“Online entrepreneurs” can apply to many business models. This article will address the online business model of affiliate marketing. Let’s find out what are the 7 habits of highly successful online entrepreneurs.
This article was unabashedly inspired by the iconic work of Stephen Covey called, “The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People.” Mr. Covey’s book applies to a wide range of situations. This post will focus specifically on those building an online business, through affiliate marketing.
I promise you this is not complicated. Isn’t it uncanny that simple things can be the most challenging to complete? I compiled these habits after combining my experience with research into habits.
Guess what? After failing a lot, I discovered there are no magic bullets. Success has everything do to with you. Yes, YOU! And no one else. Knowing what habits can help you to become successful will give you an edge on your competition.
It’s almost like a secret.
The Secret!
Firstly, you need to know what these 7 vital habits are. Secondly, you need to know how to make these habits second nature so that they give you the power to succeed.
Can this be valuable information that you can take to the bank? You bet!
Before we dive into these 7 habits, I want to share with you an affiliate marketing pathway to make your life so much easier. How? EVERYTHING you need to create a vibrant online business is available in one place. Click the link below to learn all about it:
How To Learn About Affiliate Marketing Online And Get The Results You Want!
The 7 Habits Of Highly Successful Entrepreneurs
May I share the list of habits first before diving deeper into the details? There is a particular significance to the roll our order of these habits that I will also explain after the discussion.
- Define clearly what results you seek
- Create a success plan with a timeline
- Conduct Keyword Research
- Compile supporting materials for your content
- Research your competition
- Write content
- Scale up your business.
It is easy to learn what you have to do, how to do it and the rate at which is necessary to meet the results in the timeline you create.
So why do most people fail? I said earlier this is all about YOU.
You need to do the training, Do the homework. And take consistent action on a schedule that you must make.
After all, this is YOUR business. It is up to you to decide when you want to achieve the results you are seeking.
What do you think is the show stopper?
Not having a plan and doing the work consistently. This happens when you do not have the critical habits necessary.
Let’s dive deeper into these critical habits.
Habit #1 – Define Clearly What Results You Seek
The most obvious result is to state the monthly income you want to earn starting at a specific time in the future. The sooner you want these results, the harder you will need to work and at a faster pace. It is this work ethic you must develop as the most important habit.
Habit #2 – Create A Success Plan With A Timeline
I created the following weekly schedule as an example to use in this discussion. I filled this schedule with the most critical tasks necessary in affiliate marketing when you begin.
This will evolve to adding more tasks perhaps using a weekly and monthly schedule when you make more progress in your business.
| Sunday | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Saturday |
| Pick Product | Research Competitors | Write How To Article | Write Review Article | Write Comparison Article | Work on Unfinished Business | Review Weeks Activities |
| Affiliate Program Search | Find affiliate links | SEO Actions & Publish | SEO Actions & Publish | SEO Actions & Publish | Read Posts on WA and Comment | More Keyword Research |
| Keyword Research For 3 Content Titles | OEC Training | OEC Training | OEC Training | OEC Training | Weekly Webinar by WA Live Coach Jay |
Definition of terminology:
| WA | Wealthy Affiliate – The name of the business building platform |
| Keyword Research | The process of finding low competition search phrases to rank high |
| SEO | Search Engine Optimization. The process to drive traffic to your content |
| OEC | Online Entrepreneur Certification. Certificate for course completion |
Habit #3 – Conduct Keyword Research
Keyword research is how you discover the titles for your articles. The table above identifies three types of the most common content in affiliate marketing. These are shown in italics.
Your objective is to come up with search phrases that your potential customers will be using to find the information they are seeking. I have derived three kinds of information.
- The “How To’s”. You disclose what solutions for their problem you have found through your own research. Share how the product or service category you are suggesting will provide the most optimum solution and how.
- The Product Review. This review conducts a thorough evaluation of the product you recommend to solve the problem they face. Explain in detail why this is the best solution.
- Comparison Report. There may be alternate products that are cheaper, but not the best for many reasons. Some people are willing to make compromises if they find a less expensive product. In this report, you will provide a detailed comparison of the product you recommend, with others that require compromises. Naturally, you will have affiliate links for all these products so no matter what the customer decides to go with, a commission will come your way.
Keyword Research enables you to derive a comprehensive list of articles to keep you busy for a long time. Knowing what to write in advance can save you worry and time.
Habit #4 – Compile Supporting Materials For Your Content
This habit is often overlooked. Relevant diagrams, pictures, tables, and data can enhance the experience of reading the content. Making this a habit is essential.
Sources like Pixabay and Canva have free membership options. They provide you access to a wealth of Royalty Free images and graphics.
Website articles can benefit from SEO when using images that you can add hidden alt texts. Creating your own library of content supporting materials can be a significant asset in your business arsenal.
Habit #5 – Research Your Competition
Before you start writing content, use your keyword in Google to see what your competition has written. I think you will be pleasantly surprised to find you can do better. Knowing what your high ranking competition has done will give you an edge
It is totally OK to create your content using a mix of the best bits you find in your competition.
