Affiliates are always searching for the keys to success, and that is because it’s possible to go from beginner to super affiliate real quick… as long as you have the right personality traits and put in the hard work. Maybe you want to see if your competitors are working smarter instead of harder than you? Or you might be asking yourself — what skills do you need for affiliate marketing?

If you want to find out what the top ten qualities of successful affiliate marketers are, then this article is for you. Read on and make sure you’re not missing out on some untapped potential!

1. Willingness to Learn

We’ve said it before and we will say it again, there is a big learning curve that comes with affiliate marketing. A thirst for knowledge will help you succeed, as the more you know about the industry, the better your chances are for success.

Super affiliate Charles Ngo says the most important trait an affiliate marketer should have is having a Growth Mindset. Put simply, someone with a growth mindset understands that their skills and talents can be developed through hard work and effort. Rather than the alternative fixed mindset which is to give up and believe that everyone has a natural level of intelligence, and which is fixed and cannot improve beyond a certain level.

This willingness to learn will also help you gain as much knowledge on the niche you work within as possible. This will help you to serve better ads to your target audience and increase your sales, and ultimately your commission.
The most successful affiliates enjoy growing their knowledge by continuously testing things out. Trying ad formats, rotating various banner ads, constantly improving landing pages, and adjusting their bid rates whenever the opportunity comes.

Click here to learn more about affiliate marketing!

2. Organization

A good affiliate marketing strategy requires that you start with good planning. As we all know, failure to plan is planning to fail. Before you can even begin to choose your niche, you need to have a clear goal in mind. After having this strategy ready, next you need to clearly define where you will focus your time and energy. Whether that is to be spent on content marketing, building an email marketing database, or an affiliate blog or website. 

It will help you to stay on track if you set yourself goals that feed into your overall strategy. For example, make a certain amount of conversions in a given period, and have a set amount of gross profit in the same period. This will help you to stay on track with weekly, monthly, and yearly targets feeding into this strategy. 

But keep your feet on the ground here, base your goals on your reality, rely on data from your previous campaigns. You have to be realistic and let becoming a super affiliate be part of your long-term plan, not a monthly goal.

It’s also important to mention that being organized goes for your accounting skills, too. You will need to be watching how much money is coming in, and how much you are spending on your campaigns to ensure a positive ROI. One way you can stay organized with managing multiple campaigns is by using ad tracking software.

If you’re organized maybe this is the right career for you. Click here to read more!

3. Selectivity

Another way you can keep organized is by sticking to your chosen niche. If you learn as much as you can about a particular area of the affiliate industry, you will be bound to do better than your competitors. Rather than if you were to try and balance many different verticals. This is because when you focus on a specific niche, you gain more insight into what interests people the most within this market segment, and which offers your target audience are likely to react to.

Selectivity really comes down to being selective with the right affiliate marketing programs and affiliate networks that serve the right offers for your target audience. Whether you are going down the search engine optimization route, with blog posts containing your affiliate links, or you are using paid traffic to fuel your conversions, being selective with your offers is the golden rule of affiliate marketing.

This is because it allows you to create better-targeted ads, whether you focus on demographics, GEO, device type, or offer type within a vertical. Your goal is to serve the right traffic to your ads, so when people see them, they are prompted to take action. So, if you are more selective with who sees them, then your conversions will likely go up, as will your commission, and your ROI. 

If you’re looking for more tips as a beginner
We have 25 more right here!

4. Consistency

Think of this as a continuation of that all-important phrase: find your niche. Once you have been selective in finding said niche it’s time to put your efforts into the learning and testing phase. Find out as much as you can from your campaigns about what works in your corner of the market. This includes everything from the best performing visuals for your landing pages to the right amount to bid for traffic. Although, of course, there are waves of trends you must ride where things in the market change for a week or a month. If you are consistent, then you will be able to have an overall positive average.

In order to serve your target audience, you need to be consistent with your strategy. This means choosing relevant affiliate products or services that meet people’s needs and sticking with them.
If an affiliate is short-sighted in their career by focusing on short-term success, then they are less likely to be consistent in creating successful promotional content.

Click here to read about the 7 mistakes you might make as a beginner affiliate!

5. Networking

We know affiliate marketers are often lone wolves, self-employed, and free from the 9-5 grind, but that doesn’t mean they can ignore networking and the opportunities that can come out of this. It means they should be networking more to learn from as many successful affiliate marketers as possible. There are several ways to network as an affiliate, our favorite being the affiliate marketing conferences that are held throughout the year. This is a chance to meet many like-minded affiliates with whom you can swap industry secrets and tips. Being good at networking comes from listening well, and being able to add value to the person you would like to add value to you. 

Sounds simple, right? Well, it is.
The importance of two-way conversation is not to be underestimated as successful affiliate marketers. Especially in the current time, the use of social networking platforms for learning is super important. It’s more about the business rather than lazily pushing sales over sites like Facebook. Along with social media, we recommend checking out the affiliate forums (like affiliatefix, Dijs Forum, or i Am Affiliate, affLIFT, STM) as there are great tips and tricks shared by thousands of affiliates.

