Archive for the ‘Affiliate Time Management’ Category

Are You Dedicated Or Addicted To Your Job?

I’ve been thinking. There’s a very fine line between productive dedication and pissing your hours away with a harmful addiction.

I was laying awake in bed the other night with my laptop open. It must’ve been about 4 in the morning and my mind was focused on calculating and forecasting various stats based on the day’s conversions. You can say what you want about being dedicated to the job – but in this case, it’s nothing to be proud of. And you know why? It’s a small time attitude.

It’s not dedication to lay awake with your stats open. It’s an addiction to staring at numbers that are out of your control. You can press F5 until you’re blue in the face but I’ve never known refreshing a page to optimize a campaign or increase sales.

I’m honest enough with myself to know when I’m wasting my own time. But some affiliates just don’t get it. They will suffer from this addiction, this tendency to measure every last milimeter of their success. But the reality is that if you’re aiming for the stars, you’ve gotta keep climbing and not dwell on the steps along the way.

One of the things I’ve taken a look at recently is the value of my productivity. It’s no secret that I work long hours, day and night, through most of the week. But it’s a very fine line between dedication and addiction. I wonder how many other affiliates have felt themselves slipping in and out of those very distinct states of mind.

Dedication is persevering with a campaign because you know it has potential, giving it time to succeed, and using what you’ve learnt to your advantage.

Addiction is making the same mistakes over and over again, refusing to learn from them. You might work a 16 hour day but if you’re doing a half arsed job of the tasks that matter and failing where you’ve always failed before – that’s not dedication. It’s an addiction. You’re not smart for spending your entire day working if you wake up and have less of an advantage than you did the day before.

I’ve spoken to some affiliates who work ludicrous hours and get nowhere. I believe it’s because there’s a great myth in this industry. The idea that you should “just keep trying stuff until you find something that works”.

That’s such bullshit. Tell it to a Heroin junkie and see how far it takes him. It encourages the small time affiliate mindset of “create a campaign, watch it bomb, create another campaign, watch it bomb harder”. You don’t get anywhere by throwing shit at the wall. And even if you do, the chances that you’ll have learnt anything to take forward are slim to none. Success requires meaningful research, sensible planning and execution that isn’t rushed with the burning need to get rid of your zero sales columns before 5pm.

Too many affiliates are addicted to the images in their heads of an offer converting like a wet dream and helping them to live happily ever after. In search of the one campaign that’ll make them millionaires, they’ll walk straight past many of the opportunities that the dedicated affiliates are seizing.

One of my favourite quotes can be applied directly and used as a towering warning sign to anybody thinking about getting in to affiliate marketing:

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

If you’re sitting there now, tired from working too many hours and not seeing the progress that you want – you have to ask yourself, are you spending those hours wisely? Are you really dedicated to exploring the opportunities that are open to you? Or are you simply addicted to whittling away your hours on the same tried and tested campaigns? Sure, they pay your water bills but do they get you any closer to the stars?

You have to think big in affiliate marketing, because the industry is far too volatile to think anything less. I’ve realized that dedication isn’t always the hours you put in, but the quality of the time itself.

So you say that you’re working a 16 hour day – but how much of that day is dedicated to taking action? It’s all too easy to spend the morning setting up a campaign only to waste the afternoon tracking it hopelessly as the light fades outside. I’ve made that mistake too many times myself and I’m far from perfect, but you really do have to realize for your own good. Once you’ve activated your campaign, once you’ve submitted your ads – it’s time to walk away. They will succeed or fail whether you sit there shitting bricks at a negative margin or not.

Move on to the next project, make the most of your time, and never stop focusing your energies on practical changes and improvements that can actually make a difference to your success.

I found a good way to boost my productivity was by simply recording every task that I completed over the course of a week. Back when I worked for my old web agency last year, we would be given timesheets to mark down how our hours were being spent. At the time, I thought it was a pedantic distraction. The first time I analyzed my own hours, I was shocked at how little time was being dedicated to the campaigns and development that would actually take my business forward to greater success.

I put that down to small time attitude and an addiction to only ever doing what I needed to do. You can become addicted to watching your own success.

So go on. Take a look at your own working day. If your timesheet reads like a barren wasteland of hour long AIM conversations, fleeting skirmishes with Redtube and “social media research”, you can probably rest assured that you’re jerking yourself in circles. The same old circles that will take you absolutely nowhere in business, and nowhere in life.

If you spend an entire day doing this, you’ve got no right to call yourself dedicated to affiliate marketing. You’re just addicted to the Internet. There’s a difference. Especially for you “Social Media Experts” out there. I have about as much time for you as I do for my left hand.

There’s nothing expert about Twitter. It’s just Twitter, you prick.

