Whilst most of the world is happy to celebrate Thank God It’s Friday, anybody with a role in project management or self-employment is likely to be thinking the opposite, “Where did my week go?”

For that reason, I love Mondays. It’s another chance to deliver a flying clothesline to nagging targets, making sure they don’t live on to become 2017′s New Year’s Resolutions.

Monday mornings are doubly important because they set the tone for the rest of the week.

Start Monday badly and momentum is a bitch.

I’m ashamed to admit that lazy Mondays have cost me entire weeks in the past. If I start the week drifting aimlessly between tasks of equal importance but little long-term value, morning turns to lunch, and lunch turns to dinner. Before you know it, I’ve wasted an entire Monday with nothing but a headache and a sense of underachievement to show. It’s easy to spend the rest of the week playing catch-up.

Fortunately, if you start Monday well and make good progress before lunch, momentum conspires to help your cause. Productivity is contagious, but so is flicking from Facebook to YouTube and back again. Momentum can be your best friend or your worst enemy.

In affiliate marketing terms, Monday is the day that I launch my new campaigns for the week ahead. It’s wheels in motion day.

There’s nothing worse than launching on a Friday, waiting an entire weekend for your ads to get approved, then drifting in to a state of nonchalance with new ideas and brainfarts dominating your thoughts by the time they go live.

Get campaigns launched on Monday with the view to having them optimised and profitable by Friday.

I know a lot of affiliates ponder how long they should continue optimising before scrapping a campaign. Well, Monday to Friday is a nice time-frame. Assuming the ads are live by Tuesday, you have 3 days to accumulate data that should tell you whether you’re striking out on a terrible idea, or getting ready to smash a home-run.

Simply launching a campaign and getting your paws on some data provides an excellent momentum boost on Monday morning. You’re committing to positive action. It doesn’t stop there though.

Creating new ads does not constitute a launched campaign. A campaign is launched when the ads are approved and collecting data. Another guilty trait of mine has been to spend forever researching, eventually launch my ads, and then get declined for whatever reason. Instead of taking another hack at the submission process, I’d let the campaign rot in the planning stages forevermore. With no data, every idea is a fail.

So what’s the opposite of a Monday morning well spent?

In my opinion, that award goes to replying to emails. For the love of the anti-Christ, why do people wreck their morning coffee with this awful practice? Okay, admittedly, some people are in the business of servicing customers. But the majority of affiliates have no excuses.

It’s a damaging trait that many of us picked up in day jobs where we didn’t have the luxury (or Hell) of using Sunday evenings to clear out our inboxes.

I can guarantee that if you make replying to emails your number one priority, you will spend the rest of the day chasing tails and batting off distractions. It’s impossible to make any progress that could be deemed worthwhile if you’re wedged firmly up your Gmail’s arse.

More importantly, dealing with emails scrambles your ability to focus on one particular goal, which should always be your intention on Monday morning.

Successful affiliates are excellent at spotlighting their biggest goals and putting the most effort in to the most rewarding work. If that means being impossible to reach on the phone, through email and by instant messenger… then so be it. Most of us are pretty skilled at living like hermits. Celebrate it.

Monday morning is the perfect time to batten down the hatchets, leechblock Facebook, and unleash Father Zen on your most important project. Don’t take your lunch break until you’ve achieved something significant. It’s not an exaggeration to say that failing to do so may cost you the rest of your week.

Recommended This Week

• So, Premium Posts Volume 4 was released last week and the reception has been excellent with many saying that it’s the best volume yet – something I’m extremely happy to hear, because it was by far the toughest to write. It’s called Outside the Box Marketing and you can get your paws on it for $34.95. Grab your copy here.

• Any Facebook advertisers still out there? Check out Lots of Ads. Spy on the best performing ads in international markets, save money on your translations and learn from affiliates who are already making money (or perhaps wasting it recklessly?). The tool now supports 21 countries, which should be plenty to keep you busy.

• If you’re a new reader here, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter. Thanks for reading.

“I will learn how to control my time. I will defeat procrastination. 2012 better watch out ’cause I’m coming to kick its arse…”

The statement of intent is admirable, but far too many of us fail to learn from mistakes of the previous twelve months. Do we expect them to just disappear? Irrationally, yes we do. We wait for a new dawn, pretend that we’re all the wiser, and then plunge head-first in to the same mistakes yet again.

I would guess that at least half of the people reading this blog woke up on January 1st with the desire to procrastinate less. We see it as the great barrier to achievement. “Well, if I could only bring my mind to focus on all the plans I’ve set for myself, I’d be as rich as my whiteboard says.”

Procrastination is a buzz term that bloggers love to blog about, writers love to write about and speakers love to speak about. It’s a universal phenomenon. To beat procrastination is to pin jelly to a wall. Just when you think you’ve cleared your head of all the distractions and white noise, along comes another unforeseen circumstance to obliterate your carefully laid plans. We end up feeling sorry for ourselves. No matter how hard we search for solutions, we still fall in to the same black hole lapses of productivity.

If you don’t challenge yourself to tackle the problem at its source, you might as well pencil in ‘beating procrastination’ as your annual challenge for 2013, 2014, and every subsequent year for the rest of your life.

So what is the source of procrastination? Ultimately, it’s the failure to foresee your own weaknesses. It’s not a lack of application, or desire, or ambition. Procrastination is simply what happens when you plan a future without addressing the fragility of the decision-making by your future self.

We can all assess procrastination logically in moments like these where we’re reading the obvious in black and white. Yes, we know it’s bad. Yes, we know it’s a hindrance. And yes, we’re all going to make an extra effort to conquer the problem. It’s natural to feel vaccinated against procrastination while you’re reading about it. Unfortunately, there is no vaccination. Just sensible planning.

To reduce the procrastination struggle, you need to make contingency plans for your future self; a much weaker feebler-minded self that has long forgotten your ambitions, and wishes only to cave in to short term satisfaction. Pretending that this alter-ego doesn’t exist is the fastest way to guarantee failure.

