Of course, running your own business means you have to work even when you don’t want to. So, how do you motivate yourself to keep going? Here are a few suggestions…

Think of the negative

This is a big motivator for me. Whenever you’re feeling like skipping out on work, think of the negative consequences of doing so. Would it mean less money for bills? Less money for going out? Not being able to take time of later when you really needed to?

Stop barganing

Does this sound familiar?

“I’ll watch the game right now, and then do those campaigns later”…
“Hmm..now I’m tired from stuffing myself and drinking…I’ll just do double the number of campaigns tomorrow.”

We all know what happens ‘tomorrow’. Running your own business isn’t like playing ‘let’s make a deal’. The more you bargain with yourself, the less successful you will be. To combat this, make a set number of campaigns you are going to work on every day and stick to it no matter what. This will really help you understand that everything is a tradeoff. If you watch a game for 3 hours, that might be 3 more hours that you have to stay up building campaigns.

 Get some fresh air or exercise

Even a short walk around the block can kind of ‘reset’ your brain and body, and make it easier to get into work mode. Next time you find yourself staring aimlessly at your computer screen, try a quick walk or some pushups to find some motivation.

Focus on what you have to do

Sometimes working too much when you can’t get into will lead to burnout. Instead of always pushing  yourself, try completing the tasks that are the most important for that day then taking some time off. Getting away from the computer for even a 1/2 day can mean extra productivity when you return.

Set a schedule

When you had a job, you had to get there at a certain time and work a specified number of hours. People working for themselves often don’t stick to a schedule which is a straight road to being unproductive. Human’s need habit and structure..we just function better that way. Try setting a schedule for yourself and stick to it. Eventually, it will be easier to do work when you don’t feel like it because it’s part of the schedule.

Everyone who runs their own business struggles with motivation from time to time. Try adapting some of these strategies and see if they help. If you have any good tips feel free to leave a comment!

As most of you know, we changed our name from PPV Playbook to Aff Playbook. This change reflects the fact that the forum has tons of content in addition to PPV. I was a little nervous about the name change because ‘PPV Playbook’ was so well branded. I really wanted to not appear just focused on PPV however, so decided to pull the trigger. The name change was really well received and I’m glad we did it.

2011 saw solid growth of the forum and each month we set a new record. One of the things I am most proud of is all the success stories to come out of the forum. We had people posting everything from their first $1 of profit, into the thousands. Here are just a few…

What’s even more impressive is the people whose lives have been changed as a result of joining the forum. That might sound a little cheesy I know but I meet a lot of affiliates at shows who tell me how they got their start on the forum.

We continued to deliver awesome case studies & lessons. It was really cool that we had so many members sharing their case studies too. It’s always great to get ideas from multiple sources. We didn’t just have your run of the mill ‘My campaign that made blah blah on blah blah traffic source’ type case studies. We had some of those sure, but we also had case studies on building email lists, direct mail, product creation, offline marketing, and even manufacturing. Here are a few examples…

Another addition in 2011 I am really excited about, is the addition of the adult marketing section. This section is lead by an adult industry veteran, and the content is really great!

We continued our webinars and had some great guests like Traffic Vance…

Corey continued to develop the Affportal toolset with great new additions like the jQuery landing page generator. We also got some API access to build out the SEO toolset. Corey has a new tool coming out (preview in the forum) that I can’t talk about publicly, but it’s something that everyone is going to want. Funny story – I’ve know Corey for years, yet only met him for the first time in person at the last ASE!

Speaking of ASE, we had a lot of great meetups  – ASW, adtech SF, ASE. We do them at most of the major shows and they are always a great time. Instead of doing the loud music and activities, we usually keep it mellow with drinks and networking. People love these events because they can actually hear each other and talk. I know a few people who have developed very profitable partnerships from meeting at our parties.

If you’re going to be as ASW, you should come to our celebrity Penthouse meetup.

2011 was also the year everyone decided they were going to start a forum. This was …flattering? Funny? Entertaining none the less. Some people found out that Vbulletin + a few case studies wasn’t quite the easy money they hoped.

I’ll take it as a compliment if I make running a forum look easy, because it’s anything but. To do it well anyway. The increased number of forums actually helped solidify what Aff Playbook is all about. Based on all the comments I received, people realized that Aff Playbook is full of helpful people who are interested in building a real business.

