What Makes a Successful Affiliate Marketer?

Becoming successful in the affiliate game can be challenge in the early days of starting out. There is several ways to monetize traffic for profitability, but each channel has a trick to it. For example SEO is about Link Building and PPC is about Quality Score Optimization.
Which granted you can use various other channels to promote affiliates through, but let’s focus on the really high converting channels. Overall I would say PPC converts the highest and next to that would be SEO.
Pay Per Click Affiliate Marketing: PPC can be a very fast channel to make money through, but you have to be a top performer, let me say that again you have to be a top performer. What do I mean when I refer to being a top performer? Your landing page has to convert very high (it has to be perfect) and you must have a GREAT quality score (big majority of time you need to have a GREAT QS when working with affiliate offers). I am not kidding almost every market I have worked with you need a GREAT quality score with high converting keywords and a great landing page to make money.
The reason being for is becuase you are working on such as small margin; therefore everything in your PPC campaign must be perfect. One of the great things about being an affiliate though is that you can get super creative with your advertising in other ways that your competitors can’t. For example you can create review pages then start building out ads that have titles that say things such as “Top 3 Fat Loss Ebooks” I’m just using that as an example, but you can get really creative as an affiliate with your advertising that will result in a GREAT quality score.
It’s very hard to win in the affiliate game unless you are very skilled with getting a GREAT QS score with super high converting keywords. The idea is to test, test, and test. The key idea is to be creative with your advertising and make sure that everything is performing at it’s best.
Search Engine Optimization Affiliate Marketing: SEO is a very profitable channel to market your affiliate products through. The downfall about SEO is that it can take forever to get sites ranking specially on competitive keywords due to the trust rank with Google. The best way to really get an affiliate offer going through SEO is to pump out educational content combined with some high quality editorial link building.
Some marketers are just not creative enough when it comes to link building and that right there is what will set you back in the SEO channel. You got to know how to get links. Every one has their own unique way of getting links and you need to find out what works for you. If you don’t know how to get links then the chances of you making positive cash flow through SEO affiliate marketing game is next to none.
What Channel to Use? Honestly if I was you I would combined SEO and PPC together. You can learn a lot from working with both channels. For example you might find some Ads through AdWords that are getting a HIGH CTR (click through rate) you can then scale this into your SEO titles and description. Believe it or not you can literally double your CTR ratio through organic listings (that means double sales) just like you can with PPC, but you have to test through PPC to find out what works best.
Conclusion: Just keep in mind if your going to get into the affiliate game plan on giving it a lot of time. People are only successful with affiliate marketing because they test several creatives. For example about 3 months ago I cranked out over 100 Adgroups through AdWords, but guess what? Only one was driving major high converting traffic and the other Adgroups that was driving traffic was not really converting this campaign is now cranking out 1-2k a week.
Granted 1-2k a week is not a lot, but when I first jumped into this market I was thinking the promotion strategy I was getting ready to test was going to be a dud. Then to come find out it wasn’t a dud that just comes to tell me how much opportunity marketers could be missing out on by not testing intensivley. By the way I was using the content network in this strategy and at first I wasn’t going to test it, but I did anyways and look what I got.