The public image of affiliate marketing which attracts people in droves is the vision of a working week of just a few hours, great financial rewards, and an amazing life filled with vast amounts of leisure and general adventuring.

Is it accurate?? Well for some. But for many people it’s a case of “Oh well, 2 out of 3 aint bad eh?? I didn’t like short working weeks and holidays anyway!”

Arrghhh! I didn't sign up for this!!

Affiliate Marketing is Like A Venus Fly Trap

The rewards can come at a price, and the work can ensnare you in a sticky world of changing goalposts that’s hard to escape.

This year I achieved the monthly income I set out 3 years ago as “the absolute pinnacle” of my financial aims. I decided that when I finally got to that level I’d be happy and relaxed about my finances at last. Am I? Of course not. I’ve trebled the target. I’ll be happy and relaxed once I’ve reached that in two years time, won’t I?? Ummm….

So What Creates The Venus Affiliate Trap?

The earnings potential for any individual is open ended, and we are surrounded by tales of super affiliates earning riches beyond their wildest dreams. This means it is easy for affiliates to suffer from feelings of inadequacy about how much they are earning  and also to constantly push themselves on ever harder to earn more.It doesn’t matter what the Ten Commandments say – it’s human nature to covet your neighbour’s Ox and in affiliate marketing there are some might damned fine oxes for the purpose of coveting.

The side effect of this is ever increasing working hours meaning the self employed affiliate can easily work twice as hard as they did for someone else and will most likely be half as happy.  Now that is arse about face logic but I know more than a few people will read this and feel a little stab of self-recognition.

Don’t End Up Being A Slave To The Affiliate Wage

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with working hard to earn more. However as with all things a little balance is needed.  A few things that might help…

• Make a contract with yourself. Agree some working hours with yourself and stick to them. You’ll probably find you get more done when presented with a finite amount of time to cram those important tasks into.
• Define “happiness” – sit yourself down, work out what you’d be happy with in terms of your income, what you think you need to do to get there and if it’s achieveable within the scope of the hours you want to work. If it’s not, under no circumstances should you compromise your contract. You’ll have to find another way to achieve your aims either through outsourcing or nutting out some way to get the tasks that take up most of your time done efficiently.
• Plan leisure – If you’re earning any money at all from affiliate marketing make sure you spend some of it on enjoying yourself. It could be a Friday night down the pub with your mates, a day out, or a luxurious holiday. Whatever it is, make regular time for yourself to benefit from the money you earn. This will help you keep a balance between the numbers in your bank account and what they can actually do for you in the real world. There’s no point in being mega rich and trapped in your office 18 hours a day.
• Investigate your attitudes to money – I think if you want to make money for yourself  it’s important to work out how you feel about it. I recently read Secrets of The Millionaire Mind by T. Harv Eker and there was some very illuminating things in there about how your attitudes to money can affect your ability to successfully earn it, and keep hold of it.

In my own special little case, I think I need to follow a bit of my own advice. I don’t mind revising my targets upwards, purely because I have found a method that works within my margins which will ensure additional profits won’t mean additional working hours. In fact, I’m about to take 4 months off and will be working only 2.5 days a week when we return.

However I think there’s a distinct possibility that unless I put a bit of a cap on my ambitions I’ll be in the unique situation of earning great money, having bags of leisure time, and STILL not being happy because of my need to always drive things onwards and upwards.

Clearly time to write a bullet pointed list concerning myself rather than worrying about all you guys!

This post is from: Kirsty's Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK

Are You Stuck In The Venus Affiliate Trap?

Not many people have the discipline to work on their own. If you haven’t yet had the freedom of cracking open Facebook without looking over your shoulder, maybe it’s time you had the sensation of wanting to slap yourself every time you did.

To waste your own time is unforgivable. It’s arguably the cardinal sin of any self respecting entrepreneur. Procrastination is like masturbation, you’re only ever screwing yourself. I was taught that back in school. Okay, maybe not in such a colourful tone. But didn’t you just hate it when teachers nagged “if you don’t give 100%, the only person who suffers is yourself”. I’d grumble and kick my feet under the table. Well now in 2010…burden yourself with a business, take one look at the economy, and suddenly those slaps across the wrist seem like sensible lessons in life.