In 2011 I started some new businesses. Some went well, but some totally bombed. I’m going to be documenting those in the forum. I think you can learn as much by failures (and often MORE) than you can from success. One of my most recent ventures has some potential venture capital funding. We are really excited about this and it will also open up a whole new area of growth for the forum.

Thanks & Stuff

I have a lot of people to thank for all their help this last year. In no particular order..

My friend Mark from CTR Tard did numerous projects for me and helped me out of a few technical jams. He helped finish the move to Aff Playbook, and got the mobile version of the forum working.

Corey for bouncing ideas around with me. We’ve had a lot of good ideas, some bad ideas, and everything in between. I’m glad we get along so well.

My awesome mods (some who have come and gone) Lee, Tracy, Jon, Mike, Joe, Mark, Andrew, Brian. I hope you guys know how much I appreciate all the help. I know you are busy running your own businesses and can’t always post, but I really appreciate all the help.

My cats, who somehow became super affiliates and Affbuzz mascots. I would also like to say thanks to my friend Justin from Affbuzz. He was one of my first good friends in the industry and has helped me a lot.

Adam Bunch who has helped out in the forum (when he feels like it) and our mastermind sessions. It seriously wasn’t too long ago that Adam was a forum member struggling for success. He told me “I’m just going to build 5 campaigns every single day from now on”, and it wasn’t too long before his income grew exponentially.

I also want to thank all my members for helping grow the forum. I try to help you guys as much as I can whether it’s telling you to suck it up keep going with a campaign, or trying to make the content in the forum the best it can be.

2012

2012 is going to be the biggest year for the forum yet. I’m not going to outline everything just yet, but you won’t want to miss this. We’ll have the usual great case studies, lessons, and webinars, but even more resources and opportunities for members to grow their business beyond what most affiliates achieve.

Have a great New Year!

This isn’t going to be the usual ‘improve your CTR’ or ‘case study’ post, and I know it might not appeal to a lot of people. This will however help you make more money in the long run.

What we do for a living is great. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Unfortunately, sitting at the computer for long hours is one of the worst things you can do for your back. The human body was designed to move, and not sit at a desk all day. If you don’t have back, neck, shoulder, or wrist pain that’s great! If you work at the computer for years and years, you probably will eventually if you don’t do something about it.

The Problem

There are many different back problems. Some of the more common include:

Herniated discs

This is when the disc between your vertebrates bulges to one side. The protective coating surrounding the disc contents can also rupture which is called an annular tear. These can occur from the low back all the way up to the neck.

Degenerative disc disease

This isn’t really a ‘disease’ but a condition where the discs degenerate to the point of causing painful symptoms.

Sciatica

Sciatica is a condition where the nerves coming out of the spinal column in the low back get irritated, or compressed. It can cause pain in the back as well as the legs.

There are many other problems ranging from muscle spasms to more serious conditions. It’s always a good idea to get lingering back pain checked out by a doctor.

The Solution

There are a ton of ‘solutions’ for back pain ranging from supplements to doctors, devices and everything in between. I’m only going to talk about a few that I’ve either got relief from or a good number of people have.

Since there are so many causes of back pain, one treatment might work for one person and not another.

1. Get up and move around

Many experts think that back pain is just a symptom of not moving enough. We move WAY less than our ancestors did, and also have a lot more health problems.

So, one of the easiest solutions might be to just get out of your chair for a break regularly. Regular exercise and maintaining a healthy weight can go a long way to preventing and relieving back pain also.

2. Accupuncture

A lot of people get relief from acupuncture. The needles don’t hurt so don’t worry about that. A good place to find a local practitioner is Yelp.

3.  Inversion therapy

This can be particularly helpful for low back pain, herniated discs, and pinched nerves. Teeter makes really good products for this.

4. Pilates and Yoga

Many people swear by these. They do work for some, but you have to be very careful depending on your condition. The amount of forward flexion in yoga can exacerbate symptoms. The best DVD I’ve found is this one. It only takes about 20 min, and seems really effective.

5. Massage

You can go somewhere and get this done, or invest in a self massager. These can range from the little handheld gadgets to full body massage chairs.

6. The Egoscue method

This is a really popular technique that almost always gets positive reviews from people. It’s a series of exercises/stretches done in a particular order. You can watch a video showing a few of the exercises here

This Egoscue book has almost 300 5 star reviews on Amazon, and is worth checking out.

