trafficmansionIf you’re new to affiliate marketing, we are willing to bet that growth and profit are probably the only two things on your mind right now. Everything you’re doing right at this stage, you’re doing because it brings you closer to your number one goal: to expand your network and generate some sweet cash in the process.
For every type of affiliate marketer, growth is a positive thing. It can be encouraging, challenging, satisfying, and above all – highly profitable. In a nutshell, growth provides us with validation for our ideas and all the hard work we have invested in promotion, which is something we all strive for in one form or another.
However, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows.
In affiliate marketing, growing too fast can be a double-edged sword.
If you’re too eager to expand your reach and bite off more than you can chew, you’re probably going to find yourself in a downward spiral. You’ll face a lot of difficulties regarding the capacity of work, staying productive, and ensuring that your output is on a satisfactory level.
Focus means everything to affiliate marketers.
Regardless of how good or how well connected you are, it’s important to constantly have in mind that you’re still operating with limited resources.
And by resources, I mean time, money, and energy.
If you don’t do a good enough job of balancing your workload and resources, you’re going to experience frequent burnouts.
These burnouts won’t only stop you from growing; they’ll also make it extremely difficult for you to handle even the most basic operations. You’ll start to feel constant exhaustion and lack of motivation, which will automatically diminish your overall productivity and quality of output.
We at TrafficMansion know that staying productive throughout all the challenges is no easy task and that most affiliate marketing professionals have a high tendency to get lost in all the noise.
In our company, we had numerous employees that juggled many different hats at the same time and struggled with productivity. As experienced affiliate marketers, we knew that every wasted second was a wasted dollar, and that it was imperative for the future of our business to remove all the unnecessary complications and distractions from our day-to-day work.
Over the years, our company’s growth has challenged us to rethink our entire structure and improve all the procedures that have an effect on the quality of our service. We went through all the stages of our work, analyzed every single segment, and optimized everything that could be optimized in order to ensure a smoother workflow and higher productivity scores.
In this process, we tried every productivity trick and tip in the book. Some turned out to be a complete bust, while others actually helped us get more things done. In the following segments of this article, we are going to share the productivity hacks that worked the best for us.
1. Have a Written Plan and Commit to It
I know this one feels a bit redundant, but trust me; it’s worth mentioning over and over again.
A lot of affiliate marketers I personally know don’t have a written day-to-day plan. They do things by impulse. Most of them just act on their ideas the very moment they pop into their head and try to keep a “mental checklist” of all the activities they are supposed to accomplish in a specific day, week, or month.
Of course if you operate like this, a lot of things get lost in the noise. You either completely forget about certain tasks or remember them when the train has already left the station.
I get it. When you’re working 50 plus hours a week, it’s hard to find the time to write everything down and check items off the list.
However, I cannot stress this enough: It is crucial to find the time to organize your activities, measure your performance, and update your procedures in accordance to your results.
Creating to-do lists for the next day isn’t really that hard when you pick up the habit. Before you shut down your laptop, I advise you to at least make a list of tasks that you want to accomplish the next day.
Doing so not only gives you a clear direction but also allows you to see how much you got done at the end of the day.
You could easily organize your workload with Google Keep. It’s a simple app that helps users easily track and organize their tasks list.
2. The 80:20 Rule
Affiliate marketing is a highly competitive profession where people usually get obsessed by the whole rat race concept and lose track of everything else that’s important.
If you want to achieve success as an affiliate marketer, you cannot just go for the cheese at all times. You cannot just chase every possible deal and commission percentage that gets thrown your way. It’s a lot better to organize your efforts and constantly think about your future development and influence in the business.
That’s why the 80:20 rule, a.k.a. the Pareto Principle, works so well for affiliate marketers.
We live in a day and age of constant progress. The Internet is constantly changing and evolving. What’s hot now, tomorrow will most likely become another thing of the past. Certain networks and strategies will perish or just stop being effective. It is of extreme importance to stay up-with-the-times and constantly learn new things.
For those who are not familiar with this principle, the 80:20 rule is basically a time management technique that teaches people that roughly 80 percent of all the effects come from 20 percent of causes. That means that around 80 percent of your total available time you should be spending on “doing,” and around 20 percent on “learning.”
From our experience with the Pareto Principle, we have learned that this is the correct balance. This particle approach has helped us stay sharp and focused on the task. If you don’t have a plan or pay close attention to what you’re spending your time on, you can easily get suckered into chasing dead-end leads or joining irrelevant discussions with people who will only waste your time and energy.
Make yourself a plan and keep track of the amount of time you’re spending on every task. Review all your activities and decide whether that time would have been better spent on learning something new or achieving some other goal.