A naive New Year’s Resolution is to vow not to spend hours checking Facebook every day, using the thought of all the extra work you’d get done as an incentive.

A realistic New Year’s Resolution is to vow not to spend hours checking Facebook every day, and then LeechBlock the motherfucker so that its physically inaccessible between 9am and 8pm.

The difference between these resolutions is that one is driven by an idealistic hope that temptation will diminish given the right incentive. Much wiser than such hope, is a contingency plan for your weaker future self. Procrastination is just a term we give to the many temptations that control our short term decisions. Temptation is here to stay, and so is our habit of caving in to it like victims of a venus flytrap – unless we learn to tackle the temptation in advance.

Procrastination is not like smoking. It’s not a dirty habit that we can overcome with the right incentive. One day, even the most ardent nicotine fiend may find that cigarettes just don’t hold the same appeal. Such success stories prove that beating an addiction is painful but possible. Beating procrastination is not. It would require evolutionary re-programming that probably won’t be possible in our lifetimes. We are hardwired to cave in to short term temptation much more willingly than we will hold out for long term satisfaction. And that’s why you find yourself balls deep on Facebook when you should be hard at work.

If we can’t eliminate procrastination, what can we do? We can prepare for the temptations that have fucked us in the past. We can’t remove temptation, but we can control behaviour by putting our future selves on a metaphorical leash.

Here are some examples of steps an affiliate marketer can take to become more productive:

1. Pick a new traffic source, any new traffic source, and deposit $1000 immediately. The simple act of committing money to a project will do more for your ‘scaling’ than any amount of scribbling in a notepad.

2. Use LeechBlock to physically remove access to time wasting sites. Don’t just hope that you won’t waste your time. Physically stop your future self! There will be moments in the day where your attention is slipping and that future self sees no harm in a quick 5 minute session on Facebook. Make it impossible.

3. Find a business partner with a superior motive. Once upon a time, I built websites thinking the carrot of money in the future would inspire me to see them through to completion. I soon realised that this carrot would disintegrate when a better idea came along. Naturally, your future self has a bias towards ideas born in the present. If you want to really nail a big project, take on a business partner who is even more motivated than yourself. (Hint: Somebody who gives a damn about the niche.) Use their energy and passion to maintain your spark for projects when the honeymoon period (aka. the domain registration and WordPress installation) wears off. Let them know that part of their job is to kick your arse in to action.

4. Form your own mastermind group and set a daily recap. Sharing knowledge with other affiliates is one of the fastest ways to progress. I recommend kickstarting 2012 by forming a small mastermind group with 2 or 3 other marketers in the same position. Make sure there’s a group discussion at the end of each day. Use it to share your progress. Nobody wants to be the worst performer in the group, so use that competitive pride as inspiration to get a bloody move on.

5. Announce products before they’re ready to be launched. If you run a blog, or any kind of community, and still haven’t ticked off that 2012 must-do of releasing your own product, why not create a sense of urgency? Announce it in advance, tell everybody the launch date, and let your followers hold you accountable. Even better, promise 50% off if you fail to deliver it on time.

I hope everybody is optimistic and determined to make 2012 their best year yet, no matter how depressing my contrarian approach may seem. Never be afraid of making a fresh start and setting tough targets. Just don’t be so foolish as to make the same mistakes again.

Recommended This Week

• Make sure you grab a copy of Premium Posts Volume 3. Featuring over 75 pages of tips and techniques to help you dominate the dating niche, Volume 3 should give your campaigns a nice boost for 2012. Download a copy here.

• If you’re working in the dating market, check out Adsimilis. Definitely one of the better networks with a wide range of dating offers, all on high payouts, including lots of stuff in Europe and South America. I think you’ll like them.

• If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter. Thanks for reading. Happy Motherfuckin’ 2012.

A huge percentage of our working day is spent playing the waiting game. It’s one of the reasons the many Internet Marketing forums maintain such active communities, and why blogs such as mine retain a readership. Most of you are waiting for something to happen.

Black Hole Days, as I like to call them, are those where our productivity is stamped in to the ground. Where our goals are left at the mercy of somebody on the other side of the world deciding that an email or campaign is important enough to address. Such days are, thankfully, perfectly avoidable. But you’ll need to bagsy a lot of self-discipline along the way.

One of the many reasons that convinced me to move my efforts from SEO to paid traffic campaigns was the time that it took to see results. SEO is a messy business, full of relative variables, and a lot of donkey work. It’s easy to spend your 9-5 staying busy when there are more links to be had, and more articles to be written.

However, buying traffic and setting up arbitrage affiliate campaigns is something that can be achieved in the space of a morning. It can be done at a leisurely pace in your local coffee shop, so long as you find the seat where your fucked up dating imagery is shielded from the public eye.

It’s this lackadaisical approach to work that appealed to me while I was still in full-time employment. Yet, what they don’t tell you about making the jump from part-time to full-time affiliate is that nothing changes. Absolutely nothing.

The tasks simply expand to take up more of your time, and so you spunk more and more bandwidth on the chore of refreshing stats. Most of your work can be ticked off in two hours if you truly buckle down.

A lot of people ask me how I find time to blog regularly given the vast number of campaigns I seem to be running. Well, for one, the number of campaigns is probably much smaller than you think. And secondly, what else am I going to do? It takes 20 minutes to set up a campaign, and 2 minutes to check whether it’s a resounding success.

If we push ourselves, we can burn extra energy sending emails back and forth to various affiliate managers. For shits and giggles, you could always apply to one of these ’2012-era’ offers that requires all ad copy, images and landing pages to be approved. Those are my favourites. They should come with a health warning.

“Requires overnight planning. Likely to cause stroke and seismic mind-fuck in typical affiliate.”

The truth is that blogging is one of my preferred methods of filling the Black Hole Days. When my campaigns are ‘in transit’, or waiting to accumulate data, I prefer to be proactive rather than bouncing off the walls on AIM.