More information on the official website

Conclusion

Like I said, this isn’t something that’s going to make you more money tomorrow. It will absolutely make you more money in the future when you don’t lose work time to back problems. Even if you don’t have back or neck problems now, a little prevention is MUCH easier than trying to fix an existing problem.

Even if your back just hurts a little, or gets sore, etc…taking the time to take care of it can really boost your energy and productivity.

Ok, of course I’m not closing!! What I am doing is changing the name. This was a tough decision but we have so much info in addition to PPV that I wanted to rename it something that reflected that.

So with that said, over the next few days we will be transitioning to the new name of AffPlaybook.com

Everything will remain the same with how the forum is run, and the content we deliver. We have big plans for the continued growth of the forum in many areas, and can’t wait to show you guys what we have in store.

I don’t often say things like this publicly but this forum is simply one of the best resources for affiliate marketers. We have more case studies and success stories, and successful affiliates than any other community I know of. I also love how respectful everyone is of each other, and the community feel we have created.

If you think we’ve done a good job up to this point, just wait until you see what we have in store.

Most of the time when someone says to me ‘I’m not as successful as I should be’ or ‘I’m trying really hard but I’m not making any money’ it’s pretty easy to spot the problem. Often, those affiliates aren’t really trying as hard as they think they are or doing a ton of little $5/day budget campaigns without enough traffic to make any decisions on. Another big problem is jumping around too much. Affiliates jump from one traffic source and niche to another without ever really learning how to be successful in one area before moving on.

This blog post is about something a little different though. This is about the affiliates who appear to be doing everything ‘right’ yet are still failing. I’ve seen people who really are putting a lot of effort in and are intelligent, yet can’t quite seem to make it work.

When you talk to these affiliates, it’s not always easy to tell why they are failing. On the surface, it seems like they are doing everything right. However, when you start looking at their campaigns and talking to them,  some things become apparent.

When an affiliate looks like they are doing everything right but still failing, it’s usually because they are doing one or all of the following:

1. Out smarting themselves. Affiliates can be really smart, but that doesn’t always translate into how they run their campaigns. Sometimes people really over think campaigns. They come up with some really clever ‘angle’ or basically try to reinvent the wheel, thinking this stroke of brilliance will shoot them into success.

The issue here is that you really don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Innovate yes, but most of your successful campaigns will be fairly simple. Take a case study, idea, or tip and put a spin on it to make it your own.

2. Not listening to advice. Affiliates often ask for, and get good advice but don’t do anything with it. This ties into the first point a little bit; some have the mindset that they know best and don’t want to admit their ideas aren’t working. Some people really struggle with this without even realizing it.

To combat this, you need to listen to successful affiliates and try to take their advice. Part of this is admitting that you don’t always have the best ideas or could be doing something ‘wrong’ and some people unconsciously don’t want to accept this.

3. Not really trying as hard at they think they are. Sometimes it appears that affiliates are doing a lot of work and putting a lot of effort it, but then you take a look at what they are doing and they actually aren’t accomplishing much. Working 15 hours a day sounds cool, but few people can actually be productive for that many hours.

Making a schedule and to do list can go a long way to getting more actual work done. Schedule blocks of time to accomplish certain tasks, and try to stick to it.

4. Taking on too many projects. Really successful affiliates usually stick to one niche and one traffic source. I often see affiliates who try to keep a ton of different projects running at once. This can work when you are more experienced and can outsource more, but in the beginning it’s best to focus.

Focusing on one traffic source and niche will actually help you in all your marketing efforts and future projects. You learn a lot by really studying a niche in and out.

5. Not analyzing past efforts enough. Affiliates don’t always keep a record of what they’ve done. When they start doing this and look back at what they did over the month, they are often surprised by what they see. It’s really easy to get into habits and do the same things over and over again. Running campaigns is no different.

Affiliates really need to analyze whats working and whats not. Not only from a stats standpoint, but from from an overall business strategy standpoint. Are they doing the same things over and over again? Are they building all their landing pages the same way? Picking offers the same way? Collecting targets to bid on the same way?

If something isn’t working, really step back and analyze what you have been doing. See if you can find anything you have been doing over and over, where you could try something new. Sometimes that’s all it takes to turn things around.

If you feel like you are ‘doing everything right’ and yet not making any progress, see if one of these scenarios might apply to your situation.

