Training

Affiliate Marketing is a great choice for an online business, but many people wrongly assume it is an easy option to earning money online.  The premise is very simple, but the execution of the business will determine how successful you are.

In this post I am going to go through 5 Qualities for Success in Affiliate Marketing that I have found very useful to building my online business up.  Let’s start with what is Affiliate Marketing first…

What is Affiliate Marketing?

If you would like a full explanation of what affiliate marketing, then read my post “How Does Affiliate Marketing Really Work“.

But in short, with affiliate marketing you have 3 parties.  You (the affiliate), a product/service (company selling it) and the potential buyer (consumer).

Signing up with an affiliate program allows you to promote a product or service on your blog or through social media and if the buyer purchases it, you get a commission. The affiliate program gives you a unique link that tells them it was you who introduced them and then you get paid.

The actual process for Affiliate Marketing is simple, someone clicks your link and you benefit from a percentage of the sale.  But, people think this will happen really quickly, as in a couple of days or weeks and that is simply not the case.

It would be great if it could, but the truth about it is the time needed to build up trust with the search engines and the readers who will be visiting your blog.

These 5 qualities we will be discussing are all aimed at both being successful but also understanding what is required and the time needed to see it through.

Let’s get on with the 5 Qualities for Success in Affiliate Marketing.

A Willingness to Invest Time & Effort

Let’s be honest, any true affiliate marketer will tell you that it will take a lot of time and effort to build a business up to a point where you are earning a living from it. The key word there is Business.

Any business owner will tell you that you need to build a strategy, a business plan and invest in the time and effort in the beginning to get it started and out there in the public domain.

Affiliate Marketing is a passive income stream, but that doesn’t mean you sit back and do nothing.

The statement that it is passive, gives many an impression that you can sit back and watch the money come in.  But the only reason it is passive, is you do not need to present to oversee the sale.

Without traffic to your website, you will not see any of these sales and that is where you need to invest time in research, creating content, connecting with others in your niche, monitoring traffic and which strategies work and which don’t.

Creating quality content requires time and effort, constantly reviewing it to see whether your readers like it or not, does it help them, does it answer a question?

Do not expect Affiliate Marketing to be a quick win or an easy route to earning money at the start. Don’t get me wrong, when you do nail a strategy and it starts earning money it could continue to earn you money for years to come, with minimal tweaking – but you consistently need to find ways of keeping your business fresh and up-to-date with the competition.

A Constant Desire to Learn

This one came from an Affiliate Marketing expert who has 15 years’ experience, never stop learning!

Think about how quick technology changes, any given business industry is constantly improving things, and this means there are new things to learn.

New techniques, new strategies, new systems.  Google gave just updated their webmaster tools, so this meant I needed to get my head around it to get the best out of the platform and the data it represents.

There is also the fact that there are other elements that you will need to learn to be successful:

• Website Design
• Content Creation
• Online Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• SEO & PPC Marketing

There are many factors to an online business and it is key that you keep learning to become an authority in your niche.

I found a platform that has a step-by-step guide to building an online business with affiliate marketing and I have found them integral to my online business.

Wealthy Affiliate is a training platform with awesome tools to help build a business with a community of experts in affiliate marketing.

But whilst they will give you the tools, you need to utilise the 5 qualities to make it a success!

Self-Determination

Are you determined to become successful? Can you keep determined that the content you provide will be useful to the reader and help them with a problem or help them decide to make a purchase (with your affiliate link).

Consumers are very wary when it comes to things online and want to feel that there is a real person behind the website.  If you write poor content but loads of it – you will have a lot of content, but it doesn’t help you grow your business as the readers switch.

You need to make sure the content you write is the best you can do with helpful information that helps the reader.

It is also worth noting that when you are writing, you should be writing for one person.  Write it as though you were talking to one person, that is the art of blogging and helping people.  They want to feel like they have wrote it for you!

But it can also be easy to just sell – writing content that says “buy this”.

This doesn’t help them, they are searching online because they want to know whether it is the right product to buy for their circumstances, is there a better alternative.  If they knew they were going to buy something, they would have already bought it.

Be determined that your business will offer the best advice, the best support and the best products to buy.  Strive to help people, first and foremost and the sales will follow.  Never go and try and do it the other way around

Self-Discipline

The single most important fact about Affiliate Marketing is: If you play at it, you will never be successful!

The only way that you will turn it into a full-time earning career is to run it like a business.  If you are going to start it as a side gig for now, then you need to be strict about how much time you set aside each week to achieve your goals.

Many Affiliate Marketers started their business on the side of a full-time job, including myself.

The only way you can do it is to have a schedule – time to complete training, time to do keyword research, time to write an article, time to market on social media, etc.

It will be tough at first, but one you achieve your goals you will get a lot more time to spend on your business and enjoy a better work life balance and see the family more.

The other side to consider with self-discipline is self-control with distractions.

Think about how many times yourself or someone you know spends on their phone or social media.

Social Media is a fantastic tool to growing your business, but it is also one of the biggest distractions taking you away from doing tasks on your business, like creating that article you were going to write or that video you were going to record promoting your latest product review, instead you spend an hour going through Pinterest or going on Facebook.

It might be a good idea to write down a list of distractions, those that you can avoid and those you cannot avoid.  For example, your day job and your family (I have a 6-year-old) would be classed as distractions that you cannot avoid. It’s called life.

But social media, catching up on a tv show could be called avoidable distractions.

Some Optimism

The last quality, Optimism is perhaps the most important and the most difficult to keep in mind.

A lot of people are searching online for ways to earn money from home and they can get carried away with the many ways of doing it (at first glance). There are many ‘Get Rich Quick” schemes out there that are predominantly scams and can really affect the confidence people have of finding a way to earn money online.

Then many find something called Affiliate Marketing – It is a great way of earning money online and is billed as a ‘Passive Income’ method.

But the reason you need optimism with any online business is you will not see the rewards straightaway.  With one of my online businesses I did not see a return for 6 months, what if I had given up after 3 months as I hadn’t earned anything in that time.  It is key that you believe in yourself and your business.

Think of why you want to earn money online, not just to earn money.  I am talking about the lifestyle that this income can bring – I wanted to spend more time with my family, as well as get rid of the money worries I had.

In Summary

Done right, Affiliate Marketing is a very sound business model and can be very rewarding.

Helping others learn Affiliate Marketing and get started in affiliate marketing and all about the right tools in affiliate marketing is awesome and something I am very passionate about.

Harnessing these 5 qualities for Affiliate Marketing Online has been key to building up a profitable business and that is why I recommend them to anyone wanting to get started or struggling with their online business regardless of whether it is an affiliate marketing business or not.

Are you struggling to find a rhythm with your affiliate marketing business?  Do you want to ensure you start on the right foot?  I can help and I offer it willingly, if you want to get the best training out there for affiliate marketing with expert help and support.  Then I highly recommend you read my Wealthy Affiliate Review – See what fantastic tools and training they offer.

If you have any questions about affiliate marketing or need any help or support, just let me know. Drop me a comment below and I’ll get you an answer.