The best affiliate marketers make over five figures every month. They are called super affiliates. Very few affiliate marketers ever get to this level. However, anyone can become a super affiliate. Becoming a super affiliate just means you put in more work, more time, and committed more resources to your affiliate marketing business than the next guy.
This article will help you learn how to be a good affiliate marketer by telling you what to do and the skills you need to possess. Hopefully, you will be well on your way to becoming a super affiliate by the time you are done. Let’s get started!
WHAT SKILLS DOES A GOOD AFFILIATE MARKETER NEED?
The beauty of affiliate marketing is that almost anyone can do it. As an affiliate marketer, your entire job is a learning journey. Learning on the job has lots of perks, not least of which is getting to make money as you fine tune your skills.
To be a good affiliate marketer, you need to be patient, persistent, hardworking, and willing to learn. These skills will go a long way in keeping you dedicated to the job, and that is when success will find you.
Patience is important because, with affiliate marketing, success does not come quickly. It takes a lot of work put in over an extended period of time to see any tangible results. It may take months or even more than a year before you start hitting your target margins. If you are not patient, it is easy to get discouraged in this business.
Persistence and hard work are essential for the same reason. Since these things take time, you need to consistently keep putting in the work, even if you are not seeing any results. The most important thing is to think about the future. Create quality content today as if you are the biggest name in your niche, and you will reap the fruits of it when you do become one of the biggest names in your niche. Things may not work out the first time, and you may need to start over a few times, but as long as you remain dedicated to your goals, everything will work out. It’s just the nature of affiliate marketing.
You must also be willing to learn. Learning consistently and always sharpening your skills is the key to success as an affiliate marketer. Good affiliate marketers do their research thoroughly, strive to learn as much as they can about their niche, and stay abreast of all the latest developments in the affiliate marketing industry. Keeping an eye out for innovations, new tactics and things that you previously did not know about opens a window of opportunity that someone who is not willing to learn will never see.
Keep these skills in mind as you walk on your journey to affiliate marketing success. Here is what you need to do.
FIND A GOOD NICHE
One of the biggest mistakes that beginner affiliate marketers make is trying to do everything they can at the same time. Splitting their efforts up like this only results in half-baked results in all of them.
You may have stumbled upon one or two affiliate websites that try to provide every service or sell every product under the sun. Beginner affiliate marketing websites will have a bunch of pages in the menu leading to several different destinations, which ultimately only end up confusing potential clients.
Here is a good article on how to pick a niche to market to
No one likes clutter, and no one likes being confused and not being able to tell what exactly it is that you are trying to promote. Instead, be simple. Have only one niche on your website. You are not Craigslist or Amazon. If you want to be a good affiliate marketer, you need to be smart and methodical in your approach. Pick one niche and start building your business from there.
DO YOUR SEO
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”
Once your affiliate marketing website is up and running, you need to make it visible and discoverable. It needs to appear in search engine results.
The best approach to this is by utilizing the power of organic search results. When starting out, forget about paid ad services like Google Ads first. They can get quite expensive pretty quickly, especially if the business is not making that much money yet. Instead, focus n organic search results.
Organic search results are unpaid for results that users see in their browsers whenever they search for certain keywords. These are the best kind of results because their traffic juice lasts much longer than paid ad traffic. You want your website to rank as highly as possible for these organic search results.
The only way to reach this goal is through Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. SEO increases the quantity and quality of user traffic to your site by making your site visible to search engines and ranking your site highly in search engine result pages whenever certain search terms or keywords are entered.
Doing your SEO makes your website discoverable to people who are searching your topics related to your niche, which means it makes you accessible to the most relevant audience. As an affiliate marketer, this is the Holy Grail. Your entire business model depends on traffic. Nothing beats getting quality and relevant traffic.
Here is an article I wrote on how to get your content to rank faster in Google page one using SEO
You can choose to do your own SEO or hire a web developer to do it for you. Either way, you absolutely have to optimize your web pages for search engines if you want to be a good affiliate marketer.
UNDERSTAND YOUR PRODUCT AND YOUR AUDIENCE
To become a good affiliate marketer, first and foremost, you need to know what problem you are solving. The only way you can truly know your product is if you have used it yourself or if you have carried out extensive, objective research. This is essential because as an affiliate marketer, you need to promote products that you are confident about. Suggesting something just because it will net you a big commission can easily backfire on you, making your client lose trust in your recommendations. Honesty, credibility and trustworthiness go a long way in this business.
The next thing that you need to do is to have a good understanding of your audience. Know who it is you are promoting your product or service to. What do they like? What do they dislike? What problems do they have? A good affiliate marketer does not just sell products to their audience. Instead, good affiliate marketers offer value to their audience.
First offer great value, then promote a product that solves their problem. Instead of constantly selling stuff and shoving products in your readers’ faces, create quality content that they can use and learn from or gain some value from, then gently offer the suggestion of a product that can help them do what you are talking about in a better way.
When you understand your product and your audience, they will trust you and be more willing to act on your recommendations. This is how you become good at what you do.
DO NOT PUT ALL YOUR EGGS IN ONE BASKET
Many people usually fail when it comes to this. As an affiliate marketer, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is putting all your eggs in one basket. It can literally ruin you overnight. For instance, when you are picking products to promote, do not exclusively choose products from one merchant. What if they close up shop one day? What if they run out of stock? What if the merchant delays in sending your payments?
You need to protect your business. Do not let its health depend on someone else’s business. Spread your eggs around a little bit so that in case of anything, your business only gets minimally affected.
When signing up for affiliate programs, you need to be on the lookout for exclusivity agreements. Be careful of those. Unless you are absolutely sure of what you are doing, do not go for them. You need to protect yourself by diversifying because otherwise, you could starve if something goes wrong.
EMBRACE CHANGE
As stated earlier, good affiliate marketers are willing to learn. In this industry, just like with everything else that has anything to do with internet marketing, change can be very rapid. You may find that what worked last month no longer works today.
A good example is Google and its Panda update back in 2011, which almost overnight changed how websites were ranked. High ranking keyword-stuffed websites were suddenly nowhere to be seen anymore, and sites that focused on quality of content were suddenly ranking way better.
Many affiliate marketing businesses collapsed because of this. On the other hand, the few smart marketers who embraced this change and tailored their content to match it had something to smile about because they ended up performing much better.
You also need to stay on top of trends. These change a lot too. For example, banner ads were once super popular and drove sales like crazy. Not anymore. People have become blind to them now, and most affiliate marketers no longer bother with them now.
Find out what people are talking about and do your research to stay relevant. Learn something new about your niche and about affiliate marketing every day if you can. Spending your time learning, then embracing the change and opportunity that your lessons bring is one of the surest ways to success.
CONCLUSION
Super affiliates may look like they have it all. They have achieved the impossible, and we all want to be them. However, what most people do not realize is the amount of work, time and sacrifice they have invested in their businesses. They have worked hard and made a series of smart choices that have led them to where they are today.
That is exactly what you need to do. Be smart in how you run your business and it will thrive. Work hard, be patient, and be ready to learn. Choose your niche wisely and specialize in it. Do not forget to do your SEO and have a good understanding of both your product and audience. Finally, do not put all your eggs in one basket, and be willing to embrace change.
Doing this will make you a good affiliate marketer, and you will be well on your way to becoming a super affiliate.
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I hope you found this content useful! Let me know your thoughts, questions and comments!
To your affiliate marketing success!
Mike