And if you’re using a system (with formalized processes), you’re much more likely to succeed.

Every campaign will be different and things may not go the way you’ve planned, even if you’ve adopted the best practises from an affiliate marketing system, whether it’s from a super affiliate like Ewen Chia or Ros Gardner or a system like Affiliate Project X.

Nothing quite beats having hands-on experience though because real world experience is the ‘bridge’ between what you read about, and the actual affiliate commissions you will earn.

There are a number of factors to a successful campaign.

• Product

Without a product, there’s no transaction. You may hear advice about checking for a good payout and a high conversion ratio (ie a high percentage of leads being converted to transactions).

It’s a good idea to invest or subscribe to the product too, so you’ll have firsthand experience of it’s features and benefits.

Some affiliate marketers stop at this stage, shortlisting products and start promoting them. I feel you could get better results if you consider the other factors too.

• Prospects

What’s the profile of the traffic you’re sending to the page?

You might want to direct your prospects to an intermediate landing page before sending them to a landing page.

If you’ve a package like awstats (which comes with my webhosting service), you’ll have a breakdown by country, browser type, operating system, origination of traffic.

These analytics will give you a holistic picture of your traffic profile and help you measure your traffic generation strategies, so you can focus on more effective ones and drop those that fail to produce results.

It’s worth collecting prospect data via an autoresponder like Aweber or GetResponse as it may take up to 7 exposures before the prospect takes an action.

• Promotion Channel Strategy

You will likely have a dominant channel strategy such as PayPerClick traffic, blogging, forum marketing, email marketing or social networking to reach your prospects.

Match the affiliate products characteristics to your channel.

You will get better results if you shift your promotion strategy to match the product and prospects.

If necessary, use an offline direct marketing strategy to promote your products to get an edge over ‘online-only’ marketers.

For beginner type products like introductory Internet Marketing products, offline methods such as giving talks and interviews, distributing flyers and relationship marketing can be especially effective.

• Persistance and Innovation

Affiliate marketing is a constantly evolving game. A technique that worked a month ago, may be less effective now. The mantra “test, test and test” is a truism, especially if you’re shooting for, or aiming to maintain your super affiliate status.

Innovation is a process of adapting a technique from one medium to another (email marketing is seen as an extension to direct mailing). Observe a successful offline marketing technique, adapt it to the online context and test.

• The Affiliate Marketing Reality

Although newer affiliate marketers seem to complain that they have few sales because ‘people aren’t buying’, this will result in a long spiral downwards because ‘people’ are not within our direct control.

Instead, it’d be more useful to focus on making changes to the affiliate marketing process (which we can influence/control) to yield the outcomes we’re aiming at.