If you don’t want to blog (and let’s face it, most people shouldn’t), I recommend that you keep two or three books by your desk, ideally on completely unrelated subjects. I set myself the target of writing 10 pages a day, and reading 100 pages. To the uninitiated, that may seem a little extreme, but it feeds me a steady stream of new inspiration and ideas. The writing, additionally, is a profitable side income.

Slowly over the months, I’ve learnt to embrace the idea of using time spent waiting on campaigns to plunge in to research and papers that I’m completely unfamiliar with. If you’re not striving to learn out of your comfort zone, you’re never going to match the diversity of knowledge that comes from working in a formal job.

Reading and writing are both nice ways of spending time productively, but perhaps the most important step you can take is to commit to a project that involves more than traditional CPA arbitrage. Ever since I took up this job, I’ve been looking for ways to establish a legitimate business that places me as more than just a middleman.

It’s a controversial subject for affiliates, amplified by the Affiliate Marketing is Dead extremist views.

I don’t believe affiliate marketing is dead. As a regulated industry, I think it’s only just starting to flourish. Strip away the bullshit stereotypes of how we make our money and you are left with one word that is not going out of fashion anytime soon – commission. My balls will perish long before commission.

However, if you spend two or three years in full-time affiliate marketing, you will eventually find that the waiting game begins to grate. You turn resentful of those Black Hole Days and gain an increasingly fine appetite for the power of running your own ship. It’s lucrative to be a middleman, but with so much time on our hands, it’s only logical that we take measures to develop a permanent business that is ours.

Recommended This Week

• I hear Mr. Green has just released a brand new version of his Plentyoffish uploader kit. Sign up at the StackThatMoney Forum if you want it, along with a whole shebang of other free tools, plus a great community to receive professional treatment for your affiliate concerns.

• If you need a helping hand making this affiliate thing work, Premium Posts Volume 2 splurges over 70 pages of my tips, techniques and strategies for conquering Facebook. Reviews so far have generally been that the Posts are better than sex, so please do check them out.

• If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter. Thanks for reading.

We work in an incredibly intrusive environment. Some affiliates manage it better than others. I can’t for the life of me understand how any of you achieve more than a sustained migraine by logging in to AIM, or by relaying your every thought to Twitter.

For all the productivity tips in the world, I have three simple commandments that cut straight to the chase. Oh and a split personality, to hold myself accountable.

Don’t… log on to a computer out of boredom.

Don’t… open your emails if you don’t plan on replying to them.

Don’t… sit down to work without a tangible target of what you plan to achieve.

When I look back at my failed projects – and I’d need 20/20 eyesight to see to the bottom of the list – there’s a recurring trend that sets the losers apart. That trait is a lack of vision. The sheer indifference towards thinking about them every day.

So after flicking through my Analytics account yesterday, I guess you could say the skies parted and a lightbulb flashed above my head. One of my dearest old websites, and very first affiliate project in fact, was about to get the chop.

The website receives a small trickle of hits. On a good week, it’ll even turnover a few sales. But the site is about learning French (among other languages), and as most people who know me can confirm… mon francais est a petite bit shit, merci beaucoup.

To invest any more energy in to establishing a website where I have no reputable knowledge, and no vision for how I could make it work, would be like Wayne Rooney sitting down and attempting a crossword. There’s just no point.

This takes me back to ‘Don’t Number Three’ from my commandments above.

I can guarantee that if I sit down at my desk without a clear vision for what I hope to achieve, I’ll end up sodding off for an early lunch having achieved what I started with – absolutely nothing.

Why bother to enter your office if you don’t have an objective? This is the type of mistake that I would compare to jumping in the middle of the ocean on a raft without an oar. You’re never going to control where you end up, and you’ll probably just exert a lot of energy to end up where you started.

How many affiliates have felt that at the end of the day before?

A useful exercise, which I believe every affiliate should swear by, involves a month of keeping accurate records.

I know it’s not cool to keep a journal. But for the purpose of evaluating your own productivity and potential, go ahead and spend a month recording exactly what you work on every day. Don’t get sloppy. Record every last meaningless task you devote your energies to.

In an additional spreadsheet, record your daily earnings and match the income to the corresponding tasks that were responsible for generating the money.

Be prepared for a reality check. I predict that 20% of your time spent working will be responsible for 80% of the income produced.

That’s probably not surprising to many of you. But where the reality check becomes necessary is in justifying the merits of the other 80% of work that occupies our schedules during the month.

Look closely at the tasks that swallow 80% of your time. Which of these projects do you have a clear vision for, and which are simply helping you to stay busy?

Scrap whichever projects are making slow progress, little money, and perhaps even more importantly – the projects that you don’t see yourself being involved with 3 years from now. The “do I truly give a shit about this niche?” question has always been my great acid test for whether I’m going to see a project through to the bitter end.

If my answer is no, the likelihood is that I’ve spent too long logging on to my computer out of boredom, and not enough time setting goals that I’m likely to achieve.

Here’s a suggestion for you. Next Monday morning, pencil in some appraisal meetings with each of the projects in your Analytics account. Take on the split personality of an overbearing boss who cares little for sentiment and everything for results.

Now interview your project manager (Yep… that’s you again), and ask some deep searching questions.

“How do you think you’ve performed over the last six months, little affiliate site?”
“Where do you see your earnings this time next year?”
“Are you capable of reaching your targets or are you full of bullshit like Finch’s french?”

Now let the boss in you decide the fate and credibility of those answers. You wouldn’t hire a professional to do a bad job, would you? So why excuse your own poor performance?

Cut the crap and optimise your business like you would with any lucrative affiliate campaign. There’s money to be made, and time to be saved!

Recommended This Week

• If you’re not a regular reader of FinchBlogs, check out my latest post over there: The 10 Best Countries To Live In For An Online Professional. The site has been rebranded and I’m very excited for the plans ahead.

