The Myth of the Lazy Affiliate Marketer…

You’ve all read it over, and over, and over again in sales letters. Promises of instant riches with affiliate marketing, beyond your dreams, and all on autopilot. You’ll be in Maui sipping out of a coconut while $1000s a month are direct deposited into your bank account.

Bullshit!

This is the myth of the lazy affiliate, that once you get the wheels turning, you’re on your way to an early retirement. Sadly enough a lot of affiliate marketers still believe this.

Just like any other business, an affiliate marketing business takes a lot of WORK to get it going. I know that’s a 4-letter word to some affiliates! Honestly, it’s a lot of blood, sweet, and tears in the beginning. The learning curve to ppc affiliate marketing is steep, most people don’t stick it out long enough to reach the tipping point. Kind of sad since many of these people are SO close to reaching it.

Let’s face it, as markets on Google Adwords become more and more competitive over time, with the cost per click rising every year, the idea that you can “set it and forget it ” and make piles of money on autopilot with ppc is ridiculous. The day of throwing a bunch of keywords into a campaign, setting your CPC at 0.05 and instantly making 100% ROI are long gone.

Sounds pretty gloomy, huh? There’s hope for the affiliates that are willing to take their thinking (and their affiliate business) to the next level…

When I was a newbie affiliate, like many other affiliates, I was super-excited once I got a campaign running and profitable. I had finally got to the point I was consistently finding a winner! However, after a few months my profitable campaigns would keep dieing out. I had this happen to me in at least 5 different profitable markets.

I knew there was a piece of the puzzle that I was missing. If you read my last post you know that my mistake was rushing to launch new campaigns, and not building up & solidify my profitable campaigns, and here why I did this…

I was thinking like a “lazy affiliate,” I was totally focused on quickly getting as many profitable campaigns up as possible so I could make some quick money. I may as well have been selling wrist watches off the street corner here in Boston, because I was NOT treating my affiliate marketing efforts as a REAL business.

I said to myself: “Okay, I know there’s a way to make this work, there’s other super-affiliates that are making a fortune who’ve been doing this for years. What are they doing that I’m not doing, or what am I doing that they are not doing??”

When it finally dawned on me that I was not treating my affiliates efforts as a real viable long-term business, here what I changed about the way I think about, and conduct my affiliate business that totally transformed my business and my life:

1. I totally changed my focus to building campaigns that generate long-term sustainable profits. That’s when I decided to build up and dominate one market before I move into another. I wanted to lock in the profits for one campaign before I moved into another market.
2. I started writing out income goals for my business, what I wanted to make in 3 months, 6 months, a year. I put them up in the wall, somewhere I could see them everyday. Do you have goals for your affiliate business?
3. I decided to stop wasting money on ebooks that did not help me improve my ppc affiliate marketing efforts. I decide to focus on ONE thing and get REALLY good at it. In business they call this a core competency.
4. I hired a writer, and a web designer to design my sites and write the content. Once I had a good team in place my business profits skyrocketed to 7-figures. I will talk about this extensively in a future post.
5. I got a separate credit card for my business expenses, opened up a separate business account with my bank, incorporated my business as an LLC. If you have not done this, I would suggest doing it right away, even if you’re just starting.
6. Here’s a big one: I got an appointment calender, setup a daily & weekly to-do list, that I strictly adhere to. You’ve got to treat this business like a part-time job (or a full time job if you’re doing it full time). If you were working for a company (as an affiliate let’s just say), would your boss give you a big raise and promotion based on how much effort you put into your affiliate marketing business everyday, or would he fire you??

So ask yourself if your treating your business like a wrist watch salesman on the street corner or like the CEO of a multi-million dollar internet business?

PS On the upside, once you’ve worked hard over a period of a few years & have several solid campaigns going, that are setup PROPERLY for long-term profitability, you can choose to go into maintenance mode and cut back your workload and start a blog about affiliate marketing.