The Challenges Of Full Time Affiliate Marketing

Here comes another entry to my Affiliate Marketing Lifestyle series. Or as PPC.bz’s barman so elegantly put it:

“Dear Diary,

BAaaaaAAAaaaaaAaaaaahhhh!”

I would save myself from the reputation as the emo voice of affiliate marketing, but I think this is something that doesn’t really get spoken about enough. The number of part time affiliates far outweighs the number of us monkey riding this industry for a day job. I get the chance to speak to a lot of relatively new affiliates. Many have aspirations to jack in their 9-5’s and they want to know the best way to get there fast.

I find myself juggling between the advice of “fight for your dreams” and “you fucking retard, get back on the checkout desk, you’re gonna starve”.

I’ve said over and over again that a career in affiliate marketing is just that – a career. It’s not some casual job description you pin on your badge while sunbathing in the Caribbean. Your lifestyle will change completely in those first few months that you decide to go it alone.

Many affiliates forget that for whatever success they’ve been having with one hot shot campaign, it doesn’t come close to the guarantee of a monthly pay cheque. No matter how insignificant your work wages may seem in comparison, they are guaranteed.

When I first started making significant money with CPA marketing, you would find me sitting in coffee shops with a scrapbook. I’d sit there calculating how much cash I’d have earned by Month X and Month Y if I continued earning X ammount per day. This is the single most dangerous thing you can do as a part-time affiliate – especially if those numbers are pinned on a small handful of volatile campaigns.

You only have to look at the recent Google account bannings to see how a money spinning regime can collapse overnight. I’ve rattled on about diversifying for months now. If you’re serious about doing affiliate marketing full-time, you should be comfortable moving in to any niche and working with any traffic source.

People ask me how much money I think they should be making before they give up their day jobs. Firstly, how the fuck should I know? And secondly, basing your career decisions on current earnings is like deciding to climb K2 because you fancy a workout. You’re going to run in to the unexpected, you absolute psychopath.

I know this because I’ve made some pretty drastic decisons with my own career. I quit my day job having branched out in to only two traffic sources, and a handful of offers. By all accounts, I should be slapping myself with naive disgust right about now. I’m not because I had the initiative to learn quickly when I saw the danger signs.

If you’re going to move in to this industry full-time, here are the immediate challenges you face.

Managing your time – What is the point in going full-time if you’re simply going to wake up at 11am and watch your stats all day? You should have just stayed in the day job and enjoyed your temporary riches with the security of a guaranteed pay cheque to underline it. Hell, if you’re doing that, you CAN afford to splash out on the luxuries in life.

This is a challenge for affiliates both experienced and new. Assuming you saw your success as a part-time affiliate, you’ve probably become accustomed to the idea of seeing a return on a few hours of work. It’s not so easy to motivate yourself when you know that riches are such a beautiful sight to watch when they’re flowing like gold from a tap. Unfortunately, for all of the three hours it took you to setup that initial jackpot campaign – you could spend the rest of your lifetime trying to find the next one.

If you expect to be able to turn on profit like a tap, you’re digging your own grave.

Instead of being entranced by the money I saw beginning to flow when I first hit success, I chose to remember the many hours and desperate times where shit hadn’t gone to plan. As hard as it may be, you have to turn your back on the allure of whatever riches you’re earning and get back to work. Otherwise when the tap runs out, you’re back to square one.

Social sacrifice – Do you really understand the true involvement of running your own business? If you’re managing your time correctly, you are going to be busy. If you don’t feel that you’re busy, you’re probably not doing enough to stay ahead of the pack.

Nothing prepared me for the personal burden of becoming entirely responsible for my own finances. I used to be socializing at every opportunity. Down the pub on Monday, drunk in a club on Tuesday and travelling out of town by Friday.

These days, a night out rarely passes me by where business is not somewhere close to the forefront of my thoughts. Some would see that as a prison. I’m passionate about what I do though and working has always been an enjoyable experience.

Whatever social gain you think you’re going to find by quitting your day job, rest assured that it will be neutralized by the sheer weight of responsibility that comes with slinging shit full-time.

Staying positive through hardships – I’ll be the first to admit that when I worked for other companies, I was never shy of a bitch or moan. If something went wrong that I was personally accountable for, I could play pin the blame and deflect attention from my own failures.

The biggest challenge for me over this last year has been embracing a new attitude. You simply have to be prepared to smile at the shit that gets thrown in your face. It happens every day. Every morning I open my email and instead of forwarding various tasks to my colleagues like I used to, I add them to my own to-do list. There are constant tests of your character. It may be an email that your Adwords account has been suspended, that an offer has been pulled, that your server was down for a few hours last night.

You can’t nonchallently forward these issues on to your boss. You ARE your boss. And your pay cheque will be the one taking the hit if you don’t stay on top of them.

