A lack of effort and focus. This is the main quality of any failed affiliate marketer. The chances you are going to drop a couple ads you stole off a Facebook spy, take the exact images and ad copy and make $100 bucks, these days, is slim to zero. I try to teach my coaching students the best I can, giving them whole campaigns that are currently profitable, but after a few days of testing I always get this reply – “This seems like too much work. Is there any easier way to make money?”

The mindset that affiliate marketing is “easy” is a problem a lot of people are stuck with. Bloated affiliate network newsletters that provide very little details other than “This offer is generating huge EPCs for our affiliates across all traffic networks with an xyz style landing page” and lame informational products filled with misinformation, developed by those that don’t actually know jack$hit, don’t help with AM being perceived as “easy”. This is what I tell my clients when they ask that previous question:

“Sure, but it involves flipping burgers and dropping buckets of fries all day long.”

I imagine all of my affiliate marketing work as a large part of my business. Like almost any other business, it doesn’t just launch and blow up overnight. I’ve got research to do. I have to know what my target market wants and how they want it. I need to know how to deliver it before they get it. And then even when I know all that, I still need to test it and other similar variations to get in the black. There is no “easy” way to get around that. Even if someone hands a campaign to you on a silver platter, if you aren’t analyzing why it works and how you can improve it, you’ll always fail and end up back in square one.

You do need to focus, and put effort into building campaigns up, 1 at a time. Test 10 landing pages instead of 2. Test 100 images, rather than 10. Try 5 very different headlines, then test adjectives on your best performing ones. This extra effort and focus is what has made some of my clients $500 campaigns after 1 week of coaching, and I believe it is one of the redeeming qualities that has made me the marketer I am today.

This question was asked by Kang. If you’ve got an affiliate marketing question you want an answer to, ask here, join the forums, or get some 1-on-1 consulting!

If you’re anything like me, there aren’t enough hours in the year to get 90% of what you want to get finished done. You’re on your grind 24-7, looking for new traffic sources left and right, setting up new campaigns, and doing a lot of research. In there, you’ve got a lot of tedious tasks you shouldn’t be doing. If you are at the point where you’re making a couple hundred dollars a day, it’s time to start outsourcing.

Adding an outsourced employee to your business can be a big step, and to those of you without any business college or real world management experience, you’re gonna be left in a big puddle of mud on what you want them to do. To better optimize what we’re having our contractors do, we need to realize what tasks are most important to us. What couldn’t we live without and how can we have someone else, at least, assist in building out that task?

If you’re outsourcing, you’re probably outsourcing to third world countries. The key here is to give your new contractor a slow introduction into what you need done, and keep all their tasks specific. Overloading 1 person with too many different tasks can be detrimental and will put a strain on how much they can get done for you. Think about it. You wouldn’t hire one person in-house to do your keyword research, build landing pages, and do your accounting, would you? Market researcher, graphic designer, and accountant.. 3 different jobs should be done by 3 different employees/outsourcers.

So where should you start? Hiring 5 different outsourcers might not be a path you can take off the bat right now. Start with one and work your way up with the cash flow. When I hired my first 2 employees, one stuck with graphic design. That was an easy title to give and he did all my landing pages, banners, and would make Facebook ad images for me. My second employee got stuck with my other menial work, which was a lot of simple tasks that I just didn’t want to do.

The most important thing for them to do for me was campaign research. Doing campaign research doesn’t mean you are giving someone the key to your profit source. A typical sheet of research from my employees might look like a list of thousands of keywords or URLs broken down into smaller groups, images of ad banners from competitors, or recent news in business/marketing that could affect my business.  Knowing how to use that information is my own job.

So a quick summary:

1. Identify the most important daily tasks you need to do to make money.
2. Find a group of tasks that is simple enough for someone else to do, and don’t overload your outsourcer.
3. Get rid of menial, boring tasks that allow you to do more of your important things.
4. Hire more in-house/contractors when your budget allows it.

Today’s review goes out to Geosurf.com, a VPN and web proxy tool that allows you to access servers and IP’s a lot of different locations.  Geosurf has add-ons, toolbars, and web services for setting changing your proxies to better access your rankings and easier access to spying on your competitors from nearly any place in the world, or at least, any place you’re targeting.

