Personal Qualities You Need to Be an Affiliate Marketer

14 February 2023
48
0
Reading: 6 min

What does a professional consist of? Skills, experience, and knowledge of the right software and tools? Absolutely, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The portrait of an ideal job candidate consists of a balanced combination of hard and soft skills. But let’s establish upfront, there are no perfect candidates. We all have our strengths and weaknesses that can fit perfectly into a team in a unique mix.

Affiliate marketing works exactly the same way. Let’s take a closer look at what qualities affiliate teams value most, and why you are better off matching most of them.

Personal Qualities You Need to Be an Affiliate Marketer

Get on the soft side

No matter how good you are at driving traffic, it is unlikely that you will have a successful career in the affiliate field without certain “human” qualities. Hard and soft skills always go hand in hand, so you need to understand that in addition to technical knowledge and experience, you will need some personal qualities.

The ability to be a team player

If you are a lone wolf by nature, you are better off leaving these principles at home. Affiliate marketing is a very unpredictable field, with many challenges: shaving, unscrupulous affiliate networks, bans, and much more. It is important to know how to swallow your pride and ask for help from your colleagues if you need it. Also, your co-workers need to have confidence in your reliability and responsiveness, too. Ultimately, you all have a stake in a successful end result.

Well, if you realize that a team career in affiliate marketing isn’t for you, try a solo mode, but be prepared for a thorny path.

Stress resistance

As we’ve already said, affiliate marketing is a very volatile field, and you could have a steep drop in conversions around the corner at any time. Here it is crucial to keep your sanity and not panic. You can learn from the problems and make your approach to upcoming traffic drives more flexible to possible problems. By the way, we have some tips on fighting burnout for affiliate marketers.

Adequate attitude towards the industry

In the affiliate world, there are white, gray, and black-hat offers, and in the bigger marketing community, “dark” promotion may be perceived negatively. But you have to understand that you can choose your own direction. Marketing is a tool. Like an axe: you can become a lumberjack and provide timber for an entire country, or you can go the criminal way. Here, only your conscience will be the yardstick.

Patience for monotonous work

Affiliate marketing is not just “creative” work. It is 95% testing and only 5% of the time and effort is used to extract a profit from the working bundle. By tests, people mean different things. Most often a monotonous reloading of creatives is made according to the same template in accordance with the relevant working scheme. And tests of everything and everything without stopping. In other words, you don’t just have to be able to come up with something, you have to be able to come up with something on a regular basis. You need a kind of “creative endurance”.

Adaptability

When someone comes into the affiliate market expecting stable growth, they will quickly be disappointed. It’s a very dynamic sphere and if you enter this game, you have to adapt to that dynamics. Conversion flows and offers have a tendency to burn out, and Facebook Ads are very dynamic. You have no choice but to keep up that momentum in order to stay afloat. If you’ve caught luck by the tail and your ROI skyrocketed once, be prepared to lose it all one day and find the strength to rise again.

Creativity

Making creatives and design stuff can be delegated to the design department, but the affiliate himself must give them the right specification. This requires a special marketing flair and mental agility. It is about being able to “recognize the bundle”. If you read interviews with famous affiliates, it will become clear that success is not found where more or less well-known up-to-date working mechanics are repeated. Affiliate success is where unique methods and techniques for bypassing blocking, account mining, targeting, combinations of promotion channels, visual creative concepts, etc. are generated, tested, and developed.

Personal Qualities You Need to Be an Affiliate Marketer

Immunity to burnout

This quality refers back to the point about stress resistance. In order to maintain your ability to work, you have to learn to get yourself together and stop in time. Sometimes the work gets frantic, you feel like you’re on a roll, and the excitement just doesn’t give you a chance to take a break. In the affiliate sphere, such a lifestyle will drive you to your grave. You can’t get anywhere without proper planning and control of your work-life balance.

Expert’s comment

We asked Angelina, HR Director ZM TEAM, what skills she often pays attention to when recruiting affiliates for the team.

  1. First and foremost, it is important to understand that affiliate marketing is the opposite of stability. What converted yesterday may be zero today. The candidate needs to adapt and readjust to the new realities.
  2. The second important skill is the ability to analyze traffic. One person will lose 20k and earn nothing, while another will lose the same amount and earn a million. You need to be structured and analyze your work. 
  3. The third is creativity. Most bundles and insights from spy services are outdated, and everyone knows it. A genuine affiliate understands the value of creatives and their uniqueness.
  4. Willingness to take risks. New products, new approaches, GEOs — it’s always a fear of losses, but also a belief in new records in terms of results. That is why it is important not to be afraid to test.
  5. Two heads are better than one. The affiliate should be ready to share his or her expertise inside a team, as together you can scale better.

Final thoughts

Let’s get back to the point that there is no such thing as a perfect candidate. Even if you don’t fulfill a couple of qualities from our list, don’t worry, the road to affiliate marketing is not closed yet. Either way, everyone should have points of growth and development. In addition, the team must be balanced. So even if you are strong in one component of the job, your colleagues will be able to help with something you do a little worse. Now you know what the ideal affiliate should look like regarding personal qualities. You can work on the missing parts to become a market leader and wow everyone with your converting bundles.

Have a story to tell about traffic arbitrage?
Become a ZorbasMedia contributor!
Become an author