3 Ways to Boost Your Affiliate Marketing ‘Gains’ By Spending Less Time In The Office

It seems as though most problem queries regarding Performance begin with “a friend” (A friend of mine is seeking advise about such and such… A friend of mine has a problem with this and that… It’s not for me, it’s for a friend, I swear”, etc.). Well, this particular problem just happens to fall into that very category.

Before you go speculating, his problems with performance was actually in the gym, not in the office, or any other room in the house for that matter – *ahem*. He told me that no matter how hard he pushed himself, no matter how many hours he put in, he just wasn’t getting the results he wanted. “It makes no difference how heavy I lift or how much time I spend in the gym”, he was saying, “I just don’t seem to be making any muscle gains”.

Eventually he came to the realisation he was spending TOO MUCH time in the gym. Somebody with a lot more experience told him one day that he was overloading during training and not giving his body the necessary rest-time needed between workouts; that spending less time in the gym and focusing on doing one thing well each time was key to success. And after a few months of more succinct training sessions, alongside downtime dedicated to aid muscle repair and growth, he was finally improving his performance in the gym and getting the results he wanted.

Whenever I hear of an affiliate marketer who is struggling with their performance – whether they are struggling to break through any performance plateaus or flat-out can’t get their affiliate business model off the ground – I always hark back to this story about my friend in the gym. Sometimes you can do more by doing less, ironically, and therein lies an affinity between the two. Here’s 3 ways to boost your affiliate marketing gains by spending less time in the office and promoting fewer offers.

1. Pull, don’t push your audience

Nobody joins a mailing list just to hear about third-party promotions.People want to receive something of genuine value and interest in their inboxes as well. The same thing goes for content on your website; if you aren’t offering fresh, unique articles and blog posts for users to read then you’re never going to keep them coming back to your site. And let’s not forget Google’s stance on penalising websites that fail to provide regularly updated and relevant content. In other words, you need to spend more time drawing people in than pushing offers and competitions.

Don’t get me wrong, creating high-quality content is still hard work (trust me) but it’s an area of your business that doesn’t need to rely solely on marketing strategies and heavy sales tactics.

And, while I’m thinking about it, a word on content-promotion ratios: It’s widely accepted as rule of thumb that for every affiliate offer you post on your website, you need to post three pieces of unique content (so so you have a rough estimation of what works best).

2. Recognise the importance of office downtime

When you take time out from the office, your productivity can increase. It’s the same with any job – generally speaking – but none more so than when you’re working for yourself, relying on your own initiative and creativity to get results.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a very long time either. Short breaks away from your workload can do wonders for cognitive thinking. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve struggled to get through productive knots in my own head – desperately seeking some solution to a problem or come up with an idea for a new blog post – only for those jumbled pieces to fall neatly into place and provide me with the answer I was looking for, after a walk away from my desk or a breath of fresh air.

3. Focus your efforts on doing one thing well

So much time and energy is wasted on trying to push offers not right for your audience and perfect marketing strategies that just aren’t going to work for you, for whatever reason. Instead of trying to do everything, focus your efforts on what you already know works well for you and aim to improve upon it.

This could mean limiting your mailing list in terms of age/gender/demographic and sticking to certain promotion types which align with your target market. It’s much more effective (and a lot less time consuming) to build a solid relationship with a marketable customer base and go from there. As opposed to tackling as many different customer types as you can think of, and thereby diluting the quality of your user-marketer rapport.