Diary of an Affiliate Marketer
What a bad week I’ve had this week! As many of you will know I set up a small business blueprint of my task, targets and goals for the rest of 2009 and beyond. I did the exercise after listening to Zig Ziglar on James Martell’s podcast which was first broadcast on January 1st 2005.
Even though I appreciate that I have set myself aggressive targets it’s still disappointing when I don’t achieve them and this week I find myself achieving only 56% of my total target. Well, that’s the negative part out of the way because I still achieved loads by sticking to my plan.
If you are going to set up an online business you need to have a plan. One of the biggest reasons that people fail in any business is because of lack of planning. Many small businesses survive day to day because the owner doesn’t have time to sit down and plan what their next steps should be.
This is even more critical for someone working from home who needs to stay focused and needs to stay motivated. When you work at home building your online business it is easy to get lost in the day to day running and lose track of where you’re aiming to be in 1 week, 1 month, 6 months, 1 year and beyond.
Part of your plan has to be to take time out and review your business. In my case I am taking a couple of hours each Friday to review which of my targets I achieved for the week and more importantly why I failed to achieve the others.
If you follow a similar plan one of the benefits you will get from this self analysis is you will discover your weak points and you will also uncover opportunities to contract out those tasks that you don’t like or find difficult to do.
The best part of this is that it’s not expensive to contract out. There are websites out there such as Elance.com where you can post a job specification and invite bids to complete the task. A great advantage of posting a job online is that people from all over the world can bid for your work making the rates very competitive.
You also need to realize that many of these people are top quality people who are making some money from home doing projects they have bid for and they are a great pool of labor for you to draw upon.
On the flip side be aware that some projects such as writing an article for an English speaking audience can rarely be completed to the quality you want by people whose first language is not English.
Probably the best person I know who contracts out a high percentage of his work is James Martell. I have seen James in seminars go through his outsourcing techniques and explain each step of putting the project together and getting bids. He puts together a very detailed project so that the people bidding on your work know exactly what is expected.
Another great bonus from putting the detailed project together is that you come into contact with people you will end up using again and again. These people become part of your network or part of your workforce.
So, whilst I started off being disappointed with last week’s performance what I am pleased about is that because of my planning I know I didn’t perform well last week and can do something about it.
