Speed – The Second Most Important Quality for an Affiliate Marketer
First of all, if you haven’t read the first post in this two-post mini-series, go do that now. In that post you’ll find what I consider to be the single most important quality for an affiliate marketer. Now let’s talk about the second most important quality — speed.
Let me give you some reasons why speed is critically important for the successful affiliate marketer…
When you’re not conciously trying to work quickly, it’s easy to spend too much time on what I like to call “secondary tasks”. What’s a secondary task? Anything that does not directly contribute to increasing your revenue. This would certainly include things like web server setup and software installation, but to a lesser extent can even include things like design and layout. You can have the nicest looking website in the world, but if you aren’t getting eyeballs in front of it, you won’t make any money. By contrast, working speedily helps you establish a rhythm…a “groove” if you will…which in turn keeps you motivated and focused.
Working quickly also helps minimize risk. In any new campaign, there is always a certain amount of risk involved. For instance, it’s not always clear if the offer you’re promoting is going to convert. The best way to find out? Yup…test it! And if it ends up *not* converting, the sooner you test it (and fail), the sooner you’ll *know* that and cut your losses.
So how do you operate with speed? Here are some practical tips…
1) Get the most important things done first and then do everything else. Basically, you need to prioritize your tasks. I recommend making a list of tasks that you want to accomplish the night before. That way, when morning hits, it’s not a question of what you’ll be spending your time on.
2) Automation is your friend. I have so many things to share with you in terms of automation, as I consider it an important part of my business (and quite underused industry-wide). There are many ways to automate tasks, and you don’t have to be a programmer to do it. Ever want to keep a number of text phrases in your clipboard and assign a hotkey to each one for easy pasting? No problem, have a look at this. Want to automate a repeitive and user-defined sequence of keystrokes? No problem, have a look at this.
3) Outsourcing is your friend. This gets back to the point above about secondary tasks. You really need to ensure you’re not spending your time (often the most precious commodity of all) on secondary tasks. But please hear this too – there is a balance… In other words, don’t be foolish with your money. If you don’t have any income coming in and you can’t afford to outsource, then don’t do it! Outsourcing is a great way to grow your business, but there should be a business there to begin with.
The Single Most Important Quality for an Affiliate Marketer
The single most important quality for a budding affiliate marketer is….
Consistency.
Allow me to play Captain Obvious for a moment and spell this out a bit. If you’re not consistent in your efforts to promote other people’s products (or send them leads), then you’ll have sporadic success at best. For the search marketer in particular, there is no such thing as “set it and forget it”. Ever hear that phrase? What’s that? You’ve heard it way too many times? Yeah… Me too. And ‘ya know what? It’s a big fat lie.
Let me say that again:
At least in the context of search marketing (SEO or PPC), “set it and forget it” is a bloody LIE. Follow this foolishness and you will all but guarantee your failure.
You have to *continually* work at your affiliate promotions for a whole host of reasons, not least of which is competition. For SEO, unless you happen to own a well-aged GOV or EDU with tens of thousands of backlinks, prepare to work your butt off to keep your rankings. You simply *must* be better than your competitors. If they’re writing 2 articles per day, you’d better write 4. And while I don’t recommend you spend inordinate amounts of time analyzing your competition, you do need to monitor their workflow. How quickly is Google indexing their pages? How many pages are they adding to their site on average per month? Per week? How many backlinks are they getting on average per month? Per week? And if this level of analysis is too burdensome, then just GET AT IT and keep taking action with your campaign. Keep adding content, keep getting backlinks…. Keep tweaking your salescopy. You want to eventually be at the place where your competition is not even in the rear-view mirror.
And for PPC? Well, consistency is even more important here! With the advent of tools like KeywordSpy, PPC Bully, etc., pay per click competitive intelligence has become a cottage industry unto itself. Thousands of marketers worldwide are perpetually running automated queries against Google, scraping the results and warehousing them in a searchable database. Think I’m kidding? Think again. You *have* to continually monitor your campaigns, as bid prices fluctuate, impression count will fluctuate, quality score can fluctuate, etc (and all of this for any number of reasons which are outside the scope of this post). And if you happen to be cleaning up with PPC, don’t rest on your laurels. Set personal goals for yourself in terms of profit. This is a great industry with a lot of upside, but don’t think for one minute you can be lazy.