Into - By Neil
One of the things that helped me most when I first got started in affiliate marketing was a Private Forum I joined run by a great marketer named Ryan (read an interview I did with him an Jonathan Volk here). Joining the forum was simple, you didn’t have to pay him anything… far from it! All that he asked was that affiliates who joined his forum signed up to Azoogle under him. Once in the forum he shared great secrets, posted some amazing articles, offered one on one coaching, and even shared what campaigns he was promoting every month!
The forum is not very active anymore as he booted people not making more then $500 a month so now we are only around 10 of us. One of those people is a great guy named Gagan who has turned into quite the affiliate marketer as well. He has a a great blog called Niche Affiliate Marketing and to give you a taste of what you can find over there he wrote a pretty good guest post for NeilsWeb.com.
Guest Post: This is guest post by Gagan from Niche Affiliate Marketing.
Now come on, be truthful to your self, you and I know that as affiliate marketers, we always like to keep ourselves occupied with more than one project at a time. Consequently, we burn ourselves and before we know it we got a mess in our hands trying to manage multiple campaigns, 1000s of keywords, dozens of ad groups, sub ids and offers.
So how we keep ourselves from going insane?
Learn to mange and organize your work into small tasks.
What I do?
I basically set a goal for each day that I want to accomplish. Be it starting a new ad group or modifying a landing page or whatever.
What I don’t do?
I don’t distract myself from other ideas that are always popping up in my head when I’m trying to work. “Oh! what if I do this or what if do that?” You know what talking about right 
I also never try to do too much in short amount of time or work 4 hours straight. That’s even bad. Give yourself short breaks. Move away from your computer screens for few minutes. It helps.
Why you should set goals?
I set goals, so I know what the hell exactly I’m trying to accomplish.
“My goal is to to expand my keyword list. So, I’ll get just some keywords and set up some adgroups and i’m done.” Sure! but how I’m going go to expand my keywords list?
Divide your goals into tasks
I divide my goals into small workable tasks. Let me elaborate.
Your goal has to be something which will take a day or more. Starting a new pay per click campaign in your existing niche can be goal. Now you have to determine, what do I need to do to start a new campaign? From top of my head, starting a new campaign requires:
1. Building a keyword list (Monday)
2. Grouping keywords into targeted groups. (Tuesday)
3. Building ad copies for each group (Wednesday)
4. Building landing page(s) (Thursday)
5. Setting up keyword tracking (Friday)
6. Launching campaign (Sunday)
What we have done is split our goal into manageable tasks. Each of these tasks can be further split into smaller workable tasks. For example, building a keywords list can be split into
1. Building 50-100 keywords for sub-niche 1 (Monday 6:00 pm to 6:45pm)
Break (7:05 to 7:30pm)
2. Building 150-200 keywords list for sub-niche 2 (Monday 7:35 pm to 8:30pm)
By allocating time, you are organizing your tasks and managing your time. Now you’re obligated to finishing your tasks in those times. When you know you have to do a task but you say to yourself, “don’t worry, I’ll finish it today for sure”, guess what, it never gets done. However, by allocating time, you are more inclined to work persistently and responsibly. Try it, it works!
Don’t lose tracks of tasks
What I do is, write my tasks down (as shown above) in a note book. I check mark each tasks when I finish it. When your tasks is written down like this and when you finish them, you get sense of accomplishment which makes feel good and boosts your confidence in what you’re doing. You know what exactly what you’re doing now and how you’re going to accomplish it. It makes your feel you’re control and that will keep your efforts from falling apart and you’ll be less stressful at the end of the day.
Be in control of your work instead letting your work control you.
