The Five Features Of Fearsomely Successful Affiliates

What do successful affiliates all have in common?

We’re a super-varied bunch, after all. There’s no fixed line on age, location, background or career training. You don’t need a degree in marketing, statistics or computer science – hell, you don’t need a degree. (I don’t have one.) Top affiliates come from every continent, every lifestyle and every outlook on life.

But there are a few – very few – traits that most, if not all, successful affiliates share, and which are uncommon in other people. And it’s a large enough sample size that it at least strongly implies you should probably cultivate these traits if you want to be a successful affiliate.

They’re “lucky”

Affiliate marketing is a game of luck, there’s no doubt about it. Most campaigns won’t work. Most offers won’t work.

And so, most successful affiliates have been lucky quite a few times.

But there’s a twist to this. To misquote Thomas Jefferson, “I’m a great believer in luck. The more campaigns I launch, the luckier I get.”

Stackman, one of STM’s founders, runs a lot of very big campaigns – campaigns he had to be lucky to find. How does he find them? He forces his luck. Here’s his explanation of how he found a single $x,xxx a day campaign – it involved testing more than 50 campaigns to find it.

Likewise, Charles Ngo first hit success as an affiliate when he found a “lucky” campaign – after 6 months of 7-hour evenings running unsuccessful ones.

Successful affiliates test. A lot.

They run losing campaigns. A lot.

And that’s why they’re so damn lucky.

They keep moving forward

A lot has been said about the virtues of hard work, but it’s possible to work very hard and not actually achieve success. The difference between that and what successful affiliates do is that successful affiliates keep moving forward.

That can be as simple as keeping testing new campaigns rather than just getting stuck trying to make the same one work over and over again. Or it can be as dramatic as what Alex “Angry Russian” Tsatkin did – closing things down and moving back in with his parents to give himself time to make the next big leap in his career.

As an affiliate, it’s very important to learn the difference between motion ...