Your affiliate manager might suck if…

1. You hear the toilet flush when talking to them on the phone

Yeah, this happened. Imagine the conversation going something like this.

Affiliate manager: “Yeah, this offer is doing pretty well and……….”
Me: “Sorry, what? I couldn’t hear you over the toilet flushing.”

2. They light up over Skype calls

This happened to a friend of mine, then I was telling someone else the story and it happened to someone they knew too (same affiliate manger). Now, I’m open minded but that’s probably not the most professional thing, especially when you don’t know the person.

3. They send you 10 funny videos but can’t place your pixel

I know a few like this actually. You chat, share a few laughs and they are really good about getting back to you…until you ask them to do something like place a pixel, and the disappear for a day.

4. They try to take you away from another AM

Recently, I messaged an AM I used to work with a few years ago to see where they were working now. They told me the network and I said ‘Oh cool, I didn’t know that. I work with you guys already and so and so is my AM’. A couple hours later I get a message from my AM at that network (who I had worked with for a long time) if she did something wrong and why I asked to be switched to this other guy.

Well, I definitely hadn’t asked to switch but apparently this old AM of mine took it upon himself to go to the head of the company and say that I wanted to switch to him because we used to work together. I sent an email to the head of the company explaining that this guy was a giant douche.

5. They try to bring you into their MLM business

I know someone who’s AM was always trying to recruit him into their offline AM business..eek.

6. They tell you about someone’s campaign

If they’re telling you about others, they’re telling others about your campaigns too. . This does happen, so be careful what you share.

7. They flirt with you when you are making money, but stop the minute you aren’t

It’s great when a cute girl flirts with you..until you realize she only likes you for your conversions. This story is really common but a  lot of affiliates still fall for it.

8. Don’t tell you when an offer is paused

This sucks…I’ve dropped networks when an AM slacks on this. When you have traffic running to an offer you have to get notified asap when it gets paused, and get credited if you weren’t told in a reasonable amount of time.

I would love to hear some more stories if anyone has them so feel free to share in the comments!

Affiliates often get blindly loyal to one affiliate network, which can actually really put a damper on their progress. This is pretty normal for most affiliates but

Some of the reasons affiliates stick with one network

- You become friends with your AM and feel loyal to them.

- You go to a party thrown by them at ASW,or get taken out to dinner.

- You just run there because ‘everybody’ says it’s such a great network, or it’s the one you hear about all the time.

Those aren’t necessarily bad reasons, but business is business and ultimately it’s not going to help you build your business if you don’t try an offer at another network because you feel like you’re cheating on your AM or something.

Why would an offer convert differently at another network?

I get asked this question a lot, and I can totally understand why. It doesn’t seem like an offer should perform any different on another network. I mean, it’s the same offer right? Here are a couple reasons that offers can convert better on one network vs. another.

1. Redirect speeds

Redirect speeds are basically how fast the traffic goes from your link, through the CPA networks tracking system to the offer. Redirect speed can be affected by things like hosting, type of tracking platform the network uses, etc.

2. Brokered networks

A ‘brokered’ network is one that runs it’s offers from another network. Network ‘A’ might have a diet offer, and network ‘B’ basically brokers that offer and it’s publishers run it. If you think about that in terms of the redirect speeds, you can see a potential problem.

When you run an offer from a network that is brokered from another, it has to go through network A, to Network B then to the offer. This can really slow things down and cause the offer page to take longer to load. This is also an opportunity for cookies or tracking to drop off which can result in lower conversions.

Did you also know that there are brokered, brokered networks?  These are networks that broker their offers from another network who is already brokering offers.

3. Scrubbing

Ah, the dreaded scrubbing. I want to share something a little different than you may have heard about scrubbing though. What some affiliates don’t realize is that the advertiser can scrub the CPA network. Why does this happen? Usually because the network is sending bad quality. Some advertisers have a formula for this like ‘if a CPA network has promoted for x number of days with a conversion rate below y, the scrub rate increases to z. The advertisers aren’t necessarily out to screw anyone, sometimes they need to set a scrub rate to remain profitable.

So basically, if a CPA network is sending crap traffic to an offer, there is  a chance they could be getting scrubbed. How do you know? Well, you don’t really which is why I recommend split testing your offer across networks.

