shovel and start building a house? You need knowledge to do it. Same with affiliate marketing. And ONCE everything starts rolling its almost scary how easy it is to make money.
This is a great article,, seven habits of highly successful affiiates is a great quick boost…
I think the biggest thing for Newbies, is to try and avoid the new shiney oblect daily emails you receive from the guru’s etc. Good Luck
I have to agree with Mike,
Don’t fall for the daily onslought of offers that enter you inbox every day. The only thing that theese offers really do well is take your focus and attention off your goals of long term success.
Choose a method for your marketing and stick with it. I would suggest taking yourself off most marketers email lists, they really do very little to help you in the long run.
hi everyone, im new in this field,reading your articles make me feel,nervous at the sametime, incourage to do new to my life…as i read successfull affiliate also been doing through hardship,,, whew!!!wish me luck!
Thanks for the advice and posts related to Affiliate Mkt.. I am just starting out and have been doing keyword research for 3 days now. But after reading the “Seven Habits of Highly Successful Affiliates” I must now go back to square one and find another Niche due to the weather season we are in. No big deal, I will just get better at picking a niche and keyword research with more practice. Thanks again for this article, it was very helpful and I will save it in a folder to review it regularly! I don’t have a website yet but my goal is to have one by mid Feb.
Doug,
Before you ditch your niche and start over due to seasonality, keep in mind that if you’re trying to build traffic to it using SEO or other free methods, it can take time for your work to build up search rankings. So the work you’re doing now could be helping you when the right season rolls around! Seasonality of product is more urgent (at least if you’re looking for short term earnings) for affiliates that use paid traffic like PPC. No effort is wasted, especially if you learn from it.
You are right again regarding seasonal. I will get back to work on my original project tonight because I will be using SEO to get started and use 30% of my profits as time goes on to learn how to use PPC and other pay as you go methods I have been looking at in my spare time. Thanks for your help and let me get back to work.
Hello,
I read about search engine optimization, keyword research and niche marketing but have not studied and practiced them. Can you refer me to some good articles? thank you.
all 7 tips are worth and must be adopted to achieve desirable result. Thanks
Great article, thanks for posting this valuable information.
I am looking for articles on niche marketing,keyword research tool and search engine optimization. Can anyone point me to some directions?
I have been at it for almost a year now and have been successful with physical products. As A result I have been neglecting the Clickbank products and was about to give up.
I have a problem evaluating Clickbank products, separating the shams from real value.
Clickbank seems to accept every submitted product and let the market duke it out. Presumable the real value products survive.
I will do some new Clickbank research and give it another try.
“Sort Your Way To Success” is really urgent to read specially for newbies like me.
A very good overview on how to approach affiliate marketing. It’s important to think about being competitive in your niches and creating a portfolio of products to market. And don’t always try to catch the biggest fish in the Clickbank pond, sometimes the small ones are tasty too.
Good advice, especially about perseverence. I’d also stress the need to focus and try and do a good job of one project/campaign rather than setting up 20 all at once and doing them all badly. It’s way too easy to start up 50 websites that you can’t actually manage instead of making a great job of one site and then moving on to your next one when that one is “set up”.
Perseverance is the key! I am building membership sites to be used later as advertising platforms for various products. It cannot be done quickly regardless of what you may read in the offers you are bombarded with every day. The SEO work alone is a major job and even though I have great software for this it still takes months working within the guidelines to get a site up in the search engines. A lot of thought must go into deciding which keywords you want to rank for and how you optimize your site for the spiders.
So think long term, invest wisely in software and E literature and work at it diligently just as you would when starting any business.
A very good article.
Thanks for share this great information…
This is an incredibly useful article, thanks a lot for this. And yes, you are totally right, preseverance is definately the key to success!
Best regards,
I agree but the hardest thing seems to be finding the right product. There are so many available that it takes a lot of research to find quality that will sell.