When you work for yourself, it’s easy to fall into the trap of procrastination. I’ve a victim of it, myself. But one way to combat it is by creating a schedule and sticking with it. Here are a few tips which may help you do just that.
There’s a good chance that if affiliate marketing or online marketing isn’t your full-time business, you have another job to worry about; that other job will limit how much time you can devote to growing your affiliate business. To get a better idea of what time you have available and when, for the next 72 hours (3 days), take careful note of how your time is spent.
Once you know how you spend your time, you can easily see where you’re wasting time and where your time slot can’t budge. It will also show you when you’re most creative and alert. Those are the times when you’ll want to sneak in some business development.
You can do that by setting aside chunks of time (think 30 minutes) to developing some aspect of your business. For instance, if you know you need to write articles for a newly developed site, use one session to map out your planned articles, another to write them, and another to schedule them for publication on the site.
The beauty of WordPress is that you can schedule your posts and articles to publish when you’d prefer rather than immediately. So there’s really no good excuse for not having a regularly updated website.
But sometimes a little extra motivation may help, and that’s when you need to bargain with yourself–even better if you can rope someone into holding you accountable. One thing that helps me is to draw up a contract with specific terms in bullet point (i.e. I will publish 10 articles per week on each website, etc.), and my reward if I stick to it. Yes, it’s important to reward oneself. Then I print off two copies.
One copy gets put somewhere I’ll see it often throughout my day, and another gets filed away with a trusted friend who nudges me every week to see if I’m sticking to my contract. Soon enough, working on your site will become a habit and you can move on to drafting a new contract with yourself.