There have been nights in recent memory where I’ve been sat at my desk, eyes aching, wondering just how I can turn a campaign around or get back on track. A part time affiliate would probably think “eh, was good while it lasted”, and that’s exactly where you have to stay strong. The industry is so volatile that if you stick to what you know you do well, it won’t be long before you see a return on it. Just be prepared to lose money and take a battering to your confidence in the process. It can be a lonely struggle.

I’ve already written several posts about how you should be investing for the future. It’s the single most important thing you can be doing to alleviate some of the stress. Short term fast burning affiliate campaigns are a recipe for long term unrest if you’re not moving methodically towards a more sustainable business.

How Does An Affiliate Marketer Get Out Of Bed?

How many affiliate marketers hit the snooze button in the morning? It’s easy to go back to sleep when you’re not gonna have your balls ripped off for no-showing the 9am office start, right?

Motivation is a rare commodity that comes and goes. You can be rolling in money and still feel the need to work that extra campaign with just one more split test before you call it a night. Likewise, you can be struggling badly and for some reason still find it impossible to break the pattern of procrastination.

Finding the necessary motivation to keep pushing forward is something that can’t be taught, and yet needs to be found. One of my friends asked me the other day why I was so hesitant to give myself a night off, and to be fair, it was a pretty logical question. One night off isn’t going to break a business. Unfortunately I’ve trained myself in to such a hyperactive mindset that even a night off is riddled with subconscious brainstorming for tomorrow morning’s project. I instinctively check my phone for new emails even though I know I can’t reply to them (my phone is a piece of shit).

I recently tweeted that anybody who works as an affiliate marketer for more than 10 years is a wild savage beast who needs to be put down. Judging by the responses, I’m not the only one who’s felt that strain.

Since September, my mind has gone to another place. When I broke up with my ex-girlfriend, I lost a lot of the immediate strength that was holding me together through a difficult time. We’ve exchanged about two text messages in the time that we’ve been apart and there’s a gaping hole in my life where something so sure used to be. I’ve seen my attitude towards work take on a completely different life of its own.

Here’s a true story. I didn’t give up my day job because I was ready for the challenge. I gave it up because I was in a distance relationship and I felt that the best way to make it work was to give myself the freedom of self-employment. How naive does that sound? I pretty much took the plunge in to full time affiliate marketing for reasons totally unrelated to work. Money has never been, and will never be, my motivation.

When that relationship disintegrated – very suddenly – in the space of 24 hours, I found myself staring in to the abyss somewhat. Work had taken a stranglehold over my life, friends had become mere faces, and I felt as if I was drifting out to sea on a raft I couldn’t steer.

I’ve always been very honest about my aspirations. I don’t love affiliate marketing. I’m passionate about running my own business but you won’t see me on Twitter swooning over how many dollars I’ve stacked or how many zeros are on my next pay cheque. Towering riches mean very little to me.

So where does the motivation come from for affiliate marketing? We all have to feel a sense of achievement to be successful in this business without growing depressed. A musician enjoys the thrill of producing art, an actor has the pride of re-watching a movie he’s starred in, a fireman has the joy of saving a life. What the fuck does an affiliate marketer have to justify the love for his profession?

I enjoy what I do, but I don’t love it. If there’s anything I love about my job, it’s the lifestyle that it’s supposed to afford me. And even then, I work longer hours than every single one of my friends. So isn’t that just a fantasy? I could be earning less money and living in more comfort. A slave to the system, maybe, but sleeping at night.

I think the ultimate motivation is the final destination in your head.

When I get out of bed every morning, I look at my to-do list and it reads like a fist up the arse.

Every affiliate marketer has a unique image for what being successful entails. My motivation used to be to break free of a 9-5 job that dictated how I would live my life. I wanted to spend time with my girlfriend, having already promised her that I’d find a way to make an awkward relationship work. I’m not for divulging my private life any more than I already have, but needless to say, I failed.

It was quite surreal how it all happened. I posted this outburst, took a couple of days away, and then went back to work with a completely different mindset. I realized that I was being a weak little bitch and that the only way I could possibly move forward was to set a new goal.

My goal was to work so hard that my original decision to quit my job wouldn’t have been in vain. I’ve said a number of times that affiliate marketing is an extremely lonely business when you’re doing it from home. I’m sure I have readers who open up their RSS at work and wish they could be sitting on the sofa with a laptop and a beer in one hand. But when that novelty wears off, reality sets in. The magnitude of responsibility weighs down and you realize that it’s time to sink or swim.

The shock of a broken down relationship was enough to get the sirens ringing in my head. I felt how vulnerable I’d allowed my life to become and I wanted to achieve something that was mine, and only mine. I’ve seen friends stumble out of university with less direction than they entered with. I’ve seen close family chained to the daily grinds of life in jobs they hate.

