Productivity Boosters | Finch Sells

Mastering The Art Of Getting Shit Done

Mar 17 2010

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.

Are You Dedicated Or Addicted To Your Job?

Jan 08 2010

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

Dec 09 2009

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.