For me, the vital ingredient to a productive working day is momentum. Affiliate marketers survive and thrive by the virtue of momentum. Building steam and seeing projects through to the bitter end is paramount to success. How do you know if you suck at finding momentum? Well, take one look at your domain portfolio. Are you repping enough abandoned URLs to fill a graveyard with ideas that sounded good at the time?

Without momentum, it becomes very difficult to build long term assets in this industry. Many affiliates love pushing CPA offers. And they enjoy a lot of success. But I think it can be partially attributed to the fact that you can have a successful CPA campaign up and running in hours. You’re not building Rome in your bare feet. The same attitude and faltering attention span is a severe hindrance when it comes to working on sites and projects that demand time and perseverance to come together.

To develop long term assets, we need to train ourselves to see the bigger picture. To look beyond morning stats, weekly ROI, and actually stick with what we know we should be doing. Even when the results aren’t immediately clear. I’ve found that as a CPA marketer who thrives in achieving short term goals, maintaining the momentum and breaking down larger projects in to achievable milestones is the only way forward.

It’s nice for me to throw philosophy out there, but dealing with the reality is a different beast altogether. It’s a lot easier for me to pen a condescending blog post than it is for you to actually get your shit together and change the way you work. So what can we do to build momentum? How can you take yourself closer to the finishing line with your projects?

I don’t think it’s any coincidence that my own productivity levels improved dramatically when I slammed the axe through half my working day. I was one of those guys who spent every hour of sunlight at my desk. I’d slump there, trawling around the Internet, torn between working and scratching my balls for comfort. When I realized that time spent at my desk rarely reflected time spent putting in an actual shift, I changed my ways.

Working excessively long hours is the hardship that you wouldn’t embrace if you were doing it for anybody else, so why be such a bitch to yourself? Every night, I set myself a to-do list for the following day. It’s divided in to three sections.

1. Short term work – Maintaining campaigns, optimizing my creatives, split testing landing pages. You get the drill.

2. Long term work – Developing actual assets, planning wider web projects and working on the shit that would still feed my imaginary cat if the CPA business died tomorrow.

3. New business – Opportunity is everywhere in affiliate marketing. If you’re not dedicating just ten minutes of your day to exploring new horizons, opportunity has already passed you by. I guarantee it. Some other affiliate cowboy is laughing at you as he rides tomorrow’s gravy train all the way to the bank.

Having a to-do list is essential. You already knew this. But being realistic with what you expect to achieve is just as important.

A technique I discussed on my blog not too long ago highlighted the positives of breaking down those tasks in to smaller timed segments. I like to use this strategy. It helps to build the all important momentum that enables me to feel like I’ve achieved something by the time my dinner is in the oven.

So here’s how the first hour of my day might look:

10 minutes – View performance of campaigns, make minor adjustments.
10 minutes – Check emails, reply to anything urgent, star the rest.
10 minutes – Introduce new split tests for my Facebook campaigns.
10 minutes – Devise some new ad texts for my PPC campaigns.
10 minutes – Clear the shit from my desk, grab the post, chuck in some laundry.
10 minutes – Brainstorm a list of articles to be outsourced for one of my sites.

So you’re probably thinking, that’s one hell of a scattergun approach. How can you expect to build momentum when you’re jumping from one task to the next? I find that it works, simply because I’m never getting bogged down. I can hear the clock ticking and I’m in a hurry to achieve my objective before the ten minutes are up. But it only works if you force yourself to move on when the time is up. Even if your undies are half hanging out of the tumble dryer when that moment strikes.

After the first hour, I’ve built up enough momentum to break the early morning brain freeze. You know that feeling? You wake up, shuffle out of bed and plump yourself at your desk. You vow that you’re going to have a good day…if only you knew where to start. Sound familiar? When I follow this technique, I feel like I’m achieving something. No matter how small. It helps me to dive in to the bigger tasks. So I’ll start to ramp up the workload.

20 minutes – Research hot new product X, analyze my competitors and brainstorm ideas.
20 minutes – Work on content to feed out to my email lists.
20 minutes – Build a landing page to split test in to one of my campaigns.
20 minutes – Sign up at a new traffic source, get in touch with rep.
20 minutes – Add a couple of new products to my turnkey site, get down with the SEO.
20 minutes – Throw down some bullet points and an intro for a blog post.