If ever I needed motivation for affiliate marketing, it’s that I can escape those realities. This is a unique industry where YOU are the master of your own destiny. Success is a question of how good at your job you’re determined to become. I’m not going to preach some guru bullshit that you can be earning $XX,XXX in 30 days. Hard work is the vital ingredient of every affiliate who’s ever made it and stayed made.

I’ve made up my mind recently that I want to move to America and face the challenge of setting up a business abroad. Coming from a sleepy town where nothing much happens, those are some tough targets to achieve. My motivation is that I want to break free of everything I’ve known so far. I don’t want to settle for the 14 hour working days or the very short sleepless nights.

One of those popular inspiration tips you hear mentioned is to surround yourself with visions of your future. Pin shit on the wall, change your desktop to a tropical island, remember to smile in the mirror four times a day. Whatever.

I work in the opposite way. On my wall, you’ll find pinned a collection of memories and photos that bring back pain and regret. I’m not a sadist, but for me personally, pain is a greater motivation than some nice sunset wallpaper which has an emotional attachment of precisely jackshit in my heart.

Having to stare at some of the biggest regrets of my life is the only way I know to move forward and work hard enough to slowly erase them from my mind. If I ever find my attention lapsing during the day, or my mind wandering, I focus hard on those memories and use them to kick on. It’s easy to find a reason to put in that extra hour if it takes you one step closer to escaping the skeletons in your own god damn closet.

Finding The Entrepreneurial Spirit To Succeed

One of the comments posted on my piece about Investing In The Future With Affiliate Marketing has gotten me thinking recently.

It was Conv3rsion who made the comment:

“One thing being an affiliate marketer can teach though is that there is always opportunity out there. You can always out hustle someone else and get some of the pie. If anything, this life style breeds life long entrepreneurs. I don’t think I can ever have a job again where I’m not the boss.”

Life long entrepreneurism.

That’s pretty much what this game is about if you plan on remaining an affiliate until retirement. But it also got me thinking whether all affiliates actually possess the entrepreneurism streak that’s required to succeed. And is that what separates the top earners from those chasing the coat tails of more successful affiliates?

One of the things that I always stress very heavily to people looking to jack in the day job is that affiliate marketing is a career change – not a retirement plan.

It doesn’t matter how many successful campaigns you have up and running. You could be earning 10K a day and it still doesn’t mean you’re prepared for life as a full time affiliate marketer. Not unless you possess the mindset that will keep you ahead of the pack.

I like to look at my current situation in affiliate marketing using tomorrow’s stats as a marker.

Zero clicks. Zero conversions. Zero profit.

It’s simply no good to assume that your success today will see you through to tomorrow. You have to be constantly visualizing those zero columns and using it as the incentive to find new ways to build your income.

When I quit my day job, I made what had to be one of the most reckless decisions of all time. All of my earnings were wrapped up in two traffic sources stretching across a handful of offers. Within weeks of going full-time, those traffic sources had fallen out on me and I’d been forced back to the drawing board. Many affiliates would go up in flames at this point and never produce another profitable campaign.

So one of the first things I had to do as a full-time affiliate was stare at a list of zero columns. To rack my brain for new opportunities, new ideas, new ways to pay the bills. I’ve managed to rebuild my business on much sturdier legs now that I’ve felt the true vulnerability of the industry. But Conv3rsion is right with his comment – one of the qualities that distinguishes successful affiliates is the ability to seize on opportunity and grab success. If you want to quit the day job and never go back to it, you really need to find that entrepreneurial spirit.

How many affiliates are suffering from banner blindness? I say that with tongue in cheek, but it’s a genuine question.

If you ask an affiliate where he makes his money, you’ll probably get an answer along the lines of Adwords, Facebook, media buys or PPV. Too many affiliates do their research, learn about these well known methods of making money, and draw a line under them. That’s all they want to know about. But if you’re truly in possession of an entrepreneurial streak, you don’t stop there. You should be using your eyes and ears.

Opportunity is everywhere on the web. How many times have you been browsing a site, seen an Ad that caught your eye, written it off as a media buy and not even bothered to check the bottom of the page for an “Advertising” link?

The reality is that a smarter guy was there before you. He saw an opportunity to reach a demographic, jumped on it, and now you’re sitting nodding your head in retarded approval.

Spending so much time on the web, I see dozens of different ways to generate income every single day. I don’t always see immediate use in them for myself, but it doesn’t stop me bookmarking the pages, taking some notes and storing them in the memory bank for later use.