Checking your rankings or ads by location right now requires a set of proxies and IP’s, changing settings, running VPN’s, and checking the settings for each market you want to target.  It’s frustrating, slow, and you feel the money slipping out of your hands as you pour more time into changing the settings all the time.  Geosurf’s toolbar and web apps cut that process out, and in a few clicks you’re surfing in Denver, a few more and you’re checking rankings for Portland, and a few you’re checking UK, Egypt, Finland, etc.  Anywhere you want to check is just a couple clicks away.  Pretty invaluable for researching any markets you want to launch some campaigns in.

Overall, it’s a great tool.  Small, easy to use, and fast, and you can hit nearly every major U.S. and international market easily.  They’ve done it by providing you with access to a network of servers around the world.  You press a few buttons on the web client or on your web browser, and it routes you through to a server in your target market, so you can see what you’re up against, and who you’re bidding against for traffic!

Geosurf doesn’t filter content or ads, either.  The page displays exactly what your target is seeing, just as if you were searching on their computer.  It makes it easy to check up on your ads to make sure they’re coming up unaltered in the correct demographics.  Geosurf even signs a contract with you binding them to keep your information, even search information, private, so there are never worries on that end, leaving you to snoop on your competitors undetected.

While anyone would probably benefit from it, if you’re working out of the U.S., like me, it can be particularly hard to find out what you’re up against.  Geosurf definitely makes work much easier.  No changing settings or running VPN’s to find out what’s going on in new geo-targets, just change my location to where I want to look and go.
What you’re getting is a service that takes all the work out of finding the correct proxies and IP’s for your target demographics, and condenses it into a small little toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer (No Chrome or Opera support, but luckily you can use Firefox).  No more wasted money tweaking campaigns every day hoping to see an improvement, or throwing away hours trying to figure out who you keep losing those bids to.  You can check right away and see exactly who you’re going to start sniping traffic from.

Check them out at Geosurf.com!  You can start out small with a free trial or one of the cheaper services, without all of the features, and change it up as you find yourself needing more.  Their great support answers any questions you have quickly, so you save even more time instead of waiting forever for a response.

The goal… the dream for a lot of us is to make money flow out of every traffic source we can find. For many of us, though, that means a lot of work. I remember working 15+ hour days. It was that damn rough in the beginning. But as you begin to progress, there are a lot of things you can do to take the work load off yourself, and still make the same amount of money or more than you have made before.

Goals

Probably the most simple thing everyone can do. How many times did you really sit down and do 8+ hours of work? How many of those hours were you stuck in “thinking about what to do next” mode? This used to happen to me a lot. Sure, I was working, but not physically working. I never knew what to do next, or if I had anything I really had to do.

These days, I make sure I write down my goals and to-do lists before I start working. Sometimes I do this better the night before I sleep, and I’ll add things when I wake up. I stick to those plans and blast through each task as I come to it. When I’m done, I’m done with work. No more thinking mode and no confusion on what I really need to do.

Outsourcing/Freelancer/Employees

I know you have repetitive tasks to do everyday. Check your stats, send out emails, build links, designs simple ads, code simple landing pages, so on and so forth. A lot of this doesn’t really need your creativity and isn’t always a major part of your day. Why do it yourself? Once you’ve got the cashflow, hire someone. A VA or a local college students. I know lots of college students that would kill for a part-time job where they could work from home for minimum wage + some. You can hire a Flipino or Indian for as little as $250 a month. If you can’t afford that, you’re in the wrong industry.

All my employees make back their salaries within the first 2 weeks I hire them.

Rewarding Yourself

Money is great… real great. But it is fruitless if you aren’t doing anything for yourself with it. As much as I’d like to be on the “grind” for 20 hours a day, rolling in hundreds of thousands a day, I know I could never actually do that. When you finish work, give yourself something. For me, its usually a nice dinner or going to the club and opening a bottle to celebrate a good full days work. For you, it might be a good walk with the dog, playing a new game or working on some other hobby of yours. It doesn’t need to be expensive or cost anything at all, but when you’ve got a goal to work for, you still need motivation. Let a reward be just that.

So how do you do less work and still get away with more money? Share your tips in the comments below!

