Affiliate Marketing: Attitude Is Everything

You can work day and night with a smile on your face and make no money through affiliate marketing, provided you choose the wrong topic and then work with the wrong affiliate partners.

Nevertheless, the attitude you take towards your affiliate marketing business can become a determining factor in your success. In fact, your attitude may be the most important part of your affiliate marketing business, especially when you're starting out.

Attitude is what separates high-performing affiliates from average gumps. Choose your destiny by choosing your attitude. It's an affiliate marketing tradition.

Patience

The biggest attitude problem that unsuccessful affiliates suffer from is lack of patience. People get so excited about the affiliate marketing millions that they forget:

Before you can make millions, you must make thousands, and before you can make thousands, you must make hundreds, and before you make hundreds, you must make tens.

Patient affiliates, by contrast, realize early on in the game that this may take a little while. It may take six months. It may take a year. It may take two years. But however long it takes, once the affiliate marketing dollars start flowing, they don't stop flowing if the business is built right.

The nature of the Internet, particularly with regard to showing up in natural search results, is such that patience is rewarded, and inconsistency punished. From an SEO perspective, for example, you are better off adding to your website little by little over a long period of time than busting out 66 articles in a blaze of glory, and then picking up another hobby.

Patience is the indispensable virtue when it comes to affiliate marketing success.

Healthy Skepticism

It's no use being patient if your affiliate marketing efforts are based on lies and half-truths. And there are, circulating widely, many lies and many half-truths about affiliate marketing.

If you are the kind of person who can simultaneously become wildly excited about a good idea, and yet question yourself in harsh terms about your idea's flaws and faults, you have a bright future in affiliate marketing. You gotta believe, no doubt, but you also gotta study up.

Find facts, discount opinions. Even your own.

Always Learning

Rounding out the list of absolute must-have attitudes for affiliate marketing success is the penchant for learning that excellent affiliates display in spades. No matter how much you know, you can always learn more. You can learn from your wins as well as your losses.

As you tally wins, as you tally losses, as things you try work, as things you try don't work, attempt to build up a system that allows you to store that information. A basic Excel spreadsheet will work fine, or even a handwritten journal. Recording gives rise to remembering.

Affiliate marketing "gurus" who at least half-deserve that cheesy distinction have, as the saying goes, forgotten more in the last ten minutes than the average gump will learn in a lifetime.

Earning disparities generally follow that same pattern.