Here’s a tip. You never know what you’re going to be working on tomorrow. So pay attention to great marketing and keep on learning. It might just give you a headstart over your equally retarded competition when it comes to brainstorming your next campaign.

Just because a piece of great marketing doesn’t fit in nicely with your niche, that’s no reason to turn a blind eye. This is what I call banner blindness for affiliates. The ability to gloss over incredibly profitable opportunities. When money is made in every corner of the web, why are you only looking out for good keywords and good dating images?

Are you one of those guys who opens up Adwords and thinks to himself “What can I sling today?”. Maybe you make money, maybe you don’t. But I much prefer to let new campaigns come naturally to me. Find a market first, target the need, THEN decide the best method of promotion. It might be Adwords, it might be PPV, it might be some long ass email to the webmaster begging for a banner tenancy.

But if you’re actively in the trenches hunting out these marketing opportunities, you’re gonna be better placed to make some money than the dude who sprays shit at the wall in Adwords hoping something will stick.

There’s too many arbitrage affiliates out there who refuse to get to grips with what marketing is all about. They become masters of traffic sources. They start turning over fortunes using just Facebook. Or just Adwords. One day their traffic source falls out from under their feet and what happens? They embark on this route of discovery to find the opportunities that they should have been getting out of bed to look for in the first place.

That’s the difference between the guy with the entrepreneurial spirit and the guy who knows how to use XXX to make money. One can live and learn from failure – the other will probably roll over and die if his one trick pony gets shot.

It’s not always about making more money. At least for me it isn’t. I take pride in wanting to be good at what I do. I might be harming my own profit margins by spending so much time exploring other avenues, but with knowledge comes experience. With experience comes the know-how to deal with failure. And you’re nearly always going to fail at some point in affiliate marketing.

Are you prepared for it? Or are you a headless fucking chicken who knows how to open Adwords and not much else?

Investing For The Future With Affiliate Marketing

It seems funny to think that I’ve only been a full-time affiliate marketer for six months – and I’m already planning what to do next. There will probably be a large number of you who think that jacking in the day job to work from home is the ultimate retirement. The chance to put your feet up, bust out the cocktails and wake up when the sun goes down.

The problem, of course, is that affiliate marketing happens to be one of the most volatile industries to be making a living in. At any point your campaigns could go to bust, your traffic source could eject you, or an inexplicable server downtime could cost you thousands of dollars. My ex girlfriend once told me that I’d been talking to her about affiliate marketing in my sleep. Besides bowing my head in shame at the obvious, I was quite shaken at how quickly this industry has enveloped my day-to-day thoughts, concerns and ambitions.

As much as I love what I do, I’m slightly paranoid about the long term prospects of it all. Can any of us honestly say that those $35 commissions are going to be there in 15 or 20 years time? The industry will evolve and so will the techniques that we use to reach the millions of users online. But that in itself is a constant challenge. No matter how much money you’re making today, the Internet is transforming at such a rate that you always have to be learning. Or you’ll get left behind.

Take the art of SEO as an example. I know guys who work every day on building long term websites that rank well in Google. If that’s not hanging your balls on the line, I don’t know what is. Your riches and fortunes are hinged on some Google suit deciding not to tweak the algorithm in somebody else’s favour. I would not want to be sitting there knowing that everything I have is prospering in a virtual universe that could change tomorrow and completely forget me.

I think enough affiliates have been banned from Google and Facebook for me to assume you already know the dangers of being a one traffic source wonder.

Affiliate marketing is a game of cat and mouse. The mouse being very rich, and the cat being a Warrior Forum sized stampede of nobodies. Every last one of them would enjoy your riches and it’s up to you to stay one step ahead. If you’re sitting at your desk and thinking it’ll only take one lucky break, one lucky campaign, to turn your life on its head – well, you’re wrong.

Try one lucky campaign, every week, for the rest of your working life.

That is the reality for marketers who intend to make hay forever as affiliates. Personally, I’m working hard now to provide greater opportunities for my future. I see affiliate marketing as the launch pad to something else, something better, something that doesn’t have a stinging acai aftertaste. If you’re not investing in your future, you’re setting up your eventual fall. Nobody’s luck lasts forever – especially for an affiliate.

Security is the word that springs to mind when I consider what I’m trying to achieve. And that’s ironic because most affiliates who’ve achieved great things have had to risk it all at some point. I think the mass banning of Adwords accounts back in the summer acted as my warning. Since then there hasn’t been a day where I haven’t forced myself to think several steps ahead.

It’s very easy to watch a successful campaign rake in several thousands of dollars. But you should assume that the offer caps tonight. What’s your next move? Say some Wickedfire dick has outed your campaign and the whole world can see what’s been making you money. Your work ethic needs to be such that they’re only talking about the weaker split test. If you’re constantly evolving and seeking out better results, you’ll find them before your competition catches you.