I do not mean copying and pasting. What I recommend is to rewrite what you find in your own words. Make sure what you write reflects you and not others. Find your own style.
This is a neat way to write superior content that can rank.
Habit #6 – Write Content
Finally the time has arrived to write your content. After Keyword Research, writing content is the next most valuable use of your time. Your article title – based on your Keyword Research, will influence where the article itself will rank on the search engines.
Your objective is to have them rank on page 1 for the specific keyword you use. Not only on page 1 but also in the first slot after articles with paid ads. This is something the training I told you about earlier will teach you how to do.
Habit #7 – Scale Up Your Business At The Right Time
This habit will involve using social media and email marketing to actively promote your content to attract more traffic. These habits will be added once you see more traffic coming to your website.
As you start to earn commissions on a regular basis, it will be time to invest some of that income for paid ads to amplify your traffic.
I hope you can see the logic in scheduling more activities as your business grows.
The Logic Of Sequencing New Actions
Don’t rush to find and use affiliate links too early. The justification used is why not make money sooner rather than later?
Until your website has built considerable traffic, using affiliate links before then, will result in little or no sales. When this happens you will get discouraged.
Say if you become an Amazon Associate which is easy to do. If you do not achieve three sales in three months, they will cancel your affiliate relationship. Of course, you can rejoin. But wait till you have grown traffic on your website. This is another skill you will learn in your training.
When you are a beginner, you may modify the type of articles you initially write to all be “How To” solutions based articles. After you see your traffic start to grow, then you can introduce the product reviews with affiliate links.
What Is A Habit?
The Oxford Dictionary defines a habit as follows:
“A settled regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up.”
The key phrase to me is, “especially one that is hard to give up.” Once you learn the tasks you must do to succeed in affiliate marketing, it is clear you have to ingrain these things as habits.
If you fail to develop these habits, the chances are it will be very difficult to be consistent with your actions. Without consistency, your actions will take on a haphazard pattern and success will elude you.
Converting your activities in affiliate marketing into habits will be one of your biggest challenges. I want to give you some tips on how to form these new habits.
For example. One of your first articles in the beginning could be what are you aiming to accomplish through your website. Tell your audience what your niche is and how you can solve problems using products and services related to your niche.
Your Daily Schedule As Related To Your Habit
First, let’s make the following assumptions.
- You already have chosen a niche and started building your website.
- Your training has taught you how to do the basics of keyword research, SEO preparation and to write content. These are the three most important activities in affiliate marketing. There will be others when the time is right to tackle them.
- You will be able to find a wealth of products and services in your niche to solve various problems or meet many needs in your target market.
What you do daily on a regular basis, are habits that got instilled over a very ling time. Unless you have tremendous will power, it will take time for these new habits to take root. Don’t beat yourself if you falter.
At the same time, if you see yourself faltering, stop and think if changing your schedule will make it easier to gain these habits. All our living schedules are different. Take that into account when you create your own schedule.
How long does it take to build a habit? The general consensus is between 21 and 30 days while making efforts to repeat the desired activity.
If writing two articles a week is all you can do, even one, that is OK. What is most important is you do it consistently. Review your schedule daily and check off your scheduled activities when completed. If not completed, then fit them into the next day.
Habit Building Exercises
I want to share a few habit building exercises using the activities in the weekly schedule I provided earlier. Here is that table again.
| Sunday | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Saturday |
| Pick Product | Research Competitors | Write How To Article | Write Review Article | Write Comparison Article | Work on Unfinished Business | Review Weeks Activities |
| Affiliate Program Search | Find affiliate links | SEO Actions & Publish | SEO Actions & Publish | SEO Actions & Publish | Read Posts on WA and Comment | More Keyword Research |
| Keyword Research For 3 Articles | OEC Training | OEC Training | OEC Training | OEC Training | Weekly Webinar by WA Live Coach Jay |
Note that in this schedule you will be writing three articles each week. On Sunday you will perform Keyword Research to create a title for each of these three articles.
Let me give you a tip. The keyword is actually a search phrase that should make grammatical sense. This is what becomes the extension of the content UR and is what is designed to rank high.
You can add words before or after the keyword to make your title more appealing. But these extras so not appear in your URL But they will appear in the title that will show in the search engine results the person doing the searching sees.
Make sure you write down the activities you have scheduled for the week, if different from my suggestions.
Exercise #1
Close your eyes and visualize yourself using your computer doing the scheduled activities for the next day. I suggest performing this mental visualization daily at night before going to bed. Use affirmations aloud to command your brain to introduce these new habits.
Exercise #2
Follow through the next day on the actions you visualized yourself doing on the night before. If competed, check it off on your schedule. If you haven’t completed that task, then remind yourself the unompleted task(s) must be completed before moving on to the next.
Exercise #3
Being trained correctly is necessary to develop new skills related to building your website and doing all the tasks related to it. Although I have scheduled 5 training sessions each week, you can change that. The important factor is to stick to your training routine every week.
Notice that I’ve scheduled Keyword Research for Sundays as well as Saturdays. This gives you some flexibility to start the proicess on Saturday and play catch up on Sunday.