I’ll share the results of a test I did recently

This was the exact same offer and offer page on 3 different networks. The traffic source, keywords/targets, etc. did not change during this test. This was set up in CPV Lab to rotate these 3 networks evenly.

Network A – Conversion rate 4.35

Network B – Conversion rate 6.49%

Network C – Conversion rate 3.70%

You can see the conversion rates varied a lot. I see this all the time when I split test offers like this. When I see something like this I’m pretty direct with the network I don’t run it on, and tell them exactly why. No reason to hide, or feel guilty…this is just about the bottom line. Some really honest networks have even suggested I run an offer somewhere else if they know a similar offer is doing better.

Those are my ideas about why it’s so important to split test networks. I’m curious to hear if you guys have seen similar, or if you haven’t split tested this yet?

Let me start with a little story. Once upon a time, before the PPV Playbook days, I was hired to do some consulting for a marketing forum. The forum had a lot of members but had lost a little steam and people just weren’t posting as much. My first ‘day on the job’ we had a conference call to talk about a game plan and what we would be doing in the forum.

A suggestion I had was to create an off topic section of the forum. Nobody understood what I meant exactly by an off topic section (not sure why) so I explained that it would be just one small section of the forum where we could talk about things like favorite tv shows, funny news headlines, or even industry gossip. Nobody really said much about my idea.

The next day I learned that I was almost ‘fired’ from this project for suggesting such a thing. Apparently they thought this was the most idiotic idea they had ever heard of. I tried to explain the idea behind an off topic section was to get people to post, get them to interact with other members, and make the forum a place people wanted to log in and hang out. This idea was completely lost on them so I gave up. Things didn’t turn out so well for them. Not just because they didn’t have an off topic section obviously. It was really that the reason they couldn’t understand why that section would be important translated into all areas of their business.

I haven’t got many complaints about my own forum but it cracks me up that a couple of the ones I have got were about this very issue. One person couldn’t believe I was posting about music or something when I should be posting only marketing info. Somehow the fact that number of these posts are so small compared to marketing related discussions gets lost.

S0, with that in mind I’ll leave you with another story (I’m changing the details a little to respect people’s privacy but this actually did happen). Once upon a time in the PPV Playbook forum there was a post about people’s favorite TV shows. In that thread someone posted how they liked this really old, obscure show nobody had heard of. Another member came along who had heard of it and the two started a dialogue on IM. Long story short, through the friendship they developed, ended up adding tens of thousands of dollars to their income as a result of working together. Of course, they also made a new friend which could be considered priceless.

The party got off to an interesting start when one of the first guest to show up was an elderly woman who made a beeline to the bar.

I have no idea who she was and she didn’t have any idea what the forum or affiliate marketing was (I learned this while getting blasted with her red wine and bar peanut breath). She said all her friends were coming so for a while I was worried the meetup was going to look like a senior citizens convention. Fortunately she only had 1 other friend come lol.

The Dream Marriage candy bar courtesy of Stefanie

The candy bar seemed to be Adam’s favorite spot but he assured us he would do double P90x afterward

View from the balcony looking in

Thanks to everyone who came!!

This reminds me of a really well known blackhat seo guy I used to be friends with and what he told me one time; Apparently tons of people would come to him for help with questions about site structure, indexing, etc, etc, etc. and he said his answer 99% of the time was just that they needed to build more links. That was it, forget everything and build more links.

Going back to Adam’s advice above…I agree 100% that simply building more campaigns will make you progress faster and further than almost anything else. I’m not saying don’t ask questions or anything at all, just not matter what build new campaigns every day.

So, I want to see how many of you are up for a 30 day experiment. For the next 30 days, commit to building at least 1 campaign and up to 5 campaigns each day. A new campaign could mean simply taking a campaign you already have running and moving it to a new traffic source, or doing the same campaign in a different country. It doesn’t always have to mean building a totally new campaign from scratch. A campaign should not be taking you days to launch. If it is, let me know and let’s talk about your approach.

Don’t over complicate this…the point isn’t to make perfect campaigns, just to make campaigns.

If you want to keep track of this yourself that’s cool..get a calendar or something and cross out every day you build x amount of campaigns every day for the next 30 days. We started a thread in the forum where people can post each day the # of campaigns they make (myself included). It’s going to be really interesting to see how many people follow through with this. I will report back on that one!

I don’t know if many people will do this but it is probably the one thing I can recommend doing that would take you to the next level.