Take the Plunge…Part II

Last time I talked about the struggles I went through when I first went full time.

It was a REALLY scary time of my life, to say the least, but you know what, after surviving this MAJOR downturn in my business I was a totally changed person.

Here’s a few lessons I’ve learned from this experience that have served me, again and again, in running and growing my business :

THERE’S (ALMOST) NEVER AN EMERGENCY

Whether you get Google slapped or your top affiliate offer expires out of the blue, sure you may panic and lose sleep for a couple of days, but in almost all cases you’ll be able quickly to find a workaround that will get your profits back up (at least enough to cover your basic living expenses).

The important point here is that you have to mentally bounce back FAST and start thinking clearly and constructively.

Ask yourself this question : “Okay, this is the situation, what’s the best course of action I can take to remedy the situation, at the very least, only temporarily.”

LIVE BELOW YOUR MEANS
Yes, even I, living the Super Affiliate Lifestyle, live well below my means. And as a result I’ve put a good amount of money in the bank and in various investments.

A good strategy is to absolutely, and completely live WAY below your means when you first go full time and bank all your profits. Live on the same amount you made from your job.

A lot of affiliates have a REAL problem with this, they go nuts with their new found cash, and when their affiliate campaigns take a downturn they have to go back to working 9-5!?!

Get to the point where you have 6 months worth of living expenses in your bank account. This will give you a HUGE amount of piece of mind. So if your business ever hits a “Judgement Day” where you profits plummet, you have a 6 month cushion to get things up and running again.

In most cases (from my experience) you should be able to turn around a downturn in your profits in a few weeks. If you can only make a temporary fix (i.e. changing your domain name after a Google Slap) then that’s okay.

A temporary fix + your banked business profits will buy you time to really…

…BUILD A BULLET PROOF BUSINESS

After facing a couple serious downturns in my business (in the beginning), I got serious about developing a solid stable business that would produce consistent long term profits.

Building your affiliate business PROPERLY will not only give you piece of mind, and make you a lot happier, it will also free up your time to work on bigger and more exciting projects, taking your profits to a WHOLE NEW LEVEL!

Needless to say I’ve put a considerable amount of thought into how to build a bullet proof affilaite business, check out part II and part III of my “How Heavy Hitters Do Adwords” series.

DO NOT repeat the mistakes I made, build your affiliate business properly from the beginning. In the short term you’ll make less money, but in the long term you’ll blow away all the instant gratification affiliates who went for the quick cash.

FAILURE IS A PART OF SUCCESS

Seriously.

You’ll learn more from your failures than from your successes. The few times I’ve gotten the wind knocked out of me because of a change on Clickbank or Google, it actually forced me to rethink my whole strategy.

Every time I’ve been forced to changed my strategy, that is, change the way I do affiliate marketing, I’ve come back from my downturn with a stronger more profitable business.

I learned the above lessons, after I took the plunge, after I make a TOTAL COMMITMENT that this is was what I was going to do.

When you have no option but to succeed it really forces you to change your thinking and grow as a person.

You have to grow FIRST before your business grows.

I know I was going to talk about qualities that you MUST have to be a successful entrepreneur (or full time affiliate for that matter), and I’ve indirectly touched on that in this post. Nevertheless, I’m going to do a whole separate post on this topic in the near future, so stay tune!