I had a couple of emails after my last post about “outing” successful Facebook techniques. It’s never my intention to harm anybody else’s campaigns, and it’s true that the tactics I talked about have been good to me over the last few months. But do you really think I’m so stupid to post how-to guides on what’s currently making me money? This is the big problem with affiliate marketing blogs and why you shouldn’t be reading them all day every day. By all means go ahead and teach a bum everything they know, but don’t teach them everything you know. Most affiliate bloggers are very good at that. In fact, they don’t teach shit to begin with.

What I’m trying to say is that to enjoy long term success as an affiliate, you simply have to learn as much today as you did yesterday. To do that, you need to be humble (under the surface), willing to learn from your mistakes and constantly seeking improvement.

If you check out my profile, you’ll see a quote that I believed in when I started this blog:

“Entrepreneurs live for a few years the way most people won’t so they can live the rest of their life like most people can’t.”

Maybe I’m still living those few years, but I don’t believe it anymore. If you truly have the dedication to achieve something, the desire to improve your business, you’ll never start working less. And that’s a good thing because determination, drive and commitment are qualities that some people will never dream of having until the sirens of failure are ringing in their ears.

You might work smartly. You might move away from the daily grind that contributes to so much stress – but will there ever be less work? Less on your mind? I don’t think so. When I look back and ask myself “when was the last time I had nothing to worry about?” I think my answer is when I was sitting at my day job. That’s the truth. If you take the solo road, you are going to carry a burden. You might not feel it through the good times, but it’s waiting to reveal itself to you when shit gets hairy.

Outsourcing For Profit Without Being A Dick

Last week I laid down a few reasons why outsourcing can be a great help to your business. I think most of us have probably dipped in to a site like Elance at some point. If you’re working on your own, there’s only so many hours a day you can commit to work until you start glancing sideways for somebody to lift the burden. By getting smart and outsourcing parts of your typical working day, you can free up more time for the creative decisions that shape whether you ultimately succeed or fail.

Many affiliates are reluctant to outsource because they see it as falling in to a black hole of having to shave down their margins. The truth is, you’re probably selling quite a few berries already, right? You can afford to spend a couple hundred bucks on the chores that stop you from moving in to that next big money niche. I know a lot of affiliates are just getting started, and if that’s you, fine. You should probably focus on learning the ropes yourself before you start managing somebody else.

For the rest of us, the Internet is a gaping hole of opportunity when it comes to recruiting talented freelancers. I slag off the Warrior Forum and Digital Point at least once every two posts, but in this case, I’m gonna have to go out on a limb and recommend them both for picking up some good talent. These forums might not know shit about affiliate marketing, but they do have skilled professionals who are often willing to work for very competitive rates. Wicked Fire, as you’d expect, is a good starting point for finding 85% of everybody who’s ever installed a flog.

If you visit a marketplace like Sitepoint or 99 Designs, you can go one better and post a contest. Crowdsourcing, as it’s called, is the process of setting a fixed price for a piece of work (usually design based) and then letting a bunch of willing freelancers submit their best efforts. You only pay for your favourite. This is great if you’re looking for a logo or a banner, but it’s not the best idea for a full landing page design.

Beyond the social networking landscape, you have a few dozen subscription based outsourcing sites. These are dedicated entirely to connecting freelancers with people looking to hire. Oh and they’ll nip a percentage of your project fee in return. You can attempt to swipe a contact’s email address and run your transactions through Paypal, but they will generally suspend your account if they catch you asking for it. So don’t be a retard and go hunting for AIM screennames after just depositing $5000 in to an escrow. I’m pretty sure they’ve got a “search, find and destroy” button to outlaw that shit. I’ve listed a few of the big sites below:

Elance – Probably the biggest and most respected site for outsourcing. You can pick up some quality freelancers with rates varying from competitive to fucking outrageous. Elance also has a structured membership system which prevents any old mope from applying to your posting. You can require that only gold members have access, for example. And these are the guys that are paying however much per month just to be a god damn member so they must be earning something. My favourite site for outsourcing.

Odesk – Okay, I’ve had limited experience with Odesk. But from what I can tell, it’s an absolute crapheap. Most projects are awarded on a “pay by the hour” basis. So instead of candidates bidding a set project fee, they will usually post their hourly rate and leave you to play ip dip sky blue over who’s best equipped to get shit done. Odesk also uses some bizarre remote desktop like application to record your minions while they slave away. I don’t know about you. But I didn’t outsource the work so that I could watch it being done in all its 4 frames per minute glory. Give Odesk a try if you want. I’m still pissed off from paying out a month’s wages to a chick who was working on shit that I didn’t even know about.