I’m making up these tasks on the fly here. They don’t actually represent my working day. But you can see the idea. That’s another two hours where I’m constantly jumping between tasks that I could probably stretch out for hours at a time if I didn’t discipline myself with a time constraint.

The third and final part of my day is divided in to six 30 minute bursts. That gives me a six hour working day. It doesn’t sound like a lot but the momentum of constantly ticking off tasks keeps me motivated to the very end.

You can give 16 hours a day to affiliate marketing, but guess what? Affiliate marketing doesn’t owe you shit in return. If you’re not working efficiently, well, you might as well be whacking out articles for $5 per piece.

By having the freedom to work from home, we have to sacrifice the occasional boot up our arses that would normally keep us in line. Some marketers are born with the ability to sit down and work like troopers until the inbox is empty and the light outside has faded. Personally, I still need that boot up my arse. So I still rely on techniques like this to keep me pushing forward.

This post was contributed by Finch of FinchSells.com – when I asked him for a quick bio to put on here he suggested “Hi, this is Finch, affiliate marketer and blogger. Jesus, doesn’t he ramble a lot?”

I think I like Finch’s style

This post is from: Kirsty's Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK

How An Affiliate Marketer Deals With 9am – Guest Post

Affiliate marketing is all about change and innovation – that’s what’s fun about it. If you enjoy stability and stultifying boredom – get a job watching grass grow, cos this simply ain’t for you bucko!

Sometimes a good pruning results in amazing growth!

An Affiliate Business Is Like An Apple Tree

It gets pruned every now and again, but patient affiliate gardeners will be rewarded with greatly enhanced crops. Each and every time any changes outwith my control have impacted my business it’s come back bigger, better, and stronger than before.

Why? Because I’ve always viewed change as an opportunity for my business – not a threat.  I just get the old affiliate gardening overalls out, and look at what I need to do to satisfy Google, or find a new revenue stream. Like most hard gardening, the actual mechanics and sheer volume of work required is not fun at all – but the end result is always well worth it.

How My Business Has Been Pruned In The Past

• At the end of September 2003 I set off on my first ever affiliate marketing funded adventure with a year long trip to Australia.  November 15th 2003? Florida Update. For those of you who’ve never heard of it, here’s a description of what happened.  In a nutshell, Google blew the entire methodology I was relying upon to pay for all my antipodean adventuring right out of the water – all the rules changed. My mass produced spammy pages no longer cut the mustard, so I moved on to be heavily reliant upon direct to merchant PPC.
• Adwords Display URL Rule Changes – this was so long ago I can’t even remember when it happened!  Aaaaages ago, Google allowed multiple repetitions of the same display URL in their results. Google decided (correctly) that this gave a poor user experience.  Unsurprisingly several merchants banned affiliates from using their display URL to keep them from driving their in house marketing costs up. This happened fairly slowly but it meant that I repeatedly went out and found new merchants to work with in this way only to have them close off use of the display URL after a while. It was very difficult to get ahead. To cope with this I started to build my own landing sites using merchant’s feeds.
• The Death of Brand Name Bidding. At one stage I was heavily reliant on this income stream (ahhh…. back in the day!). Some programme terms were changed, and – shazam!! No more easy money.
• Adwords Quality Score Rules Are Changed (Announced February 14th 2007. I love you too guys!!)  Just as I was finally getting to grips with my feed type landing sites and Adwords, the goalposts were moved again.  Adwords put the bite on thin affiliate sites and, yep you guessed it all my lovely campaigns got zapped again. This time I took a good few months to work out what sort of content Adwords would want from my sites whilst cheekily “churning and burning” domains to buy me time.
• Mayday Update – unaffected. Finally I’d gotten ahead of the Google game!

Far From Being A Tale of Affiliate Disaster…

Throughout all of the above my business still grew nicely.  I must confess though, it’s only since 2007 when I ventured properly into creating my own genuinely useful websites packed with unique content that I’ve seen true income stability and excellent growth. I’ve created a few really good sites with healthy organic traffic.

Dealing with the changes above combined with the usual programme closures, network hassles, and commission reductions has always made me consider my setup and look at ways to strengthen my position and income. I not only enjoyed dealing with them (in a grim sort of way!) but I’m glad they happened.