• If you’re not already registered on PPV Playbook, you are missing a beat sunshine! Easily the BEST place to learn from marketers who are actually making money. It has some awesome case studies. The catch is that you will need to pay some of your hard earned pesos to access it. I swear from the bottom of my black heart, joining is worth every penny

• If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter Love you long time. Thanks for reading.

If you work primarily online, you’re likely all too familiar with the dangers of distraction. Internet distractions abound – social media, games, news, YouTube – but work and family issues can also throw you off your game. It can be difficult to finish one project when other business matters keep stealing your attention.

However, if you can learn to minimize interruptions, organize your work, and plan effectively, you can make yourself more productive and efficient. If you’re familiar with the saying “time is money,” then you know why this is important.

Tip 1: Devote Days to Specific Tasks

While an online business naturally requires you to multitask for much of your day, trying to do too many tasks at once can kill your momentum, break your train of thought and make you less efficient in general. For instance, Robert Plank writes that he typically targets email on Monday, moving on to customer service on Tuesday and so on. A system like his can help you focus on one project and make you less susceptible to interruptions.

Finch: I devote different days to different traffic sources, and also different days to different verticals. My blog posts are usually mid-evening brainfarts when I have nothing else to do.

Tip 2: Close Your Email

Forcing yourself to refrain from constantly checking your email can be difficult, but doing so can save you from wasted time and unneeded distractions. Try setting rules for yourself that limit the number of times you can check your email everyday to two or three. Each time you check your mail, respond to only priority emails. At the end of the week, set aside a few hours to respond to all the other messages in your inbox. To make this easier, organize your emails in Gmail with labels every day, marking those that you’ll reply to on your designated email day.

Tip 3: Organize Your Computer

It’s easy for work-related files to pile up on your computer, and failing to organize them can result in a lot of wasted time as you search through them to find what you need. Use folders to keep track of different projects, labeling each folder according to its contents or using a naming system to help you more easily sort each folder. If you regularly work on more than one device, take advantage of software like Dropbox. Dropbox allows you to access your files from any machine at any location. As long as you have a mobile device or laptop with wireless internet, you can open and update any file without having to constantly send emails to yourself.

Finch: Dropbox is one of the best nomad resources of the 21st century. If you don’t have it, get on the bandwagon.

Tip 4: Stop Surfing the Internet

While this one goes without saying, sometimes you need to remind yourself just how much time surfing the web wastes when you’re trying to work. Learn to control your impulses to get on Facebook, read forums or check the news, making sure to set aside off-work hours for that. Turning off email and chat programs can help you avoid the random, distracting links that your friends send you throughout the day.

Finch: How do any of you get work done on AIM? It’s like dodging productivity bullets. LeechBlock is your best friend for avoiding the time wasting filth.

Tip 5: Set Aside Free Time

Being self-employed makes it easy to slip into a work mindset at all times, but you need to give yourself free time to maintain balance and, maybe more importantly, your sanity. If you make sure to set aside some free time for yourself every evening, you’ll have something to look forward to while you work and will be less likely to fall prey to distractions. During your free time, don’t check your email constantly or think about anything work-related. Having work creep into your leisure time can be just as inefficient as giving into distractions when you should be working.

Tip 6: Set Goals

You can work much easier by setting concrete goals for yourself to accomplish, in both the short and long term. For instance, you could aim to complete a certain project before the end of the week while setting your long term sights on increasing your job income by 100 percent in the next 3 years. Your goals should be specific, measurable and time-bound, providing you with a concrete target and a limited period of time in which to hit that target. Of course, they should be attainable. Setting unreasonable goals for yourself will only lead to further stress.

Tip 7: Create a Daily Action Plan

To help you work toward the goals you’ve set, make a list of every task you need to complete each day. As you finish each item on the list, check it off and move on to the next. This helps keep you on track and makes your work day go faster. After several weeks of making checklists, you can also become better at estimating how much you can expect to accomplish in a single work day, further improving your ability budget time.

Tip 8: Prioritize

In determining which tasks should be tackled first, it can be helpful to remember the adage that states, “80 percent of your profits are derived from 20 percent of your tasks.” The tasks that are most crucial to your profit-making potential should be given top priority. Try to spend most of your time taking care of critical tasks, saving other less important ones until you have more time.

Tip 9: Clean Up Your Work Environment

A messy workspace can promote mental clutter, making it important to keep your physical work environment just as clean and organized as your computer. For many people, simply working in clean and comfortable room can greatly boost productivity. Keeping your workplace orderly can also help you associate it with your professional life, making it easier to work without distraction.

Finch: I also find it helps to have lots of natural light in the room. Working from your mother’s basement is probably not the best way to stay chipper through the day.

Tip 10: Exercise and Eat Right

Staying in shape may seem irrelevant in regards to working online, but neglecting physical fitness can lower your drive, energy and efficiency. Try to spend at least 30 minutes walking, running, playing sports or otherwise working out every day. That may seem like a lot of time to devote to non-work activities, but the investment can pay off by giving you more energy and discipline.

Likewise, a healthy diet can make you feel less sluggish and can put you in a better mood while you work according to the American Dietetic Association.

Finch: Unfortunately, this is true. Try getting a campaign profitable after munching down a Village Pizza XL Meatfeast at 1am. Your posture is also something to pay close attention to, unless you want to follow the much travelled road of successful affiliate at 21, squared eye hunchback at 26. Priorities, affiliasphere!

Recommended This Week:

• Slightly off-topic, but I see Spotify has finally landed in America. Being the long term Spotify fangirl that I am, I have a bunch of invites for those of you in the States who aren’t yet members. Email me if you want one (and trust me, you want one), or add me on Twitter and get in touch.

• If you’re interested in guest posting on FinchSells.com, or having me post on your own site, please read this. New reader? Add FinchSells to your RSS

Staying productive is something I talk about a lot because I believe self-discipline to be the single greatest asset to any entrepreneur, or anybody who controls their own working environment. Without it, we could spunk entire afternoons on YouTube or away from the office altogether.