Still struggling to make your buck work for you? You might want to consider 1-on-1 coaching with me. Click Here!

If you’re anything close to an affiliate marketer like me, you’re probably a bit on the lazy side. I know there are go-getters out there that can do nothing but work, work, work, and shuffle out 50 new campaigns a day. I, unfortunately, will never be one of those people. A.A.D.D. – Affiliate’s Attention Deficit Disorder is what it’s known as, I think. Only kidding, of course, but lack of motivation and laziness are two problems I face on a daily basis. So what do I do? I find ways to kill the time, productively.

Productive time killing, you ask? Well it’s a simple idea, really. You take the things you normally do, and you turn them into things that, even if they don’t provide the full benefit of a Ryan Eagle-hustle (20 hours of work p/day), give you more benefit than they would any other way. It’s hard to put this concept in to words, so what I’m going to do is give you a list of examples of things I’ve taken and turned into my own “more productive activities.”

I’m a huge gamer. I’m constantly playing the dumbest flash games, sniping your head off in Battlefield, or flying my internet spaceships (internet spaceships iz serious business) in Eve Online. There isn’t a lot of stuff I can do to keep myself from playing besides wipe my whole Raptor and SSD hard drives that are full of them, and I just can’t bring myself to do that. So what I’ve done is reached out into the deepest depths of Internet space (ex. Wickedfire) and I’ve started playing with more like minded people. This allows me to do several things at once – build a business relationship at a friendly and competitive level, keep myself pumped up and motivated, and every once and a while, we’ll talk about business in game lobbies or during down time.

Facebook and instant messaging are another huge time waster. If you’re on my friends list, you probably get 100 add requests a day from the Thai girls on there. Sorry, but as you can see, that used to kill my time a year or so back. I’ve since cut myself off from Facebook as much as possible, and use it only to connect with business people and other Internet marketers. Even if its just a friendly chat, I try to keep it with people that know what I do and have they’re own experience with it. Sometimes we’ll cover business tips, but either way, it helps build a relationship, that in the future could hold some huge value for myself.

Another thing I’m horrible with is watching movies. Every night seems like movie night for myself. Cutting myself off was hard, so what I’ve focused on is watching more business related material and less pop culture trash. These can include webinars, seminars, coaching sessions, presentations, whatever really, all related to internet and affiliate marketing, self-help, pick-up (great for confidence and general conversation, really), investing, stocks, SEO, management, or other business-related material. It’s missing some of the drama and action that you might be used to, but it is still something to watch when you’ve got time to kill.

General browsing of the iterwebs, I know, gets us all. A smart marketer blocks crap-sites that they try to access way too much. However, if you’re me, you buy a domain, read a piece or watch a video, then basically reblog it. It goes back to working for a bit, but you never know when one of your sites might actually get picked up and starts making you real money. It’s happened to me before, and have since started doing this a lot more often.

So do any of my readers have any bad habits that they turned into productive activities?

A great affiliate marketer shouldn’t have to force himself to work. Work should come natural to him, normally from a good amount of drive, effort and want to make things happen. You are working, pretty much, without consequences of someone working at an office below a boss. If he doesn’t work, he gets fired. Where as if you don’t work, you miss an opportunity to make money, but you can still go back and catch up on work tomorrow. But what if you say the same thing tomorrow? And the next day and the next? Being lazy is one of the largest hazards of being a stay-at-home business owner.

So how can you avoid being lazy? I’ve got a few tips to give to you.

Goals

Give yourself a set of goals you plan to achieve throughout the day. Make this one of your first activities of the day to make sure it gets done. Some nights I sleep next to a notebook and a pen so I can wake up and jot down any good ideas I may have dreamed about and want to test in the morning.

To make sure you carry through with your daily goals, write down a reward for completing all tasks. Rewards for myself include going out to the club later that night, enjoying a nice Wagyu steak dinner, buying myself something new, playing a game, or something else simple like that. Just make sure you’ll enjoy and fight for the reward as the end of your work day nears. If you don’t reach your goal, you don’t get your reward and you continue working.

