In the course of your Internet marketing journey, you might hit the occasional speed bump and find a plateau. You might identify with Josh who writes:

“Hi Andrew,

I’m an affiliate marketer and have been having success with my affiliate marketing efforts, I use PPC and free traffic means (primarily articles) to generate leads.

Lately, my sales have been stagnating…

How can I ensure more stability in my affiliate income?

Thanks.
Josh”

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My answer:

Having worked with a number of Internet marketing veterans, I’ve noticed a couple of best business practises that I’ve seen these successful and experienced marketers use.

• The Micromanaging trap

There’s the Internet marketers “day trader” mentality that you’d want to avoid.

It’s something I used to do when I first started out – typically seen in behavior like staying logged in to your affiliate account all day and hitting the refresh button every hour to see if more sales have come in.

If you’ve looked at how stock day traders work, they’re like human rats sitting in front of their computers, waiting for the stock to go up (or down) 1 or 2 “ticks” (bids) and doing a buy or sell order. This isn’t any way to run a business and you’d be chaining yourself to your computer.

If it’s a new campaign, you might want to check in once or twice a day.

If you’ve planned a campaign well, you can set it to run on autopilot and tweak it every day or 2 days.

• Regularity and consistency

It’s important to distinguish between revenue generating and non-revenue generating activity.

Some marketers who spend more time writing ebooks than actually practising what they preach might give you advice that is highly suspect. Do your own testing and tracking.

I have heard one highly experienced marketer suggest that you write and submit 20 articles to the major article directories and wait for the cash to come in.

From actual practise, I’ve found that it pays to submit enough articles to establish a presence in your niche area (maybe 5-10 articles), then drip feed another 2-3 articles every week. This ensures that your traffic is more regular. (imagine the analogy of subscribing to a newspaper and getting 50-60 issues in a single day, versus getting an issue every day…it’s pretty much common sense, isn’t it?)

• Testing and tracking

You need to be able to analyze the data your sites are generating and go beyond just gathering a bunch of keywords from Google Analytics, awstats, MyBlogLog Pro Stats, or whatever other analytics package you are using.

You need to intelligently put together a picture of your visitor profile, track where they’re coming from, and put together new traffic mechanisms, whether a new PPC ad group, to test that new channel.

If anything, I think a lot of new marketers fall prey to the idea that you can just set up a PPC campaign, let it run on autopilot, never touch it again and expect cash to come flowing in….nothing could be further from the truth.

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So your success in affiliate marketing has to walk a fine line between getting the urge to micromanage and fiddle with your campaigns every 5 mins, and the other extreme of setting it up, never doing further follow up and expecting something of a miracle.

Following the mantra of “test, track, test, track” will bring your campaigns to the next level.