3. Pomodoro Technique
Patented back in the 1980s-1990s by developer/entrepreneur/author Francesco Cirillo, this technique was developed with an idea to improve people’s attention spans, increase concentration, and improve the overall quality of output by training the brain to work in sprints and thus, maximize focus.
Pomodoro is a work optimization technique that is widely used by software developers today but it can help professionals from various industries.
The methodology of this system is quite simple: You take a big chunk of work and cut it into small, timed intervals, interspersed with short and effective breaks.
Usually, these work intervals run up to 25 minutes and each of them is called “pomodoro.” If you want this technique to work, every single one of these chunks has to be precisely measured, so that you could actually complete a specific chunk of work in 25 minutes.
So, every time you complete a “pomodoro,” you mark it with an “X” and take a 5 minute break. After four completed pomodoros, it’s advisable to take a bigger break – let’s say, for 15-20 minutes.
Pomodoro has worked wonders for us. Ever since we have started chopping big tasks into smaller ones and doing them the Pomodoro way, we have noticed a significant boost in our overall company’s productivity. Our staffers have stopped exceeding deadlines and complaining about the actual amount of work that needed to be done. Pomodoro really helped us remove all the distraction from our day-to-day job and get more things done, without feeling tired or exhausted in the process.
4. Introduce Software to Your Daily Routine
One of the main reasons why most affiliate marketers still struggle to stay productive throughout the day and week is because they still do a lot of things manually. They are stuck in a quicksand of outdated processes, dumb, manual tasks, and they don’t know how to get out.
A second here, a second there – these little, repetitive, mind-numbing, and outdated processes are constantly pulling you down into the abyss. They’re killing your productivity at every turn and keeping you away from your actual work.
The good news is that most of these tasks can be automated.
A lot of companies today are primarily focused on optimizing processes and understanding how to accomplish more in less time. That’s why automation is so popular today. There are numerous tools out there that are built with a purpose of speeding up/eliminating your involvement in repetitive manual tasks that suck up your valuable time. In addition to that, most of these utilities are also created with the goal to reduce costs and minimize the errors that are usually caused by humans.
Today, you automate almost any process to a larger or smaller extent. For any problem out there, you can find numerous different tools or apps you could use to help you overcome your obstacles.
Here’s a list of tools that we at TrafficMansion use to get things done more efficiently and remove all the unnecessary complications from our day:
- Trello
- Slack
- Basecamp
- WriteRoom
- Forest
- Hours
- Newton
- 1Pasword
As you can see, every single one of these apps is built to optimize a different process and solve a different problem. Introducing software to your daily routine can help you stay on track and ahead of the curb. With a little help from even the simplest of programs, you could do yourself a lot of good.
5. Eat the Frog Method
In case you’re not familiar with this concept, “Eat that Frog!” is a bestselling book written by Brian Tracy, a Canadian-American motivational public speaker and a self-development author who is known to a general public as an expert on the topic of productivity.
In his book, Mr. Tracy shares this theory by Mark Twain and talks about metaphorically eating a live frog every morning before starting the day. Why? Because it’s the hardest thing you’ll have to do that day. It’s hard to imagine experiencing anything worse in 24 hours than swallowing a living and breathing amphibian.
Regardless of what else you have on your plate, Mr. Tracy says that it’s always best to start your day with “the frog.”
Of course, “the frog” comes in many different shapes and sizes, depending on what you do and how you operate. For us affiliate marketers, the frog is usually that biggest and most important task of the day, which most of us are likely to push down the schedule as far as possible.
After reading the book, I’ve started to apply Mr. Tracy’s advice. For a month, I’ve started my day by swallowing that slimy amphibian I used to avoid until the very last moment.
And do you know what? It actually made a difference. Regardless of how busy or crazy the rest of my day was, nothing felt nearly as hard or annoying as swallowing that frog. I’ve genuinely changed my attitude towards complicated and exhausting tasks, and stopped procrastinating on pressing issues that demanded my focus and attention.
Over to You
Thank you for taking the time to read this article from the beginning to the end. According to a study conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a lot of people still struggle with productivity. A lot of them still face enormous difficulties with maintaining focus throughout the workday and getting things done on time.
Affiliate marketing is just one of those industries where people get overwhelmed by the workload and find themselves in a situation where they have to juggle multiple things at the same time and worry about their personal and business growth.
We hope that this article provided you with actionable ideas on how to organize your work better and get more things done during the day. At TrafficMansion, we are constantly looking to improve our processes and remove unnecessary distractions from our business. If you have anything to ask or add to this article, feel free to write your thoughts in the comment section below and we’ll get back to you ASAP!
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