Employees

Having employees has made my life 100 times more simple than it was before. They’ll carry out a lot of the tasks I’m too lazy to do, or things I just don’t know how to do. However, there is a huge pitfall for me and that is with relying on my employees to do all my work. Some days they’d come to the office while they work and I play video games. With my new office setup in the house I’ll move in to soon, I’ll make sure everyone can see everyone else. This will ensure that, while I still might not get any consequences if they see me playing a game, it certainly might make me look like a bad boss.

Thinking Back

Another good exercise to do is to think back at what you were before your own business. Were you miserable at your old 9-5 job? Did you live in a tiny apartment and drive a crappy car? Did you have less time to do the things you really wanted to do? I think back a lot and it helps drive me to work further to avoid sinking back to that. I love where I am at now and want to keep pushing higher. It’s a huge motivator for myself.

So how do you keep yourself from being a lazy Internet marketer? Leave your comments below!

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I’m not exactly sure how many days over a month it has been, but I’ve been sober for longer than a month now. At first, I hadn’t planned to quit drinking. I just caught the flu and was sticking to water and juices, but as the illness went away, so did my yearning to drink. I still go out to the clubs just as much as I used to (a few times a week), its just now I can actually converse with people and understand what I’m saying, I feel a lot more healthy, I’m losing a lot of fat, I sleep longer and better at night, and I still have just the same amount of fun as I did when I was drunk without the horrible consequences.

On top of this, I’m able to consciously pick who I’ll converse with, rather than picking the closest decent looking girl to start up a conversation, I’ll look for the guy with the most money and try and charm my way into starting a business relationship with him (or her). It’s opened some serious doors, with talks of 6 and 7-figure deals currently in progress for me. These connections also get me through the door with attractive and wealthy women, so it’s not always just business on my mind.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with limiting yourself, and I certainly know I won’t be able to hold out forever, but I’ll save any alcohol for business deals where the cheapest thing we’re drinking is more like how much I’d spend after going to the club 10 days in a row.

You don’t have to jump out on a limb and follow suit here, but for me it’s been a great decision and one I don’t regret. I feel better, my business is growing faster than I could have expected due to it, and I still have a ton of fun!

For those ready for next week’s webinar, you can sign up here! It’s tentatively scheduled for 12 – 1 PM CDT (Central US Time), although that is subject to change. I’ll be giving away 3 FREE forum accounts good for the life of the forums, a couple downloads and we should have some content ready to talk to everyone about as well! The topic will most likely cover Facebook Advertising.

Ah the fun and joys of affiliate marketing. They only get better when you add some staff to your team. A majority of your grunt work disappears, and you’ll soon start seeing valuable returns on the time you’ve freed up. There are several things you can have your employees do. These are just some of them.

Designing

This one is a no-brainer and pretty much a necessity for anyone doing anything on the internet. A Photoshop, HTML, CSS, and a PHP know-it-all is a wonderful addition to any affiliate marketing team. I’d be stuck in the deep end of the pool without mine. He’s much more efficient and cost effective than outsourcing stuff for $50 – 100 a lander.

Lead Generation

I just hired a new guy almost specifically for this task. You might have noticed someone posting on your blogs, or filling up some forums in what looked to be someone using my name. Sorry to say, but that was probably my employee. This used to be my task, and I could waste hours a day doing it. I can’t blame him, that he can’t come off sounding exactly like me, but it’s brought in a wonderful new amount of clients, forum members, and store consumers. The freed up time allows me to manage and launch more campaigns, and work on other projects outside of affiliate marketing.

I think I might have to hire ProfitAddiction for this job, though.

Research

I can set my employees out to find new targets for PPV, use tools to get general demographics and come up with the best demo mix for my campaigns pre-launch, and go hunting for competitor works. They’re also great for brainstorming other tasks and coming up with blog post ideas.

Other Boring Tasks

Affiliate marketing has a lot of boring and repetitive tasks we have to go through. Stick it to the employees. Uploading files, sifting through bad PPV targets, collecting sub-id reports, customer service, and all sorts of other things can be left to employees.

What do you use your employees for? Comment below, or join the private affiliate marketing forums for more in-depth talk about employee management.

Someone in the private forums requested I post about having employees, so I’ll write a series of posts about my experience with my employees.

I want to go over a list of pros and cons about having employees, so let’s not waste time and just get to it!

