The Affiliate Lifestyle Blog

AFA - An average frustrated affiliate who has no game and rarely manages to convert offers profitably. Also an affiliate who tends to look to “gurus” for validation, buys a lot of ebooks, but never takes action.

Yes, we’ve all been there. I was there for a long time. Here’s the game plan:

1) Write your financial goals for the year. If you want to make $100,000, then fine. Divide that by 365 to give you $275/day in profit. Now, how do you get to $275?

2) Come up with a GAME PLAN. If you know nothing about affiliate marketing, then pick a traffic strategy, like PPC or SEO. If you know something about affiliate marketing, focus on what you are currently making money with. If that means PPC, then dedicate nearly ALL your time to this 1 THING.

3) Now, time to figure out what your core competency is. First, what do you enjoy doing? PPC? Do you like managing sites? DO you like managing a team? Pick the top 3 things you like to do, then find someone to do the rest of the crap. You can find someone on rentacoder.com easily enough.. Try a few people to see who’s good, look at their feedback, if they complete the project and are good, then hire them by sending them an email and asking them if they want to work for you.

4) You should know what projects you have lined up. If you are doing affiliate marketing, look at what you are already profitable doing, and then just expand by 1 degree of separation. For example, I’m in the computer help niche, so I want to sell affiliate products like antivirus software, registry cleaners, etc. Don’t go hoping around from one niche to another.

5) So now you should have a traffic strategy, someone from rentacoder who is working for you, and a few offers selected that you KNOW are profitable because you see them all the time. Don’t make the AFA mistake of choosing an offer which you don’t see any other affiliates running.

6) Now get your butt to work. Your time is the most important thing you’ve got, so manage it successfully. Don’t do the AFA “browsing forums” , “checking email”, “blah blah”… You need to be focused! That means keeping track of your time PER project. Keep track of how many ACTUAL hours of REAL WORK (profit producing) you are doing.

7) Now, you should have proper TIME MANAGEMENT skills, you should have a team consisting of at least a designer (don’t ever design your own sites, waste of time- focus on the marketing or copy).. And you should have your PROFITABLE niche selected, and a few offers lined up.

8) Start a… review site, start a direct linking campaign, do SEO, I don’t really care what you do. BUT DO IT. And FAIL. And I mean FAIL HARD and I mean FAIL FAST. You are new to this industry you are going to fail, so give it the best shot you got, learn from it, then move on. Don’t spend 4 weeks building an affiliate site.

9) TAKE ACTION NOW. AND THEN TOMORROW TAKE MORE ACTION. KEEP TRACK OF YOUR PROFIT. Set goals + deadline. IE. I’m making $100 by January 1st. Then tie an incentive to it So you are motivated.

10) OPTIMIZE LIKE CRAZY. TRACK EVERYTHING. LEARN FROM YOUR MISTAKES. Each campaign you build should be more sophisticated than the last. Sorry, my time ain’t free guys.. I charge $500/hour- feel free to schedule a consultation.. But perhaps other affiliates will help you along..

11) NEVER STOP LEARNING OR GROWING.. ITS YOUR MINDSET.If you are determined, nothing will stop you. Otherwise, you are just another AFA.

Peace.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 at 9:55 pm and is filed under affiliate marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.