It’s All Part of The Job Description

An affiliate can and should expect all manner of change and adversity to be thrown at their progress. I hate the success stories that seem to crop up all over the place where a super affiliate charts their meteoric rise into fabulous wealth and totally fails to mention what a complete and utter shit fight it can feel like at times.

This is not an easy job, but it is an interesting one. Even when things are going boobies up I’m constantly learning, growing and loving my job. If you’re just starting out and think you could deal with this – welcome to the club. If you’ve been in the game for a while – my sincere respects to you. If you’re an account manager or other industry bod who has to deal with affiliates and moans about them being a bunch of grumpy buggers – wouldn’t you be too??!!

This post is from: Kirsty's Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK

Why Adversity Should Be An Affiliate’s Best Friend

I said that outsourcing was the absolute dogs danglies – and I stand by that completely. To be completely honest though I am suffering a slight hangover after the “champagne high” of finally ridding myself of all those terrible sloggy tasks. The thing is, in the last few weeks I’ve been feeling a little ummm…. lost!

I’ve Only Just Realised

I didn’t notice this earlier on in the year thanks to the wholesale destruction and reconstruction of my home not 3 metres from my office – I was just greatful progress was still being made and my feeble firefighting attempts seemed to keep the business just about plodding along in the administrative sense. The almost palpable noise of the money whizzing from my bank account was distraction enough without me having to hear the actual mechanics of change as well.

I’ve Been Feeling a Little Disjointed Without Knowing Why…

I used to measure my progress and reassure myself I was working hard enough based upon how many articles I was writing in a day, plus an hour or two of PPC, and the crossing off of at least 4 minor tasks on my to do list or 4 major ones. The main thrust was always around getting those new pages up and published – content makes the affiliate world go around after all.

But Now What?

My role has become a lot more nebulous in my mind and I’m suffering from terrible guilt because I don’t have any measurable benchmarks by which to define what I consider to be a good days work.

Damn this Scottish work ethic to hell and all the way back I say. I can just about hear several dozen of you thinking “what on earth is this silly girl’s problem?? She’s living the affiliate dream!!”

Creating Some Benchmarks

The ultimate thing I’m working towards is 1 ) A realisation of where I want to be with the business, and how I’ll get there. 2 ) A strategy for me to be able to implement more of my ideas without spreading myself too thin. 3 ) Keep running and developing ideas on my current sites whilst  1 & 2 are running through my mind.

Back to The Structured Day…

I’m going to have to resurrect my affiliate day planner and block off sections of the day for different types of task, thus giving myself permission to do the research that will ultimately make the business stronger and saving myself a lot of guilt about it not being proper work.

Don’t Say It, I Already Know…

I’m a bit odd, I’ll be the first to admit that my mind is unique and possibly bewildering.  Do try to feel sympathetic. I have to live with it all the time – you guys only have to put up with selected snippets!

On the plus side, it’s never dull being me

This post is from: Kirsty's Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK

Life After Outsourcing – Ummm… so What is it I do now??

Wey hey! I’ve just realised the clock has just gone into single digits – it’s 9 weeks and 6 days till I’ll be at the A4U Expo in London. No pressure Matt & Team, but much like the 2008 re-organisation of my honeymoon to attend, I’ve ended up missing my Father’s 60th birthday so that I could tie in my visit to the UK with the conference. So don’t let me down.

Bigger & Hopefully Better!

The event has obviously grown considerably in my absence, the gig has had to switch locations to the larger ICC @ ExCel Capital Suite to accommodate all the affiliate type fun and games that the Existem team have in store for us.  I’ll be interested to see what conference sessions are included in the line up. The agenda has been released, I’ve just not read it properly yet! There’ll be no less than 36 sessions to choose from so this year I may actually have to plan in advance what I want to see rather than my usual routine of asking whoever I happen to be standing near “what are you seeing then?  Ooh, yeah. That does sound good!” five minutes before the next round of sessions is due to start.

I hear on the grapevine there’s to be a chance to grill / slag off the networks on key issues like closed groups, affiliate payments, preferential treatment of some affiliates and just about anything else us affiliate masses want to hear about from the horses mouth.  Sanjit Atwal of Tradedoubler and Daniel Powel of CJ will be in the stocks. BYO rotten fruit and tough questions!