Get a Freelancer – This site is budget. Everything from the homepage design to the freelancers I’ve worked with through it. I can’t imagine it’s earned anybody more than a bowl of rice. If you want to have 400 articles written for $20 in 24 hours, this is the place to come. And yes, you do get what you pay for.

The success you have on any job hiring site will boil down to how you carry yourself and your business. Before I got in to affiliate marketing, I used to write a lot of articles for various contractors. I wrote full fucking ebooks for peanuts before it clicked in my head that marketers were selling on my work for many times the fee. While my rim still aches from the exploitation, that’s just the way this business goes. I’ve come a full circle but I’m proud to say that I haven’t forgotten where I arrive from.

Some contractors are cheeky enough to demand legit samples before they even award a project. I can understand the temptation to “try before you buy” with some random unknown service provider – but it’s not something I agree with personally. If you’re requesting design work, and you want some guy to submit creatives to you, you should be paying him. It’s that simple. By all means request some samples of his previous work. But expecting work for nothing? Get off your high horse.

Many workers in India will happily work for nothing in the hope of securing your services. I’ve never allowed this. If somebody’s going to submit even a single 500 word article to me, I’ll pay them for it. It’s time out of their day. You might be willing to take on some third world kid at no risk of your own, but I haven’t descended so far up my own arse that I’ve forgotten what it feels like to work for these kind of cerebral dickheads.

If you’re that worried about your margins, go ahead and cut the corners. Get some kid to work for free. I think it’s bullshit personally, but your business is your own. You reward good work with a bonus, right?

Bonuses are so few and far between with contractors these days. It makes me feel like a digital Mother Teresa when I start jacking out freebies for good work. I’m not saying a bonus goes hand in hand with a job being completed to spec. But if you want to build good long term relationships with your freelancers, you should be willing to go the extra mile and recognize good work.

I have a bunch of writers and web designers who are always happy to hear from me when I need to outsource. I’ve noticed that if you treat a freelancer well, he will often repay you in work that exceeds your expectations and increases its own value in the process. That’s a priceless commodity to have.

If, however, you’re the kind of dickhead who shotguns his email replies with “boss from hell” demands and a general overtone that says fuck you, you work for me, well…good luck getting the most out of your workers. They’re going to be looking for shortcuts whether they mean to or not. The ironic thing is that most of the demanding (and easily agitated) employers are the ones that don’t take enough time to prepare a decent brief. They expect shit delivered to a spec that was only ever properly defined in their own head.

Putting together a good brief for your freelancers is not a ten minute job. I can’t think of one successful project I’ve outsourced that only took me ten minutes to brief. And you know why? Particularly in this business, the art of a good project brief isn’t so much saying what you want done. It’s describing what you don’t want done.

I recently outsourced a Craigs List posting project. If you’ve ever engaged in mass-scale Craigs List advertising, you’ll be aware that it’s the sort of data entry task that needs a few brains behind the wheel. You need to avoid manual deletions, “ghosting” of your ads, and you’ve gotta have a guy running the project who can rewrite without fucking up your message beyond repair.

I must have wrote over 15 seperate briefs, and nearly all of them failed. It was only when I sat down for half a day and wrote out every single fuck-up that I got a little closer to expressing what I really needed. One of the biggest outsourcing mistakes is the same common problem that gets you shitty conversion rates on your landing pages: You assume.

You assume that because you’ve got a colourful image in your head of what you need to obtain from a project, some kid in Asia is going to read your mind and translate it to HTML. You don’t take the time to sit down and translate your thoughts to text. And if you don’t do that, you’re going to receive bad work. It’s not necessarily bad because the writer was bad. It’s bad because you never really laid out what you wanted.

Classic example, one of my friends outsourced 20 product reviews for his SEO affiliate site. What did he get back? 20 extremely negative damning verdicts of why you’d have to be blind, deaf and stupid to buy said products. Honest and genuine as it was, they weren’t gonna do shit for an affiliate’s pay cheque. If he’d bothered to convey what he needed, he wouldn’t have rinsed $200 on 10,000 words of friendly drivel. Instead he blew his gasket over the writer being such a loose cannon liability that he could never work with him again. You think the Average Joe Patel knows to lie between his teeth like the average affiliate?

Whether you’re outsourcing to India or to Indiana, it really shouldn’t make a difference. You should still treat these guys with respect and the time of day that it takes to give them proper direction. Without direction, you’ll be the one to get burnt while they’ll still be getting paid.

The upside, of course, is that if you can get your shit together and outsource well – your business breaks free from the one man mentality. You can achieve so much more and expand in to new niches overnight. It’s worth the pain, but don’t expect your visions to be delivered on a plate. Just as in all walks of affiliate marketing, you’re gonna have to bust your balls ’til they’re blue to get there.

