Staying Focused on Your Affiliate Marketing Plan

Sorry for missing a few blogs...Jury Duty, enough said!

While sitting on Jury Duty, I had plenty of time to think about life, and included in that is affiliate marketing. I came to a bit of a revelation about my current campaign...I was losing my focus! I have done this before, and I am glad that with experience that I am a bit more wise to pick-up on this mistake early on (though, I feel that I have already wasted a lot of time and money on this mistake). So what happened?

I originally developed a "plan" for this campaign. I did not set up dates, but rather, a sequence of events I wanted to follow. The first few steps of my plan were as follows:

1) Find, Research, and Pick a Product to Promote (DONE!)

2) Develop my promotion blog (DONE!)

3) Get my blog seen through search engine submissions, RSS feeds, and signatures to forum and blog responses. (75% DONE)

4) Pay-Per-Click Campaigns for targeted promotion (CRASHING!)

Wait a minute! PPC campaign? I haven't mentioned PPC campaign yet? What happened? Well, I got excited and over-anxious! In the process of step three, I was curious and checked out my Clickbank account and found that I was actually getting a few sales. In affiliate marketing, getting your first few sales on your product is almost as good as sex! The adrenaline was high, and I was eager to make this campaign work faster for me! That is when I started a few campaigns on several different PPC sites in haste. My impressions went up considerable, but my sales actually dropped and my PPC costs were going through the roof! Any money that I made prior to this is now history.

Two main lessons have come from this:

1) Haste Makes Waste! - especially when it comes to pay-per-click campaigns. To develop a proper campaign in PPC's require time, research and patience. Throwing out a few popular keywords without any thought is just asking for trouble (and a hole in your pocket-book!)

2) Stick to the Game Plan! - Don't let your emotions (and sales) get the better of you. For that matter, if things go south (and sales are not what you expect), still stick to your game plan. Again, you may feel desperate and start doing things that will only make things worse.

So for now, I am going to finish my "free promotion" plan and begin to research keywords and develop my PPC campaigns in a smart manner, not an excited or desperate manner! Stay tuned!