Latest posts by James Martell (see all)
- Building A Better Fathers Day With Gifts That Give Back - June 6, 2013
- The Simple Path To Google Rankings Success - January 14, 2013
- Google Rankings – The Gift That Keeps On Giving - November 12, 2012
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Last December my wife Arlene and I took a trip to the beautiful island of Maui to kick back and recharge ourselves. Taking time off is important. This business will let you spend 24/7 on it if you aren’t careful and you need to step away from it to keep your perspective and get out of the “moment” and have a chance to take a “long view” of things.
Maui has always been special for us because that’s where we recorded our first episode of the Affiliate Buzz podcast back in 2002. It’s also important because it proved to us that you can go on a “regular” vacation (a full 10 days) and not have your business fall apart. We worked an hour a day and were able to keep things rolling even when we had “primitive” tools to work with.
“Primitive tools.” That sounds so”¦primitive. But when you think back to 2002 affiliate marketing didn’t have near the tools that we have today. Here’s a short list of what didn’t exist then:
- Twitter (2007)
- YouTube (2005)
- Elance (2004)
- High speed internet connections
- WordPress
In fact the hotel we stayed at in Maui didn’t have access to the Internet so I used a little cyber café in Lahaina to get my work done. The routine then, like today was to spend about 1-2 hours in the morning working and then use the rest of the day to enjoy ourselves with all that Maui has to offer.
More tools means more capability means more things to do
We had a nice little business back in 2002 but when I think back upon how much time it took to create websites, publish articles and get those articles distributed I wonder how we survived. When WordPress came into its own it made life some much easier. Here was a platform that you could get up literally within minutes and more importantly, it included a content management system that was smart and incredibly easy to use.
Then the whole social media thing hit the internet and suddenly you could get something distributed to thousands of people in a matter of minutes.
New free organizational tools became available, technical programs for audio and video editing became easier to use and affiliate marketing in general had much more efficient and powerful tools to conduct business with.
Today an affiliate marketer can accomplish almost double the work accomplished in a day than the marketer of 2002. In theory that leaves a lot of free time but we all know that nature abhors a vacuum.
When the business becomes too big”¦who
you gonna call?
One of the biggest challenges in this business is being able to sustain growth. The more successful you become the more tasks there are to do. You need new content, you need to get the content distributed to get backlinks and you need to monitor comments to your blog postings and comments in forums. At the same time you have to keep focused on your marketing strategies, maintain a relationship with affiliate networks and keep your eye on new trends. In other words the better you are the more there is to do.
But not everything that you have to do really requires you personally. Much of the work can be handled effectively by a Virtual Assistant. I’ve been using the same Virtual Assistant for over three years now and not only do I trust her with much of the administrative tasks but I also rely on her to keep me on track with my own objectives.
Arlene handles almost all of our help desk plus takes care of her “Moms of kids with epilepsy” community and it’s a real handful. I finally talked her into using a VA to help her with her work load and she reluctantly accepted the idea.
Well she’s singing a new tune today. She now has VA working for her and she can’t believe how much more can be accomplished when you have a little help. And managing the her VA is a snap using Google Documents. Projects, project procedures and schedules are easy to share and track. Arlene also includes a scheduled Skype conversation each week to keep everyone on the same page.
Can you afford not to have a VA?
When you think about bringing on somebody to help with the business you almost always think about a marketer who is working his or her business full time. But think for a moment about people doing this on a part time basis.
How many people are coming home from a full time job and then spending all evening working at their “second job” in affiliate marketing. VAs are not expensive and you only buy the time that you need. For example, if you have a website that deals with starting an Internet business and you have a half dozen or so blogs that you guest post on, why not use a VA to do the formatting and the actual submission. This is a critical function but it’s not rocket science. It also can be very time consuming, time that you could put to better use even if it’s spending more time with your family.
Personally I don’t know what I would do without my VA. If I didn’t have that help my life would be far more stressed and I’m confident that something would slip through the crack that would have a negative impact on my business. In my mind, what I pay the VA actually increases my ROI so it’s not an expense but a revenue enhancer.
If you have any thoughts on this that you would like to share with us please leave a comment below.
