I’ve no idea if this will become a regular feature or not but I, like many affiliates, miss Jeremy Enkes blog, especially his “motivational Monday” posts. They were always fun to read, and a great way to start off the week.
However I’ll give it a shot, with the acronym for these articles being TGIM.
Why TGIM?
Thank God It’s Monday.
Seriously, screw people who think it’s all about “TGIF”. For me, and hopefully every other internet marketer out there, Mondays are where it’s at!
I’m not sure about your situation, but Friday signals the end of the work week for me – and I hate it! I mean I’m not complaining – it’s great taking weekends off and spending time with my kids – but man, nothing beats the beginning of that work week!
Being able to sit down, get caught up on e-mails, be my own boss and choose what I want to work on? I love it! Love it love it love it!
One thing I really like to do is not check statistics on the weekend. It’s like a Monday ritual for me. Every Monday morning I:
– Wake up at 6am.
– Shower.
– Throw the kettle on.
– Run Statsremote(without checking stats yet)
– Take the dog for a walk.
– Make my tea.
– Sit down, relax, drink my tea and check the stats.
It’s nice to have rituals like that I find, and it gets me ready for the week ahead.
If you’re an internet marketer, full-time or part-time, and start to dread the work ahead of you? Then you’re doing it wrong.
Every week I’d like to give a little motivational tip – something I do that helps me to work better. This weeks tip…
Break Up The Workload
One thing I learned very early on in my affiliate career was that the worst thing for an internet marketer is a monotonous task, where you’re sitting there doing pretty much the exact same thing over and over.
Now in some cases – if it’s no-brainer work – then the best thing to do is pop on a movie or TV show while you do it. If you’re filling in values in a spreadsheet, adding tags to every post, or updating existing content with a sentence or two to keep it fresh, then it’s easy to do something like that with one part of your brain, while watching Bruce Willis rip everything up with the other part.
Unfortunately there’s a lot of tasks that you can’t really watch something while working, as they require your focus. For example, just this morning one of my content writers sent me over 100 articles to add to one of my websites.
I like to be the one that adds all the articles to my sites, and it can be quite a task. I’m pasting them into a template, adjusting the template for that article, adding the post to WordPress, adding tags, geo-coding etc – it’s a fair bit of work, and a job that requires full concentration.
Now on an article-by-article basis, it’s not so bad. I can probably do everything mentioned above in under 5 minutes. The problem is if I try to add multiple articles at once. I notice as it goes on the process gets slower, with me feeling there is “no end in sight”.
Even worse than that….
Distractions.
Distractions are the worst thing that can happen when we work from home – we decide to check out a forum or facebook to take a quick break, and an hour later we’ve forgotten what we want to do. This happens more often than not when it comes to monotonous tasks.
That’s why I’m telling you to break that work up.
Rather than sitting at your computer all day adding 100 articles, just add 2. 2 a day. Hell, even 1 a day! Break those tasks up, then they become much easier to do.
This is something you should do for all your work otherwise you’re just going to go crazy – especially those things that keep nagging at you, and bringing you down. Those 100+ domains you have parked? Start building 1 a week. 1 5-page website a week. Maybe it’ll get you motivated to do more on that website and maybe it won’t – but you’re breaking it up, doing something, and slowly but surely hacking away at those work tasks that keep you awake at night!
Why I Love Being An Affiliate #1…
For the typical 9-5er, meeting up with a business associate to talk work means a boring boardroom, stale donuts and weak coffee.
As an affiliate, it’s different. I recently met up with John Wright from GAFFG in Montreal for the weekend.
Our “weak coffee” was lots of beer, our “stale donuts” were blue waffles and our “boring boardroom” was Formula 1 Racing:
I love being an affiliate.
Have fun working, TGIM!