Don’t Talk About It, Be About It

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I’m about to drop some knowledge on you:

You can’t make money unless you do something.

Ok, maybe there IS one way...

Revolutionary concept, right? But inactivity is probably the number one reason most people in this industry fail. You can spend all day reading forums, blogs (especially this one), chatting on AIM or Skype, or reading ebooks, and in the end you’ll accomplish one thing – wasting time. Nobody is going to pay you to read an ebook or browse WickedFire. Sure, picking up some information on the hottest offers or best new traffic source is great, but that takes a few minutes. There’s no reason to browse every new thread on a forum.

Procrastination is your enemy. Pound that idea into your head now, before it becomes too much of an obstacle to overcome. Have an idea for a lander? Build it. Come up with a neat idea for a banner? Make it. See an offer that looks good? Run traffic at it. Take action, get paid. That’s essentially the foundation of this industry. The saying that comes to mind is “Fortune favors the swift”. Whenever a new offer shows promise, the first people to hit it hard will make the most money. When there is something trending in the media (like the recent hurricane), the first people to act will make bank. You want to be first. Barring that, you want to be involved on some level. Don’t read about it now and then bitch about not getting in on it when it’s dead in a month.

I’ve been in a slump for the past week or so. I made a grand total of zero new campaigns. I spent a lot of time getting reacquainted with my Xbox (Thank you, Deus Ex.) There’s no real reason why, I just got into a funk and didn’t bother to get myself out of it. Does that sound like you? Have you spent the past week/month/year sitting around, picking lint out of your navel and wondering why you’re still poor? I’m going to help you get out of that routine.

In a Skype chat last week, a friend of mine asked the group why he couldn’t get a profitable campaign going. A man you may know as The Angry Russian proceeded to inform him that if he’s not running campaigns, he won’t make money (it sounds so obvious when you put it that way, doesn’t it?) His advice was to create 5 small campaigns per day, for two weeks. If at the end of that period you haven’t found a winner, you need to reconsider a day job.

On the other end of the spectrum, my friend Strov over at ScotchAndSales has been preaching that you should make 1 good campaign per day. I believe his goal right now is 1 new campaign per day throughout September. That’s not a bad goal, it’s easy to attain and will cost lest to initially test than 5 per day for 2 weeks.

Either way the idea is to make small campaigns ($5-$10 budget per campaign per day) and hammer them out. The idea is to work in volume. If you throw enough shit at the wall, something is bound to stick. The shotgun approach may not be the one preferred by veteran affiliate marketers, but for someone starting out (or trying to get back to work after a long hiatus) it’s not a bad way to get some ideas out there. The real reason I recommend it is that after making so many campaigns you start to recognize good ideas and good offers, and the profitable campaigns will be that much easier to create at that point. Also, this method teaches you to deal with loss well. Every campaign won’t be a winner. You need to accept that now and move forward or you’ll never get anywhere.

Right now I am personally making 5 campaigns per day until I get back to normal. Realistically, I’m just hoping that forcing myself to hustle every day will put me back on my grind full time, and it’ll stop feeling like a chore to work again. I legitimately love what I do, as stressful and ridiculous as it can be sometimes, so the sooner I get back to that mindset the happier I’ll be.

My advice to you: stop playing Minecraft, stop browsing AffBuzz, and go make some campaigns. Pick a traffic source, pick some offers, and make some moves.