And Of Course, I Can’t Wait For The Essential Affiliate Parties

I’ve been sitting here in Australia absolutely writhing with Jealousy at the two glittering A4U Awards ceremonies that I’ve missed. Hopefully I can make up for missing them with the 3 shindigs that are being lined up to keep all the thirsty attendees well oiled.  Free champagne has been mentioned, and I like the look of the venue for the middle evening party. My hot tip for dealing with all the free booze on tap is not to peak too early and get hammered on the first night. Jury’s out on whether I’ll take my own advice this year. I certainly didn’t last time!

I was also intrigued at the prospect of “Speed Networking” on the 12th – possibly of limited use when you work in such specific niches as I do but probably a great way to meet some new faces in a very short space of time and a good laugh as well. Specially if there’s free drink.

Did I mention that I’m looking forward to all the free drinks? Yes?  OK. Just making sure. Maybe I should drop Matt Wood a line and suggest they put a little bit extra behind the bar now that I’m definately attending!

And The Issue Of This Year’s Price?

The cost of the Expo has risen considerably this year which has prompted some discussion of whether or not it’s worth attending. Personally, not attending simply isn’t an option for me. It will be my only opportunity for quite some time to network, see some information sessions of direct relevance to the UK industry, and generally catch up with what’s going on in the industry at the moment.

At £395 for an affiliate ticket on the early bird rate it is a lot more expensive than before. However that is an “all inclusive” price.  I like the fact that once I’m there I don’t spend any more money (other than a taxi to the airport and a mega pack of panadol for the affiliate hangover).  It’s still a lot cheaper than other affiliate conferences, and most importantly I will not be subjected to any sales pitches whilst attending. I have a friend who paid a LOT more than that to go to a conference which simply turned out to be speaker after speaker trying to sell their fantastic make money online products.

Of course, I am going to sit down after the conference and really work out if the money I’ve spent is worth it. In the past I’ve always found the expense was more than covered by new contacts who’ve helped me out here and there over time, handy tips from loose lips thanks to the booze, and of course the information content in the seminars.

I hope to meet lots of people there, Duncan and I are both really excited about going and seeing our affiliate pals

P.S. When I was chatting with the guys at Existem about the new ticket prices they sent over a £25 off discount code. Nearly forgot to post it! AFFSTUFF25

This post is from: Kirsty's Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK

Affiliate Stuff is Coming to The A4U Expo – T Minus 9 Weeks & Counting!

Visuals of profits & costs are way more revealing than lists of numbers!

This post will probably be of most use to affiliates just starting out who haven’t yet given much thought to measuring their success!

Even if you have a very small affiliate business it’s really important to make sure you know exactly how it’s progressing.  I’ve found a few simple Excel spreadsheets to be invaluable in charting the progress of my business and planning how to move forward.

I decided to make available for anyone who wants to use them 3 spreadsheets (with graphs) that are altered versions of the ones I use to keep an eye on things.  Here’s a list of what they keep tabs on, I’ve populated them all with mock figures so you can see how they chart things.

1. Monthly Sales

This spreadsheet tots up: -

• Income from each network.
• Expenses.
• Expenses as a percentage of turnover so you can keep an eye on your margins.
• Breaks results down into average daily profit ( I like to know how much I earn a day!)

The spreadsheet outputs the turnover, profit, and spend into a nice graph so you can see business progress at a glance.

I’ve found it useful for seeing the seasonal trends in my business and planning to iron them out with other revenue streams, charting the ebb and flow of income with different networks, to plan / forecast annual growth, and just downright reassuring when I’m unsure exactly how things are going.

2.Profit Targets

Just a simple spreadsheet featuring: -

• Target V’s actual profit (with graph).
• Percentage above / below target.
• Tot up of progress, average monthly profit, projected profit & target v’s projected increase for the year.

Good to keep an eye on progress, and also good to stop yourself moving the goalposts mid year. I like to sit down and work out what I’m happy with over the next 12 months. Once its in the spreadsheet it’s set in stone!

