Don't routine your work and stop further development

When you’re running an affiliate business, it’s easy to get caught up in the minutiae. On any given day, you have banners to swap out, stats to check, and content to update. If you run a site with a membership base, you probably also have dozens of emails to answer and queries to deal with. It can be easy to fall into a routine of spending eight hours a day on these tasks, without giving much thought to where your business is headed or spending time developing new marketing strategies. Unfortunately, you’re probably not going to increase your monthly commissions this way. So, what to do?

Study up with industry publications
One of the great things about being an affiliate is the number of easily accessible resources available to you. You can use these to learn more about the industry you’re promoting within, and as inspiration for new ways you can grow your business.

Printed publications are a good place to start. Reading CAP Magazine, for example, lets you find out what’s happening in the industry and how it might affect you as an affiliate. Keeping on top of this information can have a significant effect on your bottom line, too. In the affiliate survey that Income Access conducted this past summer, we found that affiliates who regularly read top industry magazines were more likely to report higher earnings. To illustrate, 86% of the affiliates we surveyed who make under £3,000 a year in commissions reported never reading CAP Magazine, whereas over 95% of affiliates making £60,000 or more a year always do!


Leverage the right online tools
In addition to offline reading material, there are plenty of online tools you can use to make sure you don’t miss out on crucial industry happenings and developments. For example, RSS readers (also called RSS aggregators) let you subscribe to the RSS feeds for various sites and have their latest content delivered to your reader as soon as it’s released. You might want to subscribe to the feeds for your favourite affiliate marketing blogs or search engine optimization sites, for example, saving you from manually visiting each of them every day.

You can also use Google Alerts to track news on any topic that interests you. If you wanted to know whenever anyone mentions “affiliate link cloaking” on a news site or blog, for example, you could set up a Google Alert for this search term. You’ll receive an email alerting you to news on your topics of interest every time it pops up on the web. Try it out at http://www.google.com/alerts.

You can also use the power of online news to your own promotional advantage. Launching a new affiliate site, or a fresh site functionality? Why not write and release a press release about it? Services such as PRWeb.com let you do so at relatively reasonable prices, and you can track the exposure your release gets using their visibility statistics. Your press release might even get the attention of a journalist looking to write a column on online poker or affiliate marketing.

Getting serious about your business
Renowned small business expert Michael Gerber has said that you have to work ON your business – not in it. The first step in taking control of your affiliate business simply requires that you change your approach. When you sit down every day to start working on your sites, resist the urge to dive right into your inbox or begin tweaking pages. It’s important to spend some time coming up with new marketing and business strategies, evaluating them, and setting out goals for the day, week, and month.

Suggested research areas:
• New partnerships
• Fresh ways to promote your site
• PPC strategy tweaks
• Incorporating sales copywriting techniques into your content
• Where you want to be in terms of site visitors, conversion rates, or commission in X weeks or months
• New web analytics technologies
• Getting a time-saving piece of software up and running
• SEO tactics
• Evaluation of which brands are converting and which aren’t on your site

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