Outsourcing: The Art Of Knowing What You’re Shit At

I’ve noticed a large number of blog posts related to work ethic and time management recently. Barman seems to be responsible for the large majority of them with a crazy posting spree on PPC.bz. Ruck chimed in with his own advice on the Convert2Media blog (less forum lurking, more pushing his berries). I’m not going to preach about the importance of setting to-do lists and sticking to them.

The truth is, no matter how many good ideas you have floating around your head, if you don’t have the expertise to bring them to reality – ideas is all they will ever be. One of the biggest stumbling points I’ve encountered is the mindset that I know everything about everything. I used to be, and still can be, a stubborn piece of shit when it comes to outsourcing jobs to be done professionally.

There are still times where I have to convince myself. I’m sitting there thinking hey, you know what, I can strum up a banner in Photoshop. Ain’t no sweat. So I’ll bust out my hand palette of gradients and go wild until I’ve wasted half a day pissing up the wall any hope of a decent clickthrough rate.

If you want to get shit done, and get shit done well, you need to know when to outsource various tasks to people who are better equipped to get them done properly. It comes down to knowing your own strengths and weaknesses. Even then, you still need to gauge the important parts of your business that require your time instead of anybody else’s.

I recently outsourced the redesign of this blog (thanks to Ramona of Dojo-Design for the great work). A couple of friends asked me why I’d decided to outsource my own web design when I come from a working background of several web agencies. True, I could have done the work myself. But it’s not always the best decision to do things yourself.

What you’ll notice about the successful guys in affiliate marketing is that they tend to spend their time at the decision-making business end of their day jobs. Testing new traffic sources and researching media buys…this requires expert knowledge that you can’t outsource without giving up your own school of thought. It’s like a pyramid of growth. If you spend all your time battling over design tweaks or copywriting mistakes – you’re going to find that this is all you succeed in becoming successful at.

We all have to put in our hard graft. I’m still in the process of growing my own business. I work incredibly long hours because it’s necessary to cover all of the ground that needs covering for me to remain successful. But while I haven’t employed anybody yet, I’m always looking to outsource tasks that create what I call “low value reward”.

Affiliates need to think innovation to stay one step ahead of the curve. If you don’t have a pair of eyeballs watching for the next acai berry trend, you’re going to miss it. Shit happens quickly in this industry. Good luck spotting the next gravy train when you’re treating every small task as another notch on your to-do list. Too much reading is a bad thing. Too many hours pissed away typing in to an AIM window WILL lose you money. I think we can all agree on that – but you can’t work like some badger in a fucking hole. Get somebody else to do the tasks that don’t require what got you here.

Outsourcing the day to day basics of your business will go a long way to giving you a more creative freehold over what you’re doing. What have you spent today doing?

Did you spend too many hours trying to find the right words for your latest flog? Maybe you’re an SEO guy with a mountain of creative thought who just spent his afternoon submitting links to PR0 directories. If you look at what you actually do in a day, you could probably find 2 or 3 tasks that somebody else is willing to manage if you taught them how.

The reluctance to outsource, for many new affiliates, stems from spending money. We seem to have a paranoia for investing money in to a campaign that might bomb or never flash a profit.

How many campaigns have you tested that failed because you threw together a sketchy 5 minute landing page and didn’t see the results that you wanted after a day’s traffic? It’s this kind of lazy marketing that costs affiliates so dearly. Not in expenses, but in lost revenue. The moneymaking campaigns that got away. Not because they were doomed to always fail, but because the affiliate was so keen to get those zero click stats ticking over.

If you’d just commit to a job and get it done properly, you’d probably find that the idea was a good one after all. So the next time you think of a great campaign, run over the requirements in your head.

You’re going to advertise on MySpace? You should probably get a banner professionally designed. That’s if you want to know for sure whether there’s money beyond that initial dollop of impressions, right? You’re going to send a shitload of traffic to a flog? There are guys out there who write the damn things for a living. It’s become a micro-profession. They could probably do it better than you, sat there in your tightie whities, larking about on MSN, scratching your balls and pretending to be hard at work for 20 words per hour.

Filtering The Retards From Your Outsourcing Shortlist

Okay, so outsourcing isn’t just the art of knowing what you’re shit at. It’s the art of knowing what half of digital India is shit at too.

The second you offer a whiff of a payment, you’re going to be fighting off messages and Skype calls from every last impoverished kid with a computer in the far east. This is just the way it works. You can get burnt with one bad job and never outsource again, or you can use it to learn and recruit somebody better the next time round.

I’ve done my fair share of outsourcing in the past. Where do you think all this typing anger stems from? The next post will feature some tips I’ve picked up along the way. What to outsource, when to outsource it, and who you definitely don’t want to outsource it to.