Individual Site Profits

For monitoring the progress of individual sites.  This looks at: -

• Turnover broken down into individual merchants.
• Expenses.
• Monthly profit (and that average per day metric again!)
• Percentage of marketing spend of turnover (again to keep an eye on those margins)
• Monthly traffic.
• EPC per visitor to site.
• Visits through to merchant / CTR.

This one is probably the most useful of all. It’s really incredibly important to monitor which sites are contributing good profits and keep an eye on the ones that aren’t.  I find that working out my CTR is really important – it lets me see any issues and address them quickly. Also, the site EPC is a fantastic metric. I use it to motivate myself and also to forecast how much I can increase my earnings by going out and finding similar traffic. I usually know how much work it is to put out X pages that bring in £xxx, so this is a great way to plan and effectively move forward to increase that cashflow.

I hope these help and if you have any questions on them please post below. No doubt I’ll have left some silly bit of Kirsty-esque maths in them that make sense to nobody but me. What can I say? I’m unique!

File Is Here>>

Contains all 3 spreadsheets. Right Click & Save Target As should get you a copy.

This post is from: Kirsty's Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK

Kirsty’s Affiliate Analysis Pack – Measure Your Success

Mr Newton - Unproclaimed Affiliate Genius

Much excitement here at Affiliate Stuff HQ -  I’ve uncovered the original version of Isaac Newton’s three laws of motion.  Must understand stuff for physicists and science types everywhere,  but did you know he originally wrote them about affiliate marketing??

“This’ll be a smash hit” Issac said, and was all up for releasing it to the scientific community until his wife pointed out ” affiliate marketing hasn’t been invented yet Issac, you’ll probably get burned at the stake for being a nut job. You were only just lucky the last time after that business with the apple!”

“Bugger!” Issac proclaimed. “I was really on a roll there. Ah, to hell with it. I’ll make it about motion and change a few of the words around. Nobody’ll notice”

So here’s the original script, recently found by your roving affiliate investigator stuffed down the back of a venerable sofa in the British Library…

Newtons First Law Of Affiliate Marketing

An affiliate at rest will remain at rest unless they act upon a motivational notion.

An affiliate in motion will stay in motion with the same speed and with direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.

Or…

Affiliates have a natural tendency to keep on doing what they are doing. If you’re sitting thinking about getting started in affiliate marketing, or have a great new idea that you just keep failing to act upon, you’re likely to keep doing that unless you give yourself a bit of a kick up the jacksie. However, once you get moving on it… you’ll be hard to stop!

Newtons Second Law Of Affiliate Marketing

Acceleration of wealth is produced when an affiliate acts on an idea. The greater the idea, the greater the amount of ingenuity needed to increase the acceleration of wealth.

Or…
Well, we all know that in the “real” world, the more brute force you chuck at something – the quicker you can make it go. However, affiliate marketing is a more subtle beast and is powered by smart thinking and downright ingenuity.  The bigger your idea for success, the more clever you’ll have to be to get it building momentum.  Affiliate marketing is fueled by a combustible mixture of ideas combined with clever execution.

Newtons Third Law of Affiliate Marketing

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Or…

You know what a rocket does when it takes off, right?? It piles an enormous amount of power out of its rear end and the ground pushes back with an equal force sending it soaring in a skywards direction.

Well, the ground is your idea and the rocket is the effort you put in.  The trajectory you achieve?  That’s all down to what you packed the rocket with, innit?

This post is from: Kirsty's Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK

Newtons Three Laws of Affiliate Marketing

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been going through an exercise to outsource tasks that take up a large amount of my time but could be done cost effectively by someone else.  The process itself began falteringly about a year ago and has recently come to full fruition.

As things have gathered pace with project “Just Let It Go Kirsty” I’ve recently read, digested, and implemented some of the principles in…

Four Hour Work Week – The Outsourcer’s Bible

The Four Hour Work Week was written by the inspirational (and hilarious) Tim Ferriss.  The sections of his book about outsourcing life were very pertinent and helped me realise that outsourcing should be about ridding myself of just about anything I don’t really enjoy doing if I can afford to do it.  The biggest benefit for me in reading this book was realising that my time has a value, and that I should not treat it as a “free” resource.

I loved the mindset I found in this book – there were so many “oh my god, he’s so right I just never thought of it that way before” moments.