I think we all know that it’s important to stay productive, but not many of us have reached the stage where we feel like we’re in total control of our environment.

So here are four tips for improving your productivity if you work from home:

1. Separate your work space from your living arrangements.

This is pretty much critical to your sanity. For over two years, I worked in a claustrophobic bedroom where I also drank, ate, slept and let the magic happen. The problem with having your office in your bedroom is that as affiliate marketers, we’re chained to a 24/7 industry that never sleeps. There’s always one more email to answer, some stats to refresh or a brainfart to research.

One of my priorities when I moved to Bangkok was to find a three bedroom apartment that had plenty of space. My girlfriend also works from home, so we opted for a 350 sq/m sprawling mass of rooms. We both have a home office, our puppies have their own bedroom and there’s more than enough space to be able to differentiate between “This is where I work”, “This is where I sleep”, and “This is where I shit”.

2. Have a schedule.

Many people consider the 9-5 to be a mental prison. The same hours, on the same days of the week for the rest of their working lives. But what can’t be argued is that routine adds order and momentum to your working day.

Nobody can tell you the best routine. Some people work better in the morning, while others can only think straight at night. Your location in the world also makes a difference.

When I have breakfast, America is going to bed and the UK is already fast asleep. This gives me a perfect opportunity to fire off my emails and work out. I can go for a swim, eat some lunch and really think about what I want to achieve before the morning has already passed me by.

If you’re going to have a schedule, you need to stick to it. So you need to plan ahead and leave time for that familiar experience of life screwing you over, or people having other ideas about how you should spend your time. It’s easy for those working at home to fall in to the trap of becoming everybody else’s bitch. Maybe your housemates want you to run errands because you have “all that time on your hands”. Or your neighbour wants you to watch out for a parcel delivery because it was too convenient to expect you to do them a favour than organize to pick the damn thing up themselves.

These are all familiar stories of how working from home can turn you in to a Samaritan at the beck and call of everybody else. So take back control and get some self-discipline. Even if it’s a flimsy whiteboard with your working hours scrawled in the kitchen for your wife to see.

You can always bust out my favourite tetchy complaint: “I didn’t get where I am today by taking care of other people’s shit.” You might be seen as unreasonable, but you’re in the right. Many of us have worked 16 hour days for months on end to be in the position that we are, so having a schedule that other people respect isn’t too much to ask.

3. Understand the difference between staying busy and getting work done.

Sometimes I have days where I only work for a few hours but what I achieve is significant because it’s a step towards a long term goal. Other days, I work for 12 hours and cross off dozens of tasks only to find that I haven’t actually achieved much because I’ve been “keeping busy” rather than making any measurable progress.

What is “keeping busy”?

- Optimizing campaigns without analyzing the data.

God, I hate myself when I do this. I’ll mark down a task for the day to optimize campaign X, and then I’ll go in and introduce some new ads or tweak my landing pages – but I won’t look at the data and make any logical assessments. If you’re forever split testing and never coming to conclusions that affect your future campaigns, you’re the perfect example of somebody who keeps busy for the sake of being busy rather than achieving goals.

- Managing people.

I’m not a project manager. So whenever I add a task like “communicate with Freelancer X and ensure project is running fine”, I know that I’m being lazy. These are things that you should either be doing automatically or handing to a dedicated project manager. It’s not a step forward for your business if you’re spending the day waiting for emails and feeling satisfied that you’ve got everything under control.

- Research tasks.

I find that if I include any item resembling “Research this…” on my to-do list, I will revert to my lazy high school trait of promoting the easiest task to the one most worthy of my time. I never add research tasks to my to-do list for one reason. They’re not measurable. I can’t hold myself accountable at the end of the day. It’s easy to flick through a couple of forum posts in the space of five hours and then by the end of the day miraculously forget that those hours were actually wasted.

To put it simply, if you’re going to set yourself tasks, you should know exactly what you’re looking to achieve. Otherwise the goalposts will move as fatigue sets in at the end of the day.

4. Cancel out the noise.

Yes literally, check out SimplyNoise. White noise is a brilliant way of canceling out the distractions all around you. I like to listen to music every now and then, but having a TV blaring in the background makes it damn near impossible for me to work productively.

My girlfriend manages to stay focused on her tasks while watching America’s Next Top Model with a laptop balanced on the sofa. She’s obviously a freak. I couldn’t bring myself to remember my CPCs from my CPVs if I had such calamity unfolding before my eyes on-screen. Whether you think it affects you or not, your brain is tuned in to what is going on around you. I find white noise to be the best way of weeding out those distractions and keeping my focus where it needs to be. Scamming the nation needs mind meditation, right?

If you’re falling in to patterns of laziness, maybe it’s time to start adjusting your home environment. You know… divorce the wife, move in to the attic, ask the cat to start feeding himself. Small tweaks. I’m not advocating Josef Fritzl measures, but discipline and clarity can be a good thing for all parties concerned. Show the world that you don’t mess with a man and his berries.

Recommended This Week:

• Ironically, given the nature of this post, I would like to recommend you join a forum. If you’re not already registered on PPV Playbook, you are missing a beat sunshine. Easily the BEST place to learn from marketers who are actually making money. It has some awesome case studies. The catch is that you will need to pay some of your hard earned pesos to access it. I swear from the bottom of my black heart, joining is worth every penny

• If you’re working in the dating market, check out Adsimilis. Definitely one of the better networks with a wide range of dating offers, all on high payouts, including lots of stuff in Europe and South America. I think you’ll like them.

• If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Feel free to add Finch to your Facebook. Yes, this is the right link. My real name is not actually Finch. Also follow me on Twitter Love you long time. Thanks for reading.

Even though I’ve only been in Bangkok for a week, it’s already clear to me that the quality of life is worlds apart from what I’ve known in the past. The people are friendly. They call Thailand the Land of Smiles, while my old neighbourhood was more like the Ensemble of Chavs. The food gets better seemingly every day, and my taste buds are on fire. Literally. Somebody should have warned me how the Thais love to douse meals in chilies. Of course, the weather here is bliss too.

