Are You an Affiliate Day Trader?

If you answer yes to the follow questions, then chances are you’re an affiliate day trader:

1. Do you spend 6-12 hours a day monitoring your Adwords campaigns?
2. Are your affiliate promotions running on slim margins (10%-50% ROI), requiring that you have to keep a tight watch on your campaigns constantly?
3. Are you unable to take a day off from watching your campaigns without breaking into a cold sweet that you may be losing money?
4. Are you constantly checking your stats?
5. Are you feeling overwhelmed because you’re managing 100s of affiliate promotions at once?

Now if several of the questions above really struck a nerve with you, then you’re a day trader, not trading stocks, but trading affiliate promotions. Now all I can tell you is that you don’t just have a JOB, you have a BAD JOB!

A lot of affiliates get burned out by this approach, it’s not what they expected. They thought that by being free from a job they were going to have a dream life and do all the things they wanted to do. However, they just end up having another job!

This is exactly what happened to me when I first quit my job! I had a lot more “free” time, but somehow my productivity went down and my income stagnated.

If you want to work less and make more as an affiliate, and have lifestyle (=money+TIME), then here’s what I suggest:

1. STOP Checking Stats More than Once a Day – Constantly check stats will not only give you a potential nervous breakdown, but it kills your productivity. Check your stats once a day for campaigns your actively working on, and once every few days for campaigns that are running on autopilot. This will be tough at first, but trust me, you’ll be a LOT more happier and productive
2. Focus on a Few Large Affiliate Offers – Find affiliate offers where the top affiliates makes more than $100k a month (ask your affiliate manager about this). Build up a few of these offers. Hire a programmer and writing company to make a custom affiliate site for you, with keyword targeted ppc landing pages. A few large campaigns are easier to manager (and have more potential for long term profits) then 100s of smaller campaigns
3. Bid Low and Shot for High Profit Margins – A lot of affiliate bid high enough on an affiliate offer to “maximize profit.” I prefer to bid low and make around 100% ROI on an affiliate offer, EVEN if i make LESS total profit. Do you know why? Because it’s less maintenance; I can let it run on virtual auto-pilot since my margins are so high it will make a profit even during slow periods. That frees up my time to work on other affiliate offers and REALLY maximized my profit if you know what I’m saying.
4. Block 2 Hours Out of Each Day for Productive Tasks – This one is a bomb shell. Make a list every night of THE most important tasks (for your business) that must be done the next day. Now as far as I’m concerned the most important task, or productive tasks are tasks that DIRECTLY IMPACT YOUR INCOME. Such as launching a campaign, adding keywords, writing and testing new ad copy, etc, etc. Now the next day shut off your cell phone, skype, IM, googletalk, don’t check your email (etc…), just spend two hours straight working on productive tasks. If you do this, your productivity and income will SKYROCKET, but I’m warning you, this takes discipline.

We’ve all been brainwashed into believing we have to work 9am-5pm for 5 days a week, even if we’re self-employed. If you can get more done working 10 hours a week/2 hours a day, than working 9-5, which would you rather choose?