10.26.2009 — Bow Wow Live at Riverwatch

Staying Focused

As I continue to grow my affiliate business, it can be very hard to stay focused.

I have a million and one things I could do in a given day and at the end of the day, there is always more to be done.

So in order to not make projects take years to complete, I force myself to stay focused.

The method that has been working really well for me recently is taking a small period of time each day and making a list of things that I would like to accomplish and ideas for future projects.

I then try to categorize them into urgency using an A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, B3, etc method. I get all the A projects done and then move onto the B’s and so on.

Keeping an organized list of things needing to be done can really increase productivity and reduce time it takes to launch (potentially) profitable websites. The more I launch, optimize, tweak, study, etc the more money I make, the closer I am to my goals.

How do you stay focused and efficient?

5 Ways to Get Serious About Affiliate Marketing

So one of the big reasons the majority of affiliates fail is because they don’t really get serious. This could be because :

  • They tried once and failed.
  • They don’t have the time (between a “real” job, kids, etc).
  • They don’t really believe a living can be made with affiliate marketing (believe it or not I could find hundreds of people who would call me crazy for saying you can make $20k/month with affiliate marketing).
  • They’re simply not smart enough.

So what’s stopping you from getting serious? You have to believe that you’re going to succeed no matter how many times you fail to get there. Here are some ways to make sure you’re serious about making money with affiliate marketing.

1) Set a Serious Budget

You’re not serious about affiliate marketing if you plan on spending a $25 PPC voucher to test and calling it a day. If you want to be serious, you have to be ready to invest a serious amount of money. How much money is ultimately up to you, but I would try to save up at least $1,000 before you give affiliate marketing a real go. In many cases it can take much more than $1,000 to find something that’s profitable. If you take $25 and don’t find anything and stop, you’re just going to quit when the money keywords could be in the first $200 you spend. So start saving now, set aside a bit of money from each paycheck and start your own fund. Sell some of your stuff on eBay. Or do some grunt work for people to make some cash.

I personally set my budget to around $300/day and run it at that testing things until I get the campaign profitable (in which time I up the budget to unlimited).

2) Set Serious Time Aside

You’re not going to get any productive work done unless you set the proper time aside to do it. Despite how easy and time efficient affiliate marketing can be, these cases are ones of luck, very good connections, or knowing exactly what to do. This probably won’t be you, it’s not most people, so you have to ma