I’ve waited a long time to live like a nomad. The biggest challenge now is to remain focused on my work while the sun is beating through my window. And if the last six days have been anything to go by, that’s something easier said than done.

I’ve always believed that your environment plays a big hand in your ability to achieve your targets. If you can’t turn your head away from the television, you’re going to miss tomorrow’s moneymaking niche. If your wife is trampling around your office telling you to do the dishes, you probably don’t want to be scouring through female dating pics.

To put it simply, your working environment dictates what you’re able to accomplish. Nothing affects an attention span quite as harmfully as a poor working environment.

I consider myself lucky to have found initial success as a young guy in my 20s, without any kids, without any mortgage and with relatively few responsibilities. It gave me the freedom of locking myself away in my bedroom and sitting at a desk throwing shit at the wall until some of it stuck. Many of you do not have that luxury.

Whether you’re working in Thailand or England, in a home office or at the kitchen table – you need to be able to cancel out the distractions of everyday life fucking with you. I’ve only just noticed since flying out to Asia how badly television can affect my productivity. How eating out can zap monumental hours out of my day. I’m still searching for a balance between work and play. And no, the equation doesn’t involve ladyboys.

Once you find a situation that allows you to focus properly, it’s easy to find a rhythm where to-do lists become yesterday’s waste in the litter basket. It’s what we call the grind. But it’s damn near impossible to slip in to that grind at the snap of your fingertips. We can become ruled all too easily by the environment around us.

So much of the success we enjoy as marketers is carved through momentum. I believe in the theory of 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration being the blueprint to success. Momentum is everything. If you don’t have an online/offline switch helping you to gravitate between work times and social times, it’s your work that will suffer the most. And probably your friends too when you explode with anger through the stress of knowing you’re not working efficiently and haven’t earnt your ticket out of the office.

There’s nothing I find more frustrating than being frustrated with myself.

I’ve become so tuned in to my former working environment that it’s truly a bitch to get my head down and work in a different climate. When I looked out of my window in London, I would see a stretch of grassy nowhereland and maybe – on a busy day – some dude being dragged along by his dog. When I look out of my apartment in Bangkok, I see a city waiting to be explored. The low hanging fruits of my work over the last few years, ready to be plucked and enjoyed.

How do you stay motivated when everything you’ve worked for is sitting on your doorstep?

I’m treating this first week as a holiday that I’ve earnt. Nobody can travel halfway round the world and expect to snap in to a working routine. So much of my success as an affiliate marketer has come from an almost robotic tendency to stay rooted to one spot and churn out profitable campaigns. It was the by-product of a mundane working environment, but a very effective one.

To get the best out of myself, I need to be in an situation where I have complete focus and concentration. As much as I enjoy working on laptops in the sun, a quiet office where I can shut myself away from the world is just the tonic I need to get by. Maybe it’s the snobbery of a guy who swears by his dual screen, but I’m finding it pretty difficult to function without seventeen windows at my disposal.

Laptops are suitable, I guess, if your entire job involves sending emails. Anything more and I need my Mac. Unfortunately it’s still in transit and my productivity has gone down the shitter ever since. I don’t like having to use my finger as a mouse and I’m acting quite grouchy at the idea of having to work out of my established comfort zone. It all comes down to that environment.

If you’re working from home, you need to become a master of your own work space. Maybe the ultimate goal is to one day pack up your bags and migrate to warmer shores. But even when you’re there, there’s no such thing as retirement for an entrepreneur. Understanding how to get the most out of your working day, and how to control your environment effectively, is a prerequisite to success.

So while I’m sitting here pissing around with a shoddy baby laptop and a failing Internet connection, take a look around the room and see how you can channel some extra focus towards your work. Maybe it’s a television that needs to be switched off, or a little white noise to cancel out the cars from the street below. Maybe you should throw your kids over the balcony. Anything to focus your energies where they need to be. Actually please don’t throw your kids over the balcony. Or at least close this window before you act on impulse.

There’s always a way to control your environment. But you can be certain that most of your competition are chained to their own. Working harder and smarter than the rest, with more discipline and more drive, will nearly always get you results. The problem I’m finding, is how I can maintain that level of focus with the allure of Thailand shining through my window…

Recommended This Week:

• If you haven’t read it from front to back already, snap up a copy of the brilliant 4-hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss. Inspiring stuff for any affiliate marketer.

• If you’re looking to explore some very different but potentially very profitable micro-niches, take a look at ShareASale. It’s like a CJ that isn’t run by a bag of dicks.

• Feel free to add Finch to your Facebook. Yes, this is the right link. My real name is not actually Finch. Also follow me on Twitter

We work in one of the most accessible industries imaginable. If you’re an affiliate marketer, you’re online. And if you’re a good one, your ego has probably exploded to the point where you’re not hard to find. I often wonder why newbies rush to buy ebooks from self appointed gurus when they could speak to those same gurus free of charge in the space of a basic AIM window.

Networking is free knowledge, ladies and gentleman. And yet it’s a subject that divides opinion for many marketers out there. Partly because it’s confused with the trait of time wasting, and those who do anything possible not to have to actually work.

For me, networking isn’t just a case of wanting to learn more about my industry. It’s an element of human interaction that I’ve missed since I jacked in my day job. While it’s pretty rare that you’ll find me piss-arsing my day away with idle chit chat on AIM, I do feel a regular need to speak to new people and to understand different paths that others have taken to find success in affiliate marketing.

But why is it important? Who would choose to spend an hour networking over the important split testing of their latest Facebook campaign?

If you’re the kind of tombraiding CPA urchin who makes his living through the constantly shifting dynamics of traffic arbitrage, then you definitely need to have an ear to the ground. Networking is your way of staying ahead. Much more so than the practical affiliate who develops long term projects with milestones stretching in to 2011 and a disregard for his daily ROI.

