Posts Tagged ‘Affiliate Time Management’

Mastering The Art Of Getting Shit Done

The summer is coming in London Town. And that spells major trouble for my work productivity levels should I decide that airing my balls to some rays is time well spent.

One of the questions I get asked by my non-affiliate friends is how I manage to not waste my life playing videogames and watching TV. It would be very easy to hit cruise control and let business take care of business while I watch four back to back seasons of Prison Break. Obviously I’m not talking from experience. Anybody who has enough time to watch 3418 minutes of espionage during working hours should probably stop blogging about productivity tips.

It would be rude not to finish what I started so fuck you.

I’ve been experimenting with various time management techniques, Firefox extensions, and god knows what else in my pursuit of a productive working day.

One of the most talked about productivity tips is simply to make a to-do list.

Now, I’m not knocking anybody who manages to stay on top of business with a simple notepad. In fact, I envy you. But personally speaking, if I’m having a lazy day, I’ll just give myself less to do on my to-do list. Which defeats the purpose of making a list altogether.

There will be some guys and girls out there who shake their heads in disgust.

“Productivity tools? Do you need Antony Robbins to inspire you to brush your teeth too? Just get it done and stop fart arsing around, you emo blogging prick”.

Yes, some people are capable of sitting at a desk, plowing through their tasks and not so much as batting an eyelid at a fresh new post on FinchSells.com. Others, thank God, are easily distracted.

I was sitting in a library musing through various self-help books the other week (don’t ask). I stumbled across a method in a book called Stress Proof Your Life, which is a really dull read except for this one particular method. So don’t go canvasing Amazon for a new bedtime story just yet.

It basically outlined the power of momentum in your working day. I’m sure many affiliate marketers are in the same boat when I say that momentum is probably the deciding factor in how much we get done on any given day.

I find it very easy to sit at my desk and tear through hours and hours of work. But only if I have the momentum where I feel like I’m getting somewhere. Otherwise I’ll bitch and moan and find the most fiendish of ways to waste my own time until somebody invites me to a pub where I can pretend that I’ve been at it hammer and tongs all day over a pint of the good stuff.

Momentum is everything.

If you set yourself a simple to-do list, it becomes very easy to switch off after you’ve completed a task. How often have you found yourself scratching your head at 5pm having spent the morning whacking off and telling yourself that it’s all okay because you don’t have plans tonight and those tasks will get done eventually?

I’ve started breaking down my tasks in to three different categories:

6 x 10 minute tasks
6 x 20 minute tasks
6 x 30 minute tasks

The idea is that you set a recurring timer to run through the time allocations with no gap in between. For example, the first hour of my morning may look like this:

10 minutes – Reply to emails from night before.
10 minutes – Analyze stats for yesterday’s campaigns.
10 minutes – Update PPC ad groups with new A-B split test.
10 minutes – Update Facebook campaigns with fresh images.
10 minutes – Add another 100 test URLs for PPV campaign.
10 minutes – Set and forget my automated scripts for the day.

These are all tasks that I could quite easily stretch to take an hour out of my day each if I was working from a simple to-do list with no time constraint. By setting the recurring ten minute alarm, you’re concentrating on one task for a very short window. It encourages you to keep moving, quit Twittering and start building the all important momentum that gets shit done.

After all my ten minute chores are done, I go straight in to the next set of activities. It might read like this:

20 minutes – Research demographics for Offer X. Decide on test groups.
20 minutes – Find and buy suitable imagery for the landing page.
20 minutes – Plan out important points to be conveyed in landing page copy.
20 minutes – Set up hosting, tracking & domain.
20 minutes – Sort out laundry, put on some clothes and apologize to the neighbours.
20 minutes – Carry out keyword research and assess prices across different platforms.

Why would I distract myself with laundry when I’m in the middle of setting up a campaign? It may sound like a really bad idea, but as long as you stick religiously to the timings, you begin to develop the momentum where it doesn’t matter what you need to do – you just do it. And that is the ultimate mindset you’re looking to achieve. To be able to get the ugly crap done.

I leave myself an hour at the end of the day to deal with the inevitable bullshit that arises while I work. Dropped offers, phone calls, email correspondence…the necessities of running a business that can be ballbreakingly annoying if you allow them to dictate your working day.

Everybody has their own way of staying productive. Some people are just natural troopers who’ll rip up the earth to get their latest project online. If that’s you, congratulations, come back when I have something worth reading.

An excellent tool I was pointed towards not too long ago is Leechblock. This is a Firefox Extension that you can set and forget in your browser. It will display an ugly red “THIS SITE IS BLOCKED” message when you try to access your usual time wasting sites. Twitter, Facebook, Statcounter…whatever you find yourself clicking back to, get it blocked and get on with your work.

Staying productive is one of the biggest challenges I’ve faced since becoming a full-time affiliate. Dragging myself out of bed when the body says no, fighting the urge to slack off over a bacon sarnie when I’ve drunk too much the night before. It’s not easy and it requires self-discipline. I can’t remember who I’m stealing this from but it’s the gospel truth: Procrastination is masturbation…you’re only ever fucking yourself.

It doesn’t really matter if there’s a method to your madness. Being static as an affiliate is the ultimate recipe for disaster. Do what you have to do and then reward yourself when it’s done. Even if the reward lasts 3418 minutes.

EDIT: Most people who’ve added me on AIM are pretty much aware that I don’t actually use AIM unless it’s a full moon or something. I’ve created a Formspring account for people to ask their questions somewhere I can answer them in my own time. And of course, for the odd smart arse to post something witty. You can post questions here: http://www.formspring.me/FinchSells. If it’s a question that you don’t want other people reading, forward it to my email and I will reply on a rainy day.

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.