Part of becoming a successful affiliate marketer is sharing your knowledge, too. So, if you have found a winning strategy you can help your community by sharing some of your expertise, or even a useful article you have read. You never know this could be your first step towards running a course on affiliate marketing as all the super affiliates do.

Do you want to learn more about forums and networking? Click here!

6. Creativity

The affiliates that make it to being super affiliates often have this creative characteristic, which allows them to sell not only through the power of persuasive speech in the form of landing page copy, but eye-catching visuals that boost their click-through rates. A creative affiliate marketer also knows their target audience well, keeping them in mind when crafting content that will keep them engaged and interested in their offers.

Do you think you have what it takes to be a creative affiliate?

Click here to get creative with your lander pages!

7. Adaptability

Adaptability is something that will allow you to know when it is time to kill a campaign and try a different strategy. But it’s also been even more important recently given affiliates have had to adapt to sudden market changes as a result of the global coronavirus pandemic wherever they are in the world. 

It doesn’t end there, though. This adaptability allows you to ride the peaks and troughs of the affiliate marketing calendar, and be prepared to make the most out of every one of these ‘peak’ opportunities.

Adaptability is also something that can be applied to the campaigns as a whole in terms of optimization. You will need to learn to be adaptable through how much to bid on for a source, how to adjust your ads to match the seasonal trends, or rotate offers if one suddenly runs out.

Want to work-from-home during the pandemic? Read here how it’s possible!

8. Patience

This is one of the traits that may be one of the more difficult to master if you are new to the affiliate industry. Beginner advertisers tend to have shiny object syndrome, meaning they chase profit in the short-term perspective, wherever it may be. This often leads to not being selective, which we have already found is one of the fastest ways to fail in affiliate marketing. 

So, be patient with your campaigns and think long-term about your affiliate marketing strategy. This includes understanding that there is a certain level of investment both in time and money before you will see a return. But only if you wait it out and learn from your mistakes.

There is an old proverb that explains this phenomenon. To put it simply, success in affiliate marketing is like growing bamboo. 

In the first few years of growing bamboo, nothing happens. You pour water and pray that something is happening, but you don’t see much in the way of results. Then after a few years, the tree can grow up to 90ft in only a year. You did not see the results, but you were making progress. For the bamboo to grow, it needed to develop its roots. This is how you need to look at your campaigns. 

Each campaign is a learning experience. You may not be profitable, but you may learn about how to do split tests, which may lead you down the road to a profitable campaign in the future. Your next campaign might lose you more money too, but you may learn what copy or creatives work best on your landing pages. Each campaign will help you learn one detail, that when combined with all the rest, will lead to a strong and profitable campaign in the end.

So, don’t get disheartened if you don’t see green, profitable campaigns just yet. Focus on learning one thing from every campaign. Your next profitable campaign might be just around the corner.

You’ll have to be patient to make it to the affiliate conferences in 2021, click to read more!

9. Analytical

Having an analytical mindset can really be an advantage in affiliate marketing. You can see quickly where your campaigns are performing best and continue with that winning strategy. But more importantly, you’re able to spot when you should kill the campaigns that don’t perform well.

Another thing that will help you learn to get the best out of your campaigns is using the right tools.

Zeropark recommends that you have an ad tracker, a spy tool, browser plugins, a landing page builder, creative tools, and maybe some web hosting for your landers or trackers. If you want to see the best tools to help you in your campaign analysis, then click on the article link below.

For the best tools to use in affiliate marketing, check out this blog post!

10. Determination

Like our bamboo story from the patience section, determination is another one of the traits that are required in affiliate marketing for the very same reason. Affiliates should be determined to be successful in the long term, but know that they might have to put up with losing money on their early campaigns. As long as it’s a learning experience, it’s not a lost investment. Think of it as a learning budget. 

This never-give-up attitude is important as it can help push past the competition, who may try a couple of campaigns and lose a little money and give up. You need to keep in mind that you may be one campaign, and one lesson away, from changing your strategy from breaking even to making money.

It is still a balance between persevering and knowing when to kill a failing campaign. Our basic rule is that a campaign has not been tested for long enough if $100 has not been spent. This goes for sources, too. The general rule is to test sources with at least $20 before committing or tossing them.

With determination you should be able to make money in affiliate marketing, so give it your best shot.

Determined to make money with affiliate marketing? Check out the latest trends here.

Conclusions

So, now you know the top ten traits you need to succeed in affiliate marketing. How many do you have and which ones do you want to acquire?

If you have even one of these characteristics then you are ready to start your journey with your affiliate business and paid traffic. But remember this is not a get-rich-quick scheme and you’ll need to work hard and be patient to succeed in this business.

Do you think you have the traits to succeed?
Start today with paid traffic from Zeropark!