It’s tough for me to sit here and preach the importance of developing relationships. The popular word is that if you’ve stuck your weary eyes out of the rabbit hole long enough to engage in a 10 minute conversation on AIM, you’re simply not working hard enough. That’s bullshit. There can be no excuses for not taking a moment to integrate yourself with your peers, to seek out new business and to actually network with other like-minded individuals.

Oh and by the way. Some affiliates seem to preach to the crowd that they work 16 hour days, more or less Monday to Sunday. So they don’t have time to network. That’s real nice. But you do realize that just because you’re plugged in to the Internet and your modem is flashing, it doesn’t mean you’re actually working – right?

If your breakdown of a 16 hour day equates to 3 hours of keyword research followed by a WickedFire binge from lunch through to moonlight, then you’re probably not reaping the benefits that a dumbarse motherfucker “working” 112 hour weeks probably should. Your net working day can be established by subtracting “time spent chasing skirt on Facebook” from “hours spent building out campaigns”.

I am certainly not one to knock the hard working affiliates who strike through their to-do lists whether the wife has gone in to labour or not. It takes commitment and great discipline to stay focused on your goals. But without keeping an eye on your peers, you’ll never know how relevant those goals are to business success. Simply put, we work in an industry that evolves too quickly to be out of the loop.

Christ, I took a two week break not too long ago and the first thing I did upon rebooting my Mac was to Google search “is affiliate marketing still for real?”.

Networking and sharing knowledge means you’ll never have to buy another ebook in your life. Why? Because it puts you in touch with the REAL people of this industry. The people making money every day. The people making money before the lame ebooks have been outsourced for creation.

I like to think of it as a spider building his web. Broadening your horizons and spinning that web might not reveal any immediate benefits. You might even feel like you’re wasting your time while you could be out chasing after riches. I’ve certainly felt that sensation while aimlessly discussing Cheryl Cole’s sex appeal with Andrew Wee in the past. But when a knowledge bomb drops, when tomorrow’s big niche lands, you want to be there to catch it. And if you don’t make an effort to integrate yourself with real affiliate marketers, to reach in to every corner where opportunity might land – well…

You’ll be a hungry spider?

Yeah fuck that anecdote, it’s been a long day.

My point is that somewhere on the horizon, chugging towards your doorstep, is the same kind of gravy train that most of us were too slow to capitalize on in 2008 when it was loaded with acai berries. My excuse for missing out was simple. I didn’t really know about it. And by the time I did know about it, I was too late.

If you can establish working relationships with the right people in the right places, you WILL see that next gravy train coming. Whether you jump on for the ride is probably a matter of how intuitive you are.

The next time you find yourself stargazing at the promises of Mr Guru McBullshitsalot’s latest ebook, stop and think for a moment. Wouldn’t it be great if instead of buying a book that this smug bastard dreamed up six months ago when his methods actually worked…you could talk to him now and find out what he’s currently doing?

And there lies the power of networking with real affiliates. You will learn far more by simply being connected with the right people than you will by purchasing their products or reading their blogs. Make an effort to establish actual business relationships. Without them, you’re simply the pawn they’re trying to sell to or the sheep us bloggers like to write to.

Business Protip for the day: If you’re going to take a break and spend 6 days camping at a festival without email access – remember to tell your affiliate managers. It seems as if some networks are quick to pronounce me dead if I stop running traffic for more than 24 hours.

Unfortunately I’m not dead. But I am severely tanned with sun kissed balls, and ready to get back to the grind again. Glastonbury Festival, for those of you who haven’t been, is the sugardaddy of all musical events. You need to go. I still feel pretty partied out but I’m going to do my best to address something I’ve noticed that affiliates seem to get wrong. All the time.

If you’re a full time affiliate working from home, what’s the one thing you have that a part-timer doesn’t? It’s time. Complete control of your hours, and the ability to be as productive or as unproductive as the day is long. Nobody chomps your balls for strolling in to the office at 9:06 and if Brazil vs. Holland tickles your fancy, the to-do list can always wait a couple of hours, right?

How many marketers actually take the time to nurture a talent or to learn something new? It sounds pretty irrelevant. You’ve got all that split testing to do, those new offers to rig up to fresh campaigns. Christ, I’ve got a thousand tweets in my face telling me that snoozing is losing.

An affiliate marketer is more often than not a middleman. You can be a complete retard and still make good money if an advertiser has a good product and an audience has a strong need. But it doesn’t give you any kind of asset. You have no market value. That’s unless you develop websites that stand on their own two feet.

We basically seize the loopholes of traffic brokerage and exist in a state of limbo where our main talent is to capitalize on opportunity. That’s rosy and sweet, but it’s pretty fucking moronic to not have a Plan B. If you’re not designating an hour of your day to nurture a talent, you’re wasting the one freedom you always dreamed of when you jacked in your day job.

Real businesses exist to be the best at something. They provide real solutions. All the truly great businessmen of our time have a talent that puts them above their peers. The problem with affiliate marketing is that you don’t have to be the best at anything. You can be merely competent and still pay the bills.

But that shouldn’t be your attitude. In the worst case scenario that affiliate marketing gets nuked in the morning, we should all have been busy developing our assets to a point where we can say that we’re the best at something…anything. Being an expert at affiliate marketing isn’t enough. How many real life human beings give a shit if you’re the smartest handler of EPCs? It adds no value for anybody.

If, however, you decide today that you’re going to focus on improving your copywriting, for example, that’s an investment worth so much more than any late night split testing binge. If you can become an expert who writes the best damn copy in the business, you’re going to be in demand.

We have so many hours on our hands and if we’re not striving to improve, we might as well go back to the 9-5.

For me personally, my main passion is writing. You might accuse me of being just another marketing blogger with his dick up his own arse and willing to push any second tier referral he can throw your way. But actually, this site is like my CV. I could devote all my hours to painstaking research of new offers, but it doesn’t add any long-term value to my business. Whereas this blog will remain here long after my bizopp campaign of the week has faded.

