5 Strategies to Becoming a Successful Affiliate

Affiliate marketing is easy to get into but challenging if you want to make serious money. Your luck may favor you at the onset and you might make your first thousand or a few thousand rather conveniently. If you wish to become a successful affiliate and that entails a sustainable revenue stream and diversification, then you need to strategize your entire approach. Here are five strategies to becoming a successful affiliate.

•	Become a fulltime affiliate marketing professional. You can spend a few hours every day trying to make some extra cash but then you will remain confined to that much. You can get lucky with one or few affiliate marketing campaigns but you would not be truly successful. Like any other job or profession, affiliate marketing requires fulltime commitment. You can decide if it would be six hours or sixteen in a day. Whatever amount of time you think is sufficient for you or what you want to put in is acceptable but you should not treat it as a hobby or pastime. 

•	Develop your niche. Do not try to imitate or replicate anyone. You may know of an affiliate who has made serious money in herbal medicine or someone may have minted writing about automobiles. You need to know what you specialize in and use that. Write about books if you are a bibliophile or a bookworm. Write about consumer electronics if you love your gadgets and know them too. You must have a penchant for something and you would have extensive knowledge in some niche or another. Use that instead of trying to dabble in a niche that you are unfamiliar with. 

•	Choose a medium that suits you. If you are a good writer and can really engage readers, then you can pen down articles, reviews and other forms of textual content. If you are a designer or someone who would rather use pictorial representations, then go for slideshows, info-graphics and other tabular forms of data. If you like making videos then use the audiovisual medium. Affiliate marketing is not confined to any specific medium. Use every medium you can, from social media to video sharing websites.

•	Focus on your personality and hence personal branding. Today, people want to know who has penned down a review, who has made a video or info-graphic and what that person’s credentials are. Establish yourself as an authority on social media and niche websites. Develop a personal brand that people will trust.
  
•	Always serve the customers, consumers or your followers. While the companies will pay you commission, it is the readers or buyers who are actually contributing to your success. Put their interests first and you would not put a foot wrong. 


