Affiliate Marketing – The Dangers of Treating it Like a Hobby

Posted on 26. Sep, 2010 by Aaron in IM Business

Found it so true this week when people say (whether you’re an affiliate, web designer or internet marketer or all three like me) don’t treat it like a hobby. There is good reason for this. If it’s a hobby your eyes aren’t firmly fixed on the bottom line. If you’re a business that is all you can think about.

As an example I’m going to tell you about a complete screw up of a day I had yesterday. It started off simple enough and I thought I’d finish on the weekend with a couple of training runs on the bike, but instead of my usual 100km Saturday training run, I spent 12 hours trying to fix something for a client instead.

If you want to make some real money in this business, that’s what you have to treat it as ….. A business, hobbies are something you do for fun and most of the time for free

Why? Or more importantly, why did this happen? I strayed from my tried and tested processes. Coming from a manufacturing background I have been involved with certain processes such as six sigma and lean. I’m sure most of the staff who were taught this with me have long forgotten the info now but for me it totally stuck. I run pretty much everything from my training on the bike to building a website (and I have set processes depending on which type of site I’m building too) but the long and short of it is I always without fail (apart from yesterday) plan, do and review.

So I do the job once, write up the processes involved, colour code what I think can be optimised then every time I do that same job I note down any improvements, everything is tested and optimised to the Nth degree. Then all that data is taken through into costing, which means I not only know if I’m hitting my desired hourly rate but also if the project or chunks of it are worth outsourcing.

Anyhow back to yesterday, I had a clients site almost ready to go. Put it in my shiny new reseller account and hey presto all looked good. Small problem!!! You could only see the site from my IP address, I’m still not too sure what happened but I’m suspecting it’s to do with when I connected my reseller account to my WHMCS account for billing. All the time I kept thinking I had the answer only to be confronted with another ‘cannot connect’ message when trying to view the site through a proxy, yet through my browser everything looked fine. Finally I accepted defeat and moved the whole site which was a heavily pimped out and modified WordPress site off my reseller account, I now need to ‘play and test’ this system when the pressure is off with my own sites before unleashing it onto my clients again, this was one huge lesson learned.

Even worse I have a course on setting up as a hosting Co that I’ve not had time to look at and put into action but took the ‘how hard can it be approach’ and tried to wing it …….. what an idiot!

If you’re always flying by the seat of your pants on projects with regards to the mechanics you will lose a hell of a lot of money. Or it’ll take to forever to build up a decent affiliate income. Point in case being I started the year building a few Amazon affiliate sites, the first couple took 2-3 hours each from registering the domain name to going live. Using the systems above I can bang out four every two and a half hours now and yep, even the niche selection process is mapped through an excel sheet so I can plug in results from current sites and map them to new niches by adding a few figures lowering my chances of failure every time I build a new site.

If you want to make some real money in this business, that’s what you have to treat it as ….. A business, hobbies are something you do for fun and most of the time for free.