Added to that, with Google AdWords Quality Score, the search network is a much harder game to play, compared to before.

While some of these “facts” have some truth to them, your success as an affiliate marketer mirror that of a brick-and-mortar entrepreneur. If every possible restaurant concept has already been created, why bother starting another?

If anything, this question is pretty self-reflective. If life is so hard, why bother getting out of bed every morning? There’s opportunity to be found. But only if you look hard enough.

If you’ve been studying the trends in CPA offers, you’ll notice that while ringtones might not be as hot as they used to be, the new class of IQ quizzes and mobile downloads for cell phones has expanded the range of offers available.

Ditto for weight loss, where Resveratrol (lots of typo traffic potential there) is coming onto the market (although still not quite near the red-hot demand for Acai).

With dating, the field has expanded beyond plain vanilla dating to include several sub-segments, eg: Asian dating, black dating, divorcee dating, etc.

Added to the fact is that using tools like Google Trends, Google Insights and keyword tools will show you a number of popular queries for which there isn’t a solution or offer available now. Which means you can either:

• Wait for someone to develop and offer and hope to be one of the early marketers to jump in on the trend
• You can join the moaners to complain about not being one of the “big boys” (a phrase recently used by a “guru” to indulge in self-victimization)
• You can spring the capital to develop the offer yourself and list it on one of the CPA networks
• Failing to have the cash yourself, you can find a partner who will fund the project, while you contribute the “sweat equity”

A friend once said “If you sit at the table of life, expecting success to be handed to you on a silver platter, you will be waiting a very long time”.

Now, get back to work.

Having been on the Friday Podcast series before, you can check out his first podcast interview.

With his experience as an affiliate and affiliate manager, Miles has insights into the affiliate industry which has helped him develop a set of strategies to “work less and earn more”.

In this Friday Podcast, Miles spoke about:

• How to grow your business
• How to focus on what’s important and high value within your organization
• Budgeting how much to spend on scaling your business
• How to train your employees and outsourcers efficiently
• What criteria and considerations to factor in as you’re scaling your business

Check out the podcast below:

Links:

• Miles Blog
• Miles on Twitter
• 37Signals

Originating as a study that showed 20% of Italy’s population held 80% of its wealth, the concept of Pareto Efficiency (also known as the Pareto principle or 80-20 rule) introduced the idea of efficiency into everything you do. It’s not just enough to work hard, you need to work smart too.

Being (or wanting) to be a lazy affiliate marketer, it’s necessary to get a handle on this concept, especially if you want to hit your 2009 goals (it’s almost the end of January, you did set them, didn’t you?)

So this is your brain and the stuff you can work on every day:

I’d go one step further to suggest that working in “internet time”, the 90-10 rule applies.

A merely 10% of your efforts are going to be responsible for 90% of the results you get, because of the vastness of the internet, the efficiency of technology like email marketing, PPC, social media and the fact that analytics and conversion tracking allow you to position with your marketing efforts with laser-like precision.

The bottomline is that you can get by with a minimum of effort and survive at subsistence-level online income, or you can focus on what’s going to get your results and act on it.

Let’s look at what WON’T get you your dream home, dream car or (fill in your preferred goal):

• Checking out your friend’s friend network on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace
• Reading forums for some new “trick” to try to add to your existing campaigns
• Answering email (unless it’s related to getting your payouts increased or getting into an exclusive offer while the network is testing it)
• Creating a prettier social network avatar
• Browsing Flickr
• Checking Twitter, plurk, friendfeed every 5 mins
• Watching youtube, metacafe, revver, viddler for “research” or “education”
• Doing keyword research and then doing nothing about it

The key to getting what you want is to take aggressive action. It’s ok to do something and fail and learn from it. It’s another thing to come up with an idea, spend a couple of days working on it, possibly running a little bit of traffic to an offer and then deciding it doesn’t work and killing it before trying out some new trick.

The fact is that persistence pays off. The guys who are more successful in the affiliate business and internet marketing in general are the guys who try more “stuff”, and conversely “fail” more too.

If your chances of success in anything you do online is 30% (on a conservative basis) then it means that out of every 10 things you do, 3 will work. Or to reduce it further, one out of every 3 things you do will succeed.

Given that logic, some will try one thing at a time and hope that it’s within the 33% success parameter.

Still others will keep doing at least 1 or 2 new things each day and keep working at it, knowing that the new winner is just around the corner.

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Knowing what you know up to this point, what’s your approach to 2009 going to be?