Two of the most important defining characteristics of a true super affiliate are patience and discipline. Super affiliates stand out from the rest of the field because they have the ability to ride out passing trends and capitalize on lasting ones. Discipline and patience allow a super affiliate to make better long-term decisions in an industry notorious for fluctuation.

Consider the following cases:

Case #1

You log into Adwords to check your spend for the day. You notice it’s high, but not totally off the charts. You then log into your affiliate network to check your sales and notice that they’re well below normal levels, but they haven’t completely tanked.

Seeing that you’re dropping money on the day you get a bit concerned and unsure about what to do. Do you A) Go back to your Google account and quickly lower your daily budget (which in turn will kill tomorrow’s traffic while they try to reevaluate your campaign);  B) Pause your campaign and decide to try again tomorrow;  C) Delve deeper into your adwords change log and speedily undo every change you’ve made in the last three days; OR D) change nothing until you have enough statistically relevant data to make ROI improving changes based on solid evidence?

Here’s a tip. 99% of affiliates choose one of options A through C and that’s why 99% of affiliates remain low-earning non-supers. They react in a knee-jerk fashion to every drop or spike in the action and never get a chance to develop effective, lasting strategies.

Super affiliates on the other hand choose option D. They know that patience in gathering data is key to identifying exactly what is and what is not working in campaign, all super affiliates practice it to a T.

Case #2

Say you run an A/B split test (using RevenueWire’s Split Tester) and after 24hrs of splitting clicks you have a winner. Now, do you ditch the second landing page and run with the first based on the early results or do you apply a higher level of statistical analysis? We can tell you right now that super affiliates almost always opt of the latter.

Usually this involves using a formula to determine if they’ve produced enough traffic to get statistically valid results. That formula isn’t easy to come by, but to give you a hand, here’s a spreadsheet that will help you determine the statistical relevance of your split tests – http://paretologic.com/downloads/revenuewire/validityanalysis.xls.

You might be surprised to learn that most top PPC super affiliates have incurred days, weeks, and on occasion even months of steady losses.  Why didn’t they just bail out and move on with their lives? The answer can be found in their disciplined approach.

Successful super affiliates usually resist the urge to make rash decisions that might have an ultimately negative ripple effect on the rest of their campaigns when they’ve hit a bad day or week. They stop and realize that downturns are a natural part of the business cycle.

Of course they don’t carry on unsuccessful strategies for years until they’re totally bankrupt, but they do show immense poise and give their campaigns the time they require to mete out worthwhile statistical results.

That means top supers wait patiently until they have gathered enough valid data before making any changes to their sites or campaigns. If they do choose to make changes, they do it in small increments and then wait long enough to accurately measure the data these changes produce.

They also apply hard and fast bidding rules for all of their campaigns and stick to them religiously. If they’re consistently promoting a particular product it’s because they’ve tested it using these methods and know it converts – so there’s never a need for them to panic.

So don’t jump the gun on your campaigns! Try using super affiliate type patience and discipline in your own campaigns and see what kind of results you get.