7 Key Traits of Highly Successful Affiliate Marketers

There is a clear demarcation between affiliates who are super successful like Pat Flynn of SmartPassiveIncome.com or Harsh Agrawal of ShoutMeLoud.com and others. So what are some of the key traits of these highly successful affiliate marketers?

Let me share my view of what I think make these affiliates super successful.

1. Selects Only The Right Products

Choosing a product based on commission isn’t how one should approach affiliate marketing. The commission should not be the parameter to consider a product or niche as a whole.

It is essential to see what value does the product provides to your blog reader.

Will the product make a change in the life of your blog reader?

The value proposition for the reader is what an affiliate should look at instead of his earnings.

Pick any successful affiliate, and you will find that none of them will:

• Promote a product or service based on financial benefits.
• Recommend something that they haven’t use personally.
• Always share their experience with the product or services.

If you wish to select the right product for your audience, make a list of products that you think will benefit your blog readers.

Now out of that list, if you aren’t using those products and don’t have personal experience or customer viewpoint, it will be tough for you to provide a good value proposition to your blog readers.

So you won’t be sharing views to help buyers solve their problems.

2. Promotes a Handful of Products

So when you set the criteria of sharing the right products to your audience, you won’t be able to use and share more than a few handfuls of the products.

We see the same trait in each of highly successful affiliate.

The not so successful affiliates make a common mistake of promoting anything and everything.

Once the affiliate starts promoting everything, the readers who burnt their fingers once with a subpar product recommendation won’t follow along when an excellent product comes along.

Understand your blog readers needs and share products that can help change their life one step at a time.

3. They are Human and Authentic

Authenticity builds trust.

The core idea of being a blogger should not be to make money. Keep money as a byproduct of being a blogger. Care for the readers and treat them like you want to treat yourself.

If you take a look at successful bloggers doing affiliate marketing, you will find they are humans with authenticity. People can learn from them, like them, share what they write as well as follow what they offer.

Readers attach with authentic experiences of a real human being behind the blog. It is a long-term process.

4. Is Honest to himself and With the Readers

In the world of affiliate marketing, one will come across useful & not so good products. There will undoubtedly be some pros and cons of every product.

Share a realistic view of the product. Talk about advantage and disadvantage.

One might wonder if writing disadvantages of a product won’t pour in sales, but if sell is the only motive, you are doing it wrong anyway.

Discuss the minute details of the product. They are more likely to take a purchase decision based on more information. In my AWeber Review, I clearly state it isn’t a cost-effective solution along with the problems I faced when I grew beyond a point. The readers like it and still purchase AWeber based on my recommendation.

5. Matching Product to Reader’s Need

Your blog may have a few categories. It is essential to place the right matching product in front of the right audience.

Hence, selecting the right match of the product is crucial.

Google Adsense works excellent for publishers because it has the best contextual matching for ads with content. As an example, a page with content about the guitar will have Google Ads related to guitars.

The same applies to blogs, and successful affiliates are master at it. The product they recommend matches the need of the audience.

So if your site is about guitars, other musical instruments may see some conversions for sure. However, the products for guitar accessories can do much better.

6. Track Affiliate Success

I observe affiliate links at the bottom of a review gets fewer clicks but a better conversion rate.

Ideally, there should be no more than three links to the same offer – one at the start, one in between somewhere in the middle and finally at the end of the review.

After reading the review, the user is more likely in a decision to go for it or not. Link in the middle is if the user has already decided but is reading a review before going for it.

Typically link at the beginning isn’t high on conversions.

The best way to know is to do A/B testing.

For example, test the color of the CTA button and see the behavior. You can track button clicks events or track affiliate link clicks in Google Analytics via Google Tag Manager.

You can track different link placement within the content.

Testing things consistently will help you figure out what works and what doesn’t.

On the contrary, if you are starting, working on better content may be worth your time than focusing too much on button colors.

For better conversions, what matters most is the content.

Does it address the questions a user may have when reading your view about the product? Does the product offer what a visitor may be looking for? How can the product address his or her problem at hand?

7. Multiple Source to Drive Traffic to Affiliate Site

More visitors bring more clicks and ultimately, more sales.

To drive traffic, consider every aspect of marketing. Don’t only consider SEO as the only way to light up the Google Analytics traffic column.

Consider search and social media for sure but also consider Google and Facebook ads as a way to boost traffic.

Use multiple traffic sources to be able to see what works and what doesn’t.

To help you start building a decent amount of traffic on your affiliate website, read my Traffic Building Tips.

Final Thoughts

To become a better affiliate, one will have to consistently put in the efforts for product research, content creation, and marketing.

Inserting tons of affiliate links in a copy paste content doesn’t work.