Pros

• Getting Tasks Done – You pay your employees to get shit done. They know the job when you sign them on (if you’re a good manager), and even if its the most boring crap you could think to make a job for, if they don’t do it, you just pay someone else to do it! You can also hire people to do things you don’t know how to do. Keep yourself doing the thinking, give tasks you don’t want to do, don’t have enough time for, or can’t do it yourself to your employees.
• Teamwork – Affiliate marketing can be a lonely job, sometimes. I did it alone for about 2 years before I hired my first employee to work in my office. Let’s just say my social skills went down the crapper. They were never that good (if you met me at ASW, you might agree. I’m pretty shy). With a couple employees on my team now, we can chat a bit, talk about whats going down in BKK and just have someone to talk to.
• Extra Thinking – When you give your employees time to think about what they are doing, they can get pretty creative and give you some help with your own goals. The new guy I hired came from a more offline marketing background, and he has some great ideas to expand my business online, and eventually take it offline.
• Ability to work at home – Since most of our work is done on PCs and the Internet, if you are sick or just feeling like you need a personal day, you can let your employees work from home. Last Friday, I did this myself to keep some stress off me when I launched the forums.

Cons

• To Close For Comfort – Your employees have a chance to get very close, sometimes too close to the core of your business. It’s important you make them aware of what they are doing and how your business works. It is your job, though, to make sure they don’t know so much that they steal all your shit and make a business with your business. If you need to, hire someone you know that wants a job, not lead their own business. There are people out there that don’t want the risk of running there own business. I pay my employees a commission on top of their salary, and that’s my incentive to keep them in their jobs, and not stealing my stats (and oh yeah, I don’t let them touch my stats or go into my affiliate networks).

  Also, having them sign non-competes and non-disclosure agreements is key!

• Sick days/not showing up/etc – It sucks when your employees don’t show up when you really need something done. It means you have to find someone else to do it, and probably pay a contractor more, and they aren’t next to you so you can take them through the steps to get it done right. Of course, you can probably just keep your employee working at home. If they don’t just show them the back of your hand against their face! (JK, yo)
• Buddy Buddy – Because we don’t have traditional jobs where we run a big, traditional office style job, things can get a bit comfy. Your employees become friends, you go party together, and share some good times. They might start slacking a bit on their job. You’ve got to keep your employees in check. I run a lax office out of my condo, but I can’t stand it if someone thinks they can just slack on a job I give them during office hours. Just gotta let them know who’s boss, remind them what they’re working hours are, and that they can’t undermine you just because you are friends.

Got any pros or cons with your employees? Let them be known in the comments below or the forums!

It’s time to get some campaigns rolling and make that money rain. But wait! Did you see that cute video with the puppy dogs and the kittens? How about the season finale of Lost? Oh yeah, you also have that quest scheduled with your guild in WoW coming up later, too. Soon enough, you’ll be so distracted you won’t even be thinking about that money. This post is all about staying productive when other, more fun distractions can pull you away from that money game.

1. Get LeechBlock for Firefox. I wouldn’t recommend Firefox for the piece of ass it’s become in the last few months (my install crashes a few times per hour) if it weren’t for the full choice of plug-ins and addons it has. Leechblock is a cool plugin that keeps you off websites that take up time. Block every video website you frequent. You don’t need the news or Twitter either. Stop wasting your times of those game sites and forums, and block those, too.

2. Really want to know how they finished off Lost? Watching the whole season takes half a day or so. You could opt for that in one day, spread it over multiple days, or if you really need to start pounding out projects and find the urge to watch to much, do yourself a favor: Spoil it. Find a plot analysis, read it, and be over with it. It sucks, but you just saved yourself 12 hours by reading for 15 minutes rather than finding out the long way.

3. Get 2 computers. One will be strictly for work. No games, all those bad sites blocked 100% of the time, only use business email addresses and IM accounts on this PC with all the software you’ll need for you landing pages, software, servers and all that other fun affiliate stuff. Keep this one in your office. You can use your other pc in a seperate location for personal use, but still use leechblock to make sure you aren’t accessing those personal sites when you should be working.

4. If all else fails, back up the notebook and hit the road. Sometimes a walk to the local coffee shop is invigorating and inspiring, so it will get my ass in to working gear much sooner.