From protecting your personal time, to focusing on the 20% of your work that brings in 80% of your income – the book was jammed with inspiration.  I know lots of my affiliate colleagues have read this book – but if you haven’t yet taken a look at it I do recommend it.  Tim has a highly entertaining and easy to read writing style, so not your average hard to digest business book.

What A Difference A Year Makes..

Since I last posted on this topic a month ago, I’ve spent a lot of time putting the systems in place I spoke about in my last post.    The result on my workload has been absolutely transformational.  I’ve gone from struggling to progress to knowing things are zipping along with me only being involved a supervisory capacity.  In the last 3 weeks this has been particularly valuable as I’ve not felt able to do anything more than give affiliate marketing a cursory glance after the recent loss of my grandmother.

The situation, although very sad for me, has really shown the benefit of the process.  It’s meant I’ve been able to take as much time out as I’ve wanted without worrying about the business losing momentum. That concern is often a huge source of stress for me generally for various different reasons – and the knowledge that I’ve finally kicked it to the kerb is very rewarding.

Kirsty’s Outsourcing Honour Roll

I’m really feeling good about all the things I no longer have to worry about and spend time on. So here’s my “Things I Don’t Have To Do Any More Honour Roll”

Personal

• Household cleaning – this may well be my favourite I’ve always hated domestic chores. Time saved – 12 hours per month. Plus another 3 or 4 moaning about it / not looking forward to doing it
• “Boring” gardening – getting out into the wilds of my QLD bush block is one of my pleasures, but  the boring stuff such as lawn mowing, lopping, pruning, and carting palm fronds to the tip… I hate doing it, and I hate nagging Duncan to help me to do it. Time saved – 2 hours per month, and Duncan doesn’t get berated for letting our front lawn get embarrassingly long any more so a real benefit to our marriage!

Total Personal Time Saved: 14 Hours

That’s enough time for Duncan and I to have two fun days out together instead of doing tedious chores as soon as our leisure time swings around each week.

Business

• Content Writing – Time Saved 35 hours per month
• Content Posting – Time saved 40 hours per month
• Link Building – Time saved 8 hours per month

Total Business Time Saved: 83 hours

Time saved is one factor, but I’ve not considered the concept of time gained before now.  Content Now do way more work on link building than I or anyone else could achieve in the 8 hours or so a month I previously spent struggling away – so the net benefit to the business is actually greater than before.  Similarly, I’ve ramped up the amount of content being written by engaging two different writers to work for me. Writer number two (who also happens to be my mother!!!!) is adding a further 20 hours or so of writing time to the business that wasn’t there before.

And This Means…

Duncan and I have a standard working week of 4 x 6 hour days equating to 104 hours work in the average month.  Recent efforts have removed 41.5 hours from that total for each of us.

Our new working week to get the same amount done? (more actually!)  2.5 days

At the moment we are still going to work 4 days a week and use the extra time to sort out all the things that we had fallen behind with and want to get sorted.  For example, Lingerie Brands has been long overdue a re-design and is now sporting an improved look, and has had a lot of the inefficiencies it’s suffered from for ages weeded from it’s structure.  The result is that already we’re seeing increased indexing and traffic thanks to us finally sorting out an issue with permalinks that was stopping pagination plugins from working.

But Don’t Worry Tim… The Mini Retirement’s Still On

We will indeed be cutting back our working hours to 2.5 days a week, or most likely 2 days one week and 3 the next, as soon as we have caught up with all of the tasks we need to perform to get our sites ship shape once more.

We will then be taking a series of Mini Retirements just like Mr Ferriss suggests (I’d always called these breaks we take skiving but that’s definately a more glam description!).

First up, we are taking 2.5 months off from September to Mid November.  We will be exploring our area of the Australian East Coast with some visitors during September, followed by a 6 week jolly to Europe (with South East Asian hols on the way there and back). After 2 entire weeks of work we will once more abandon our computers for another month of Australian R&R with some friends, culminating in a Sydney new year spectacular.

And you guys thought I’d got boring recently, didn’t ya?  

This post is from: Kirsty's Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK

Outsourcing is The New Black – What a Difference a Year Makes!