Three Questions
You have chosen to make money online through affiliate marketing. By now you should be asking the following three questions.
- Where can I get trained to become a successful affiliate marketer?
- How do I create an action plan based on my training to build my business?
- What exercises can I do to make these tasks in my action plan become habits?
It is so easy to go astray looking for effective answers that you can literally waste your time and money while searching.
When you talk to successful affiliate marketers, almost without exception, they will tell you before they found the right answers they went through the same path you did, or maybe going through right now. Namely going astray by following shiny objects. Looking for the magic bullet.
Let’s answer these three questions, shall we?
Where Can You Get The Best Training
I am delighted to tell you that you can start the best training available for free. No credit card is even necessary. If you find it helpful, you can upgrade to a paying member. And the cost is most affordable. If you don’t find it helpful, you have risked nothing.
There are so many places online that make claims you can start earning thousands of dollars shortly after you begin. They charge a lot of money with false promises. There is no such thing as a free lunch when it comes to business.
With its free starter program, Wealthy Affiliate comes as close as possible to a free lunch through its no-cost starter program. No credit card is needed to enroll. And, if you decide to upgrade your membership, you cannot go wrong selecting either one of its two programs: premium, or Premium Plus.
Click this link about how to learn about affiliate marketing online, to get all the details.
How Do You Create An Action Plan
Have you created action plans for any other projects before? I’d like to help you create an action play for building an affiliate marketing business. Before we review such a plan, let’s review the fundamentals of affiliate marketing.
Looks simple right? And it is. Easy, no. Sadly, a lot of people tend to overcomplicate things. I’d like to create an action plan based on these four steps. Each step involves several recommended actions.
Not every action plan needs to become a habit. Your affiliate market setup procedure for example is not an action that needs to be repeated for this particular niche.
However, other actions such as keyword research, writing content, posting on social media etc. requires regular action. It is in these areas where habits need to be created to increase the probability of success.
Let’s develop an action plan now using the 4 steps above.
Step 1 – Choose An Interest (Niche)
- First, choose a broad category you have an interest in, for example, Health and Wellness
- Second, drill this down to a specific narrow area that is defined as a niche. For example, Health and Wellness can have hundreds of niches. Such as nutritional supplements, foods, exercise, a specific area of exercise, etc. I hope you get the idea. And yes, I wrote an article called, How To Choose A Niche In Affiliate Marketing.
- Once you have your niche settled, it is time to build a website and fill it with valuable content.
Step 2 – Build A Website – You Can Learn This Through Training
I wrote a blog post called 5 Steps On Building A Website you can access by clicking this link. Here I will share some basic actions in this process.
- Find and register your niche domain name.
- Pick a theme in WordPress (WordPress is the most popular free website creation software)
- Start adding basic content like an About Me page and other legal disclosures
Step 3 – Attract Visitors
- Use Keyword Research to help your website rank high in the search engines
- Create content that will convert your traffic into sales and profits
- Learn and use Search Engine Optimization techniques to help drive traffic to your content
- Use Social Media to drive more traffic to your content
- Use Email Marketing To scale up your business
Step 4 – Earn Revenue
I am sure this is what you really want your website to do. Bring in the moolah! It takes patience for this to happen for several reasons. Firstly, when you are a beginner, you are in the process of learning the ropes and will make mistakes.
Eventually, you will become good at affiliate marketing, and earning money will be almost automatic. This occurs after you have written a LOT of content and have become good at it And driven a growing stream of traffic to your website.
Traffic starts to build when Google, Bing, and Yahoo conclude that you provide value to the visitors who enter their website search engines. It is up to you to convince Google that you are worthy of their trust.
You may be wondering how all of this results in earning you revenue. By signing affiliate agreements with companies who have affiliate programs, such as Amazon, Clickbank, and thousands of affiliate programs available today.
How Do You Develop The Habits You Need
At first, the action plan above may seem overwhelming. To help keep your actions in focus we will start off by building a sample weekly schedule to get organized.
Getting Organized Using A Schedule
If you do not create a schedule, what do you think will happen? You will become haphazard in taking action. There will be no focus. Discipline and consistency, traits critical to building your business, will be absent. You will fail. I don’t think this is what you want.
Although it is a good idea to have short and long-term schedules connected to your goals, I will use a weekly schedule to show how to build the habits you will need. Let’s limit daily actions to three, maximum.
I am going to make an assumption you have progressed to the point where you are starting to write content. This is the MOST important activity necessary for a blogging site.
Closing Thoughts
Firstly, can you share some comments below about what steps you have taken in the past to develop good habits? These habits do not have to be related to business. I’d like to get feedback from you that will be very helpful.
Secondly, it would be fantastic if you checked out my article that includes a review of Wealthy Affiliate, the all-in-one platform that has helped create countless successful entrepreneurs since 2005.
Thirdly, I want to give you a free eBook that will go a long way to help you develop habits for making money. Enter your name and email address below to access this iconic book Think and Grow Rich in electronic form.
Thanks for reading till the end. I am counting on you to develop habits that will help you meet your financial and other goals in life.
Cheers!
Edwin