Productivity Boosters | Finch Sells

How To Make The Most of Your Least Productive Time

Feb 03 2012

Everybody talks about mastering the art of staying productive. Not many people willingly accept that such efforts are futile. It’s impossible to stay productive 100% of the time, and this will never change.

Something that I believe to be just as important, if not more so, is what we make of our least productive time.

We all have the capacity to be extremely productive for some part of the day. Even the world’s grandest underachievers. But I believe that to be successful running your own business, to steal a cricket metaphor, your tail has to wag. You have to find a way to maximise what you achieve when you’re not playing very well. This is easier said than done.

Build Momentum with Small Actions

There are days where I find myself staring banally at the screen, not a single pixel tweaking my imagination out of the gutter.

These slumps usually arrive in the mid-afternoon, and if I’m not careful, they’ll ruin the rest of the day. When I find myself drifting badly, I like to set a menial task; something requiring little brainpower that I can tick off within minutes to elicit the tiniest flame of achievement. It could be replying to an email, or cleaning my desktop, or formatting the chapter headings in my latest round of Premium Posts.

The objective of these menial tasks is not to make giant strides on my biggest projects, but simply to regain momentum. A tiny achievement leads to a slightly bigger one. I often find that no matter how much I’m dreading a task, by diving in headfirst and staying focused on it for 5 minutes I can build enough momentum to see it through to the conclusion.

I hate leaving what I’ve started. And that’s a blessing for which I’m eternally grateful.

Forget the scale of the tasks on your to-do list. Break them down by negotiating the first 5 minutes. It’s amazing what a difference small steps can make.

Battle Lack of Direction by Committing Early

Every large project has the potential to drag on while you battle ‘downtime’ and the precarious middle stages. I rarely have trouble committing my ideas to a plan of action, and I’m wise enough to know that immediate action is required to kickstart those plans. I also find it easy to put the finishing touches on my shiny new works.

Where I suffer, and I’m sure I’m not alone, is in the middle stages. Internet Marketers often have a gajillion projects on the mind, including those that they haven’t even started. The most vulnerable phase of any project is the vast chasm between laying the foundations and casting the finishing touches.

How many WordPress installations do you have with page structures in place, finished designs, a sprinkling of content but no sign of activity since 2009?

Some people complete their websites, launch proudly and then erase them from memory. Why? Because they don’t realise that finishing a website is just the beginning. The hard middle part is marketing it, gaining traction and connecting your brand to people who give a shit. Or maybe they do recognise this and have simply given up. It is, after all, the most challenging aspect of any web project.

Maintaining direction while a project drags on is tough.

Being an Internet Marketer who frequently works on websites that are somewhat disconnected from his own passions, I like to take on business partners – passionate individuals who love the concept more than myself. This acts as a driving force. The partner has the determination to maintain the original vision, thus preventing me from abandoning ship.

Even with a partner onboard, every large project must be broken in to smaller goals and milestones. Momentum is the catalyst for nearly everything I do. I like to launch concepts as soon as possible.

When I’m launching my own products, I will get the sales letter written and the website marketed before I even finish the product. Users roam the site, click to buy, but instead of being allowed to pay, they’re told the product is temporarily sold out. In my stats, I see a potential sale. This triggers a surge of motivation as I rush to complete what I started. It’s also an excellent method for measuring demand without committing to the whole shabang.

Note: This applies to SEO, especially. Long gone are the days where I attempt to rank for keywords without running an initial PPC campaign to gauge whether the traffic converts.

Beat Writer’s Block by Mastering Second Gear

Writers live and die by the amount of time they manage to spend in The Zone.

The Zone is a productive state where flow, style and inspiration come together in harmony to produce fireworks on the page. When a writer is locked in to his Zone, it all seems so easy; both to himself, and to his readers. The problem, of course, is getting there.

When you create your to do list the night before, it’s simply not realistic to set tasks under the assumption that you’ll be in The Zone all day. What every writer has to have in his artillery is a second gear. He has to be able to make the most of his least productive time.

For me, in blogging terms, that means throwing ideas, quips and phrases in a draft. It doesn’t matter if the wording is horrible, or if the ideas are disjointed. Perfectionists will spend hours dilly-dallying over the slightest details only to find that by the end of the day, they’ve barely scribbled 500 words.

It’s important to understand that ideas do not exist in any other place but your head. Until you’ve taken the action to commit them to paper, or a WordPress draft, they will lapse in and out of memory, eventually ceasing to exist. For a writer who can only produce while he’s in The Zone, failing to take action on those brief moments of inspiration is a death toll to his output.

Every great writer needs a second gear. He must be able to write without worrying that his drafts are a damning indication of the completed work.

Use second gear to record ideas, get phrases on paper, collect together any irony that could be tied in to your posts as humour. You can’t write great material in second gear, but you can certainly invest the time wisely. When you snap in to The Zone, you’ll demolish the material you prepared earlier, like a jacked up Blue Peter presenter on steroids.

Being Bored is Not An Option

One of the reasons I upgraded from my stack of books to a Kindle was so that I could carry an immense wealth of reading in my coat pocket. I live in London, where trains and buses can suck hours out of the day. If I were to commute in to the city centre, it would take 50 minutes each way. That’s 100 minutes of sitting on a train, avoiding the gaze of strangers, and generally being an unsociable southern urchin.

Instead of wasting that time reading the tube map, or worse – the Evening Standard – I take out the trusty Kindle and plunge in to my 100 pages a day. It’s a simple matter of using every minute in the day to your advantage.

The people who complain about having no time in the day are the very same people who sit in silence, staring morosely at their reflections in the train window. Well no shit, Sherlock. They probably come home to watch X-Factor, too.

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Will You Really Earn More Money In 2012?

Jan 03 2012

One of the most predictable New Year’s Resolutions for an Affiliate Marketer goes like this:

“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.

How To Avoid Affiliate Marketing’s Black Hole Days

Dec 06 2011

How many affiliates have dared to count the minutes wasted in an average day? We’ve all experienced the hours spent waiting on ad approvals, offer activations, replies from overloaded account managers and the tedious matter of data accumulation.

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.