Today I realised it has been just over a year since I cut my working hours and implemented a new work structure.  It has been a pleasing success and it has been a massive help in me pushing on my business to new heights and really forging ahead with a series of new sites which I’ve launched over the last 12 months.  Taking a structured approach has really been hugely beneficial for me. Until Now.

Scale and Replicate? Well, Up To A Point…

The issue I’m currently having is that a formulaic approach lacks imagination.  I have my daily set tasks but I’m starting to lose faith at the moment that they are actually the right ones, or even a good use of time relative to the results that they are producing now I’m entering a “maintenance phase”. By that I mean I’ve set up lots of sites and am now concentrating upon building up the income I get from them.

The truth is, my scheduled 2 hours per day of content writing has started to bore me dreadfully.  And so dreadfully that once I’ve done my allocated slog I’ve lost the passion and imagination to do very much else. I think it was workable before because I could focus on the end result – a series of sites to diversify my income. However, now I think I need to step back and take a look at the bigger picture.

Much Like Breaking Up… Letting Go is Never Easy

It’s a bit like splitting up with someone. You get that uneasy feeling that being with them just isn’t working out as well any more. Writing all those blog posts myself enabled me to really boost up the content and traffic on my sites as well as keeping an eye on longtail traffic opportunities.  However I’m increasingly not getting all the content I have scheduled for myself done. Because I simply don’t want to write it.  Even worse, my avoidance strategy (busying myself with some largely irrelevant bit of analysis or research) then extends beyond the blogging and starts to drag the rest of the day down.

It’s Not You, It’s Me

The thing is I’ve increasingly been realising recently that I need to take a dose of my own advice. Is that two hours every day being spent “working smarter” or am I just doing it because it’s permanently written into my daily action sheets? In the last couple of weeks I’ve realised the following: -

• My many daily blog posts contribute to site traffic, but are less likely to generate sales than other more highly targeted pages.
• It probably doesn’t matter any more whether its me writing the posts or someone else. Despite knowing hee haw about affiliate marketing my mother is managing to do a beautiful job of writing content for my sites. She’s even posting it up into HTML templates with extreme ease despite having no web design skills whatsoever. It takes me about 30 mins a week to create a work list for her detailing which articles I want done.
• Continuing to write my own content of this nature is probably not the most efficient application of my skills.
• If I outsource some or all of my daily blogging I will instantly have 2 hours free each day to use in other ways.

In Other Words… It’s Just Not Worth Me Doing It Any More!

I’ve already got some fledgling ideas about how I’m going to free myself from this task. Getting bestseller lists from merchants to create the areas to write posts about, creating structured spreadsheets for content writers to work from. However I shall consider them more carefully and perhaps do another post when I have it all worked out.

My aim now is to reduce my time spent writing from around 30 hours per month, to just 3 or 4 hours spent managing the writing process whilst I get other people to do it for me.  If I can concentrate for long enough in the building site that is laughingly known as my home at the moment I may just be able to come up with something.

I’m off to the mountains today for 2 nights to celebrate my birthday. Perhaps it’ll all become clear then

This post is from: Kirsty's Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK

Recognising When Your Work System Is No Longer Efficient

Just a quickie to say thanks very much to everyone who nominated me for the Best Affiliate Blog category at the A4U Awards.

It’s a real honour and pleasure that my thoughts and general affiliate meanderings are continuing to amuse and inform enough people that I’ve made the shortlist once again.  The entire list of nominees is as follows: -

AffiliateStuff.co.uk (that’s me – yayy!!)

DavidFiske.com

eBay Partner Network Blog

Here.org.uk

Lammo.net

OneLittleDuck.co.uk

Good to see so many of my affiliate friends nominated!  You can register your votes for the awards from today on.

Alas…

Once again I will not be able to attend the awards.  I had to make a choice between the awards and the A4U Expo in October.  I eventually decided that the Expo was probably going to be more beneficial as well as coinciding with an excellent time of year for a holiday in Thailand on the way home. Needless to say I shall be very depressed on the evening of the awards at the thought of missing out on such a great night with all my affiliate friends.

You can book a table here, and book me a business class flight from Australia to London here if you need a date. I can promise witty affiliate conversation at the start of the evening and a load of old nonsense and giggles by about midnight

Enjoy the shindig everyone!

This post is from: Kirsty's Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK

Thanks For The Nomination Everyone