Overcoming Procrastination In Your Affiliate Marketing Business

So what are the best ways of overcoming procrastination in your affiliate marketing business. You know what I’m talking about. With great intentions for our business, it can still be easy to fall into bad habits and accomplish nothing. It’s easy to get sucked into social media channels and waste your time!

You need a system and a routine to create some positive habits which you can do on a daily basis – no matter how small.

In fact, breaking your big tasks down into inconceivably little tasks is one of the best ways to overcome procrastination. When we look at the mountain in one go, it’s overbearing. It’s too much to take on board all in one go. You know the saying about how to eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

Overcoming Procrastination In Your Affiliate Marketing Business – Baby Steps

With a monumental task of building an online business, it’s easy to procrastinate. You can’t possibly do it all in one day. But by breaking down the big steps into small, easily achievable goals, and making habits out of them, you can easily get back on track.

Tasks you might be considering with your business are:

• Building a profitable ad campaign
• Building a YouTube channel for organic traffic
• Building traffic to your blog
• Creating an email campaign for your list
• Learning a new strategy for marketing

However, these tasks are already too big when you’re not in the mood. You need to create smaller tasks which you can do on a daily basis and make habits out of:

• Set up a single low budget advert (just to learn the skill)
• Shoot a tester video and upload to YouTube (to lay the habit foundations)
• Write a blog post on your blog
• Write a single email to add to your outgoing messages for your list
• Watch a single video on marketing

By breaking down the big tasks into smaller tasks, you are making it easy for yourself to take positive action – no matter how small. A rolling stone gathers no moss – once you’re “rolling” it’s easier to maintain momentum

Overcoming Procrastination In Your Affiliate Marketing Business – Remove Emotion From The Action

Big tasks are often tanged with heavy emotion. For example, building a YouTube channel which gets lots of traffic might take a huge amount of time and effort. If you’re uncertain of your direction, the videos you want to shoot and so on, this further adds to the blockage.

Remove that blockage by taking a super-tiny step towards the outcome your ultimately want. So in this case, shoot a “tester” video and upload it to YouTube. By calling it a “tester” video you don’t have to give it any importance and so that takes some pressure off you. You don’t even have to set it to “public” either. This takes all the pressure of “performing” and putting yourself out there. You only need to take a tiny action and learn the basic steps in uploading a video to YouTube.

You can use this same principle with building traffic to your blog. When faced with a large task like this, it’s overwhelming. How will you do it? What will you write about? Will it even work after all the effort you have taken? These types of questions only fuel your doubt, indecision and uncertainty. So you procrastinate. But without action you can be certain of failure!

Remove the emotion by taking micro steps towards your larger goals – every day. So instead of “building traffic to your blog” create a daily baby step of “writing a blog post”. It doesn’t even have to be a great one, just 400 words and you’re done. Then you’ve created some momentum and released yourself from the blockage.

Create A Daily Plan

With a daily plan, you take action every day. Monday might be a blog post, and to write to your email list. Tuesday might be to check your ads, or shoot a video. Wednesday is posting on social media day, or Quora answers day – see affiliate marketing on Quora.

When you focus on the big picture that is your profitable online business running on all cylinders (some time in the future), you create problems. But when you break large tasks into small, easily manageable steps, you start to take action. That’s where the magic happens.

Without action you know you’re not going to have a business. So procrastination needs to be dealt with with micro steps which are easily achieved. Breaking down goals into smaller steps is a powerful tool in the entrepreneurs box! Use it to create a day filled with small easily achievable actions, no matter how insignificant they might seem.

Even if the step only has the effect of dissolving your procrastination, it’s been worthwhile.

Look At Your “Foundations”

Have a look at your environment. How does it make you feel? If you’re surrounded with a messy environment, with unfinished projects all around, it’s unlikely to help you with finding the right state of mind for top tier productivity. Set up your “stall” and clear your working space as a priority.

The same goes for your emotional state. If you’re a bag of conflicting emotions and unresolved conflicts, it’s highly likely that it’s affecting your ability to work and focus. How is your health? Are you exercising?

Getting the proper sleep and looking after your health should be a priority if you’re attempting to build something such as an affiliate business. You can’t build a skyscraper with the foundations of a cottage. So make sure you’re eating properly taking exercise and looking after yourself first!

If you’re stressed about something, it’s likely going to affect your ability to build an affiliate business. For years I was stressed about money and it did me no favours when it came to building an online business. I was building from a foundation of a poverty mindset.

Summary

So if you find yourself struggling with your affiliate business, take the long term view of your business and break it down into steps you can do right now, today. Don’t fill your mind with all the aspects of what you need to do in the far flung future; what you don’t know, or understand and how large the task is ahead of you. That only fuels the frustration you have been creating! Focus instead of a tiny first step you can do right now, however small.

Keep doing that and set yourself a weekly schedule of these tasks, and you’ll soon find yourself moving forwards again. Once the procrastination has subsided, you’ll find other things you can focus on to move your business forwards too.

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