SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL AFFILIATES

Although there are many techniques and tricks for being a successful affiliate marketer, in our conversations with hundreds of top affiliates over the years, we at ClickBank have identified the following seven habits that help create lasting success.
1. Promote products that address specific needs: While most fledgling affiliates focus on an Internet marketing vertical that they think will make them quick money, it’s important to consider the wide range of products on the ClickBank Marketplace that cater to a huge variety of needs. Many successful affiliate marketers sell products that address a specific need or answer a particular question.
2. Promote widely: Many successful affiliate marketers rely on a wide range of promotional methods—e-mail marketing, blogs, review sites, and pay-per-click advertising—since various promotional methods work well with particular demographics.
3. Promote seasonally: Successful affiliates tend to vary the products they promote based on the season. Consumers tend to seek self-improvement products at New Year’s when resolutions are being made, while they look for outdoor recreation and fitness products in the summertime.
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 affiliate marketers 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 lifecycle 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 a product that doesn’t measure up.