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.