Planning Ahead to Increase Prouctivity & Profits

Make More Money By Having A Plan

As Luke and I are beginning to figure out as we get more and more familiar and comfortable in the world of affiliate marketing it is critical to know what you are doing 3 steps ahead of time. The landscape of hot offers changes at a very rapid pace and so it is critical to have a plan in place not only for whichever offers you are promoting at the moment, but also what your next couple of moves are as well. If you have a solid plan in place, you’ll always be working towards your next goal and generating income. Opertaing a rudderless ship like we were for a little while is a great way to see gaps in your income.

Making a Battle Plan

We quickly realized a few months back that income streams in affiliate marketing can be extremely variable. One week you are raking in money hand over fist, and the next week the profits all but dry up. This is the danger in having a limited number of modes for generating income and why we have started to diversify our earnings streams by branching out a bit. We were promoting a particular dating offer that was doing really well for us but the advertiser decided to pull the offer and we didn’t really have a solid back-up in place at that time leaving us with a serious gap in our earnings. We knew at that point that we needed to have a battle plan for our business and got to work hammering one out.

Divide & Conquer

Since the two of us work together but live in different locations and have different schedules, it made sense for us to divide up the tasks each of us will be working on and set dates to check in with each other on progress. This allows us to each be working towards our new goals over the course of a week and then when we check in we use some of that time to outline our work for the next week or so. As part of our divide and conquer strategy we also started to implement a lot more future planning so that we constantly have campaigns running and other ideas being developed in the background. Rarely do he and I work on the same project simultaneously so that we can have as many different opportunities developed to make money online as possible. We are hoping that this process of planning ahead will lead us to a very profitable and productive 2009.

Implementing your own plan

Many of you won’t have the advantage of working with a business partner right away, or at all, but that doesn’t mean you can’t and shouldn’t make a plan for your online business. In fact, it is often even more critical to plan ahead when you are working alone since you are the only one holding yourself accountable. Making a weekly, monthly or even yearly goals list for yourself and then structuring your work around those goals is an excellent way to stay focused, productive and profitable since if you’ve planned correctly you’ll always have several streams of income working for you.

If you aren’t in the business of planning ahead, you should make an effort to start 2009 off on the right foot buy planning your online plan of attack for one month and see how much more productive you can be. My guess is it will cut down on wasted time, focus your efforts more and provide opportunities for self-evaluation and improvement. Good luck!