Affiliate marketing and time management go hand in hand. In fact, without good time management skills, you’re less likely to succeed as an affiliate. Affiliate marketing pays you only when you make sales. So if you spend time in the wrong areas as an affiliate, or waste time, you can spend years working for zero reward!
As a beginner I fell into the many affiliate traps too; such as spending heaps of time making a website logo look pretty – only to have zero traffic! Or building spammy websites hoping they would immediately rank and get free traffic!
It’s also easy to become a “busy fool” as an affiliate marketer – thinking you’ve “made it” because you’re working from home. But actually you’re not making any money. Instead you’re spending all day browsing social media! Or even getting stuck in “learning mode”; thinking you’re progressing but actually only watching endless training videos and not implementing what you’re learned.
You can get addicted to learning; watching videos thinking knowledge alone is progress. But you need to keep an eye on moving your income forward too.
Affiliate Marketing And Time Management
It’s easy to fall into many of these traps which suck your time and don’t move your affiliate business forwards. To make sure you’re not wasting time as an affiliate, you should write down your goals and have a daily plan to work towards them. Zoom out of the moment to look at the longer term picture. Then zoom back into the moment to work a step at a time at the main thing which will move your business forward. Make goals for 5 years, 3 years, 1 year, 6 months and 3 months. Look at your daily schedule. Do your daily steps match with your longer term goals?
Overwhelm, procrastination and hesitation are your enemies as an affiliate. You can get locked into inactivity when you haven’t chosen your direction. Or you can get lost in juggling too many things and still not move forward. Initially you’ll be learning, probably from watching videos.
Think of your use of time as spending 80% of time learning, and 20% of your time implementing what you have learned. Don’t confuse learning with action. Learning is more important in the early phase of building your affiliate business. But over time the balance should move towards 80% implementing and 20% learning, once you choose a direction and get started.
This can be a tricky phase and you may procrastinate here. But far better to fail forwards, learning from mistakes and problems, than to stand still in inaction and procrastination.
Affiliate Marketing And Time Management – Mindset
Goal setting is vital to keep you focused on what you want from your affiliate business and how you intend to achieve it. If you’re struggling with your mindset, you should get Stuart Lichtman’s ebook on Cybernetic Transposition. This book has helped me immensely with my affiliate business and was recommended by the affiliate marketing mentors I found several years ago.
Stuart’s strategy (Cybernetic transposition), allows you to transpose an area of success in your life to a new goal. It’s the best book I’ve found on goal setting. Most books don’t delve deep enough into what you really want. Stuart’s book lets you test your real intentions and align all parts of the brain for the outcome you most desire, all things considered.
The main problem for many people setting goals (me included), is they don’t follow through because there are conflicting intentions which show up in life. “I want to lose weight, but I like pizza and beer too much”, for example is a typical conflicting statement. In Stuart’s book, he addresses these kinds of conflicts so that they can be resolved to determine the things you really want and how to get them.
Operate A “Won’t Do” List & Prioritise
Most people have a “to do” list which they tick off as they complete each task. But have you thought that maybe since you’re in charge, your list is biased towards the things you like to do, rather than those things which will move your affiliate business forwards?
Ask yourself whether each task on your list is important in terms of moving your affiliate business forwards. If you don’t do something (on your list), will it make much difference? If the answer is “no” the task should be moved to your “won’t do” list. This simple switch can save you heaps of time and energy which is wasted on doing things which are either irrelevant, or suit someone else’s agenda rather than your own!
Prioritise your list in order of importance and do the most important tasks first, when your energy is high. Don’t do the easy jobs which you like first. Do the important ones which will lift up your affiliate business and move you forwards more quickly.
Schedule Your Week & Blocking
Jumping from task to task drains energy and makes them more difficult. This is why many entrepreneurs use a “blocking” strategy to block tasks together. So, for example, if you plan on building your email follow up series and shooting a video, block out time for each task individually, rather than jumping back and forth.
If you divide your day up into many individual tasks, it’s much more difficult to focus with clarity and do a good job. If you plan on writing a bunch of blog posts, shooting videos and editing, don’t jump from one to another. Instead, block out time for your video shooting in one sitting. Otherwise you will lose time in the transition as well as focus. See also timeboxing.
Regular Breaks
Evidence suggests that we work much better and more efficiently with regular breaks. When you’re working on a passion project such as affiliate marketing, it can be easy to over work and burnout. Once you hit burnout stage, you lack energy and focus to do anything. A week of fatigue can set you back dramatically so it’s far better to work consistently while looking after your mental and physical health.
The Pomodoro technique suggests working in 25 minute bursts to maximise efficiency. You can use the technique in variations to suit your working style. But it’s also a good way of breaking down large tasks into smaller tasks.
- Decide on the task to be done.
- Set the pomodoro timer (traditionally to 25 minutes).
- Work on the task.
- End work when the timer rings and put a checkmark on a piece of paper.
- If you have fewer than four checkmarks, take a short break (3–5 minutes) and then return to step 2; otherwise continue to step 6.
- After four pomodoros, take a longer break (15–30 minutes), reset your checkmark count to zero, then go to step 1.