More affiliates are soon going to appreciate the need to develop websites that provide genuine quality content. Because there are enough passionate people out there to drive you out of business. Soon we will need to put the quality of our content first and THEN worry about monetizing it.

How far do you have to look for proof? Just look at the search engines. Google is backhanding websites it deems to be “bridge pages” from the sponsored listings. I can only imagine that if this is their outlook, it will soon translate more heavily in to the organic listings too. If you don’t offer your own unique commodity, you’re dispensable.

This blog is an example of how I like to monetize. I’ve never offered sponsored content and I’ve never accepted payments to endorse networks or products in my posts. The main appeal is the writing style and the trust that I’ve managed to forge with readers. It’s a site that I’m happy to put next to my business name because I trust in what I’ve published here.

Too many affiliate websites are built on flimsy foundations. With $10/articles outsourced to so-called experts who know jack shit about the subject matter despite what they state in their Elance proposals.

The next time you focus on a micro-niche, don’t make your first question “How can I monetize this concept?”. Think first to satisfy the needs of the target audience. Be an expert in your field. How can you produce something outstanding that shows more than your ability to rank in Google?

Quality content will always stand the test of time. And so will your business if you drive it forward and become the best in a particular field.

It’s not easy, but you know what is easy? It’s easy to set aside one hour in your working day and learn something new. Ask yourself what you can be the best at, then go out and be it.

“Hey Joe, I can’t come out tonight. I’m busy grindin”

“Forced to choose between the grind and playing with my balls, I choose the grind.”

Check out Ryan Eagle’s Twitter for more classic examples.

Affiliates seem to fail or succeed by virtue of “the grind”. The ability to work like a slave – through the night, through the morning – deaf to distractions and entirely committed to the art of getting shit done.

Everybody needs to be working at least 22 hour days or they’re just not working hard enough, right? I’ve been sucked in to this competitive mindset in the past, and I’m doing my best to wriggle my way free. The grind is only cool when you know how to stop.

I was sitting downstairs in my lounge the other day, vegetating like some kind of unshaven grizzly bear. It’s very rarely that I allow mindless police chases on budget Bravo TV to distract me from work, but I truly miss the days where I knew how to lounge around and do absolutely nothing.

That sounds like a step backwards. If you’re successful, why would you want to waste your energy on television while the opportunity of time passes you by? For me, it’s become an issue of retaining my health and limiting my insanity.

It’s very easy, as an affiliate marketer working from home, to get sucked in to working these grueling 16 hour days. And if like me, you enjoy what you do, the lure can be even harder to resist. During the earliest days, I built some kind of elitist dream where putting in those hours somehow made me more likely to be satisfied with my progress. It made me better than everybody else because I was somehow more committed or more in control of my destiny.

But if you don’t know when to stop, you’re not really in control, are you? You’re more of a prisoner than you ever were in your 9-5 when there was a clear beginning and end to your day.

One of the things I’ve discovered is that no matter how much money you earn, there will always be somebody earning more. If you fall in to the trap of pursuing this relentless grind, unable to dictate when your work day ends, it’s only going to be you that suffers. And I know personally because I’ve already suffered. My health has suffered, my moods have suffered. My ability to appreciate rare moments, simply festering on the couch with absolutely nothing to worry about – those have also suffered.

I went for a laser eye surgery consultation last week and somehow ended up referred to the hospital instead with skyrocketing eye pressure, pounding headaches and an overwhelming feeling of fatigue.

Ironically, I’ve always figured that my problems could be solved by money. My bad vision being one of them. I thought if I could afford to throw £5500 at surgery to correct my eyes, it would easily justify all those hours on the grind. But there are some things money can’t fix, so grinding for 16 hours straight isn’t always the answer. Even if affiliates are being systematically brainwashed to believe that’s the case.

Over the last week or so, I’ve been working to reverse the trend. I’ve been slowly lowering the number of hours I allow myself to spend in front of a computer screen and trying to work in productive surges. I took some advice from lenstrom on Twitter and have been trying to integrate these health measures in to my day.

The biggest challenge for me is to learn that whatever lands on my desk, whatever lands in my inbox…it doesn’t always have to be acted on now. I’ve already caught some fire and some contrasting opinions on the matter.

Just two days ago I posted on Twitter: “Tomorrow…tomorrow is the day where I get back on track.”

These words seemed to raise some strong opinions from various affiliates. Apparently it came across as a sign of weakness. Why wait til tomorrow? Why not act today?

Well, that’s the attitude I’m trying to overcome. It’s not always in my best interest to act today. Everybody has to have an off switch, and the ability to resist the temptation to grind or work hard at every waking hour. It’s just not healthy. That I’m only 22 years old, and feel like I have the mental wear and tear of a 42 year old…surely can’t be healthy.

Yet everywhere you look across the affiliate marketing landscape, grinding hard is the cool thing to do. I read a forum topic a few weeks ago with the title line “How much do you earn in a day?”

A guy, admittedly with his head somewhere up his own arse, had wandered in bragging about his $1000/days. He promptly received a bunch of criticism that he was small-time, a little fish in a big ocean. He had no right to be smug. It got me thinking though.

Would I rather be the “big time” affiliate who’s torturing himself to add the next zero on his pay cheque? Or simply the smug dude who’s perfectly content with his $365,000/year? As far as I’m concerned, that’s not small time. Look at the average annual earnings in the United States and it’s anything but small time.

This industry seems to judge affiliates by the flash cars, the fancy mansions and the number of Americans they’ve convinced to shed the pounds with acai. It all boils down to money, and yet money is only a gateway to opportunities. It’s not happiness in itself.

I’ve always preached the need to work hard and harder than most. But the importance of appreciating what I already have is only just dawning on me. The next time somebody tells me to get back to the grind at 2am, or to stop thinking about tomorrow rather than today, I’ll probably tell them with all due respect – to go fuck themselves.