Affiliate Marketing – How Focused Are You?

What a stupid question. VERY. I AM VERY FOCUSED. I want nothing more than to improve my affiliate income or create one… oh look, a BUTTERFLY! *cough*

For people starting out, or for people like me returning to a full time career after a hiatus, the most important thing we need to get right is focus. The painful truth about affiliate marketing (or the absolute delight in my opinion) is that there’s not a prescribed method. There’s not a manual, or a job description, or a definitive list for success.

The mental challenges of the job go beyond working out the increasingly complex nuances of how you create revenue bearing traffic, and into developing the headspace that will keep pushing you towards those goals efficiently.

There is real adversity involved in being an affiliate. Not just in the process of “getting there”, for the reality is that most long term affiliates (like me!) have to achieve success repeatedly. It’s like any other business essentially, but it does seem to suffer from an effortless image. Propagated for the most part by sellers of snake oil.

Forewarned is Forearmed, so here’s a collection of the more obvious challenges of focus we face routinely at the cutting edge of weaving the old internet magic 😉

Too Much Focus

It can be all consuming. It’s so easy to spend every single spare second you have on affiliate marketing. After all, the more you work the sooner you get to those goals, right? Well, maybe not. Affiliate burnout beckons. If you don’t take that much needed R&R time you’ll often be sitting there at 1am achieving nothing without realising it. Checking stats, daydreaming, facebook, forums. NOT WORK!! Also, the excitement will quickly wane and turn to boredom. It’s so easy to give up on something because you’ve burned out your enthusiasm.

I recently had to pull some horrendous 12 hour days to get a time task done. Subsequently it took me 2 days to complete 1 days worth of tasks. Then it was another week before I slid back into a more usual rhythm of work I could identify as productive. I knew to expect this, but that time I needed to get a job done and fast to prepare for an upcoming Google change (more about those later!)

Spend fewer hours in front of the PC, make the time you do work count, start to develop an understanding of what’s a reasonable amount of work to get done in a “shift”. You, your business, and your personal relationships will be healthier for it. Trust me.

Stay focused. Proportionately.

Short Lived Focus

Instant gratification – there is none. It can take weeks or months for your hard work to start to really pay off. It’s way easy to take your foot off the pedal after a few weeks when you have barely earned the price of a beer after eye-bleedingly hard work. Self doubt creeps in, motivation drops. It’s incredibly hard to keep your eyes on the prize. I suffer on and off from this. Generally speaking I’ll have a period where commissions are sluggish, or some other adversity has crept in and I find it very hard to keep putting in the effort. Subsequently, everything rights itself, or a bit of work I did months ago blazes into life and I feel like a right old tit for having let myself become demotivated. I should know better.

These days, this is particularly true when trying your hand at capturing organic traffic. It’s very much a two steps forward three (hundred!) steps back endeavour at times. You can lose months or even years of work in an update. It is devastating. But you can’t look at what you lost, rather at what you kept. Because it’s there that the old phoenix will probably rise once more. You need to be an eternal optimist to be a successful affiliate. In the face of something that doesn’t seem to not be working, but also seems to be going backwards… you must persevere. And that’s a special kind of determination that requires you to be convinced that what you are doing is ultimately going to work. Well? Are you convinced? Really? Or does that Game of Thrones box set and a few beers look like a more productive weekend?

Stay focused. On your core strategy. More about phoenix stuff another time. When my own focus has improved enough to write cogently about it.

The Wrong Focus

Yes! You’ve made it!! You created that site and you can see a small but promising revenue stream. You get very excited. At this point it’s very common for distraction to set in. The imagination goes into overdrive. You spend several days working out how much more money you would make if you increased your traffic tenfold. You plan a network of related sites, for surely retirement to a sunny spot of your choosing is beckoning? Focus is lost, many domains are bought without due care and attention, several half started project are spawned.

Losing focus is one of the most toxic problems for would be affiliate marketers. There’s nobody there to tell us how to do this. We DO tend to be dreamers who aspire to greater things. Sadly that makes us prone to fantasy empire building with predictable results.

Stay focused. On the success you’ve already achieved.

Retaining focus is something I struggle with a lot. So this stuff… well lets just say I didn’t pull all the faults I’m claiming you have out of thin air. Keep pushing on and you’ll make progress. Simple concept. Often impossible to execute.

Good luck 🙂

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