Making money online requires you to do some activities, but not all activities will help you make money.
According to Pareto law, 20% of those activities will be responsible for 80% of your success.
The problem is that most people only focus on activities that will contribute nothing to their income.
That is why in this article, I will share with you the six time-wasting activities for affiliate marketing, and I will give you tips on how to avoid/ manage them.
6 Time-Wasting Activities For Affiliate Marketers
Talking to friends
Having friends is great. Who does not have them? My friends and I can watch and talk about football for hours.
Having a great time with friends and family is good, but you also need to set aside time to build your business.
How to fix this
When I started working from home, I noticed that my friends would come to my house whenever they had free time.
Since I was home always, they thought I had free time and just browsed on the internet, so one thing I did was to start going to a library and do my business there and come back home when I was done.
You need to block time for your business. I recommend blocking at least 4 hours daily to dedicate to your business.
You can do the same and go somewhere quiet, or you can explain to your friends that you have this important project and it needs to be done to have a chart after you finish. If they are your real friends, they will understand.
Surfing the Internet
I still do this time to time, I will open 20 tabs on my browser at the same time, Youtube, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, etc.
In my mind I will be thinking I am researching for content, I will end up switching to and from the tabs, before I know it I wasted 4 hours.
How to fix this
I do not believe that multitasking will make you be more productive, so I will recommend you concentrate on one task until you finish it, rest of 5 minutes, and then start a new task, this way you will be more productive.
Checking and reading email
This goes hand to hand with social media, you know there was a time I will wake up and start reading emails from different marketers and before I know it, 2 hours have been elapsed, I reduced the emails I read per day and I am more productive because of it.
How to fix this
Yes it is good to read few emails from other marketers, this will help you to learn if there is a new product or some trend in your industry, but you need to be smart about this.
First, I will recommend reading only emails from people you follow and learning something from them, so unsubscribe from everyone who is not adding value to your business.
Second, i recommend you read those emails after you have done all your to-do list of that day, you need to be sending more emails than you read them, be the creator not the consumer.
Answering your phone
You are in the middle of creating content for your audience, and the phone rings. It is your brother or best friend, and you have to answer it.
After finishing the phone call, you discovered that you were thinking about the phone conversion, and you lost your momentum from the content you were creating; it happened to me many times.
How to fix this
For me the easy way to fix this is to turn off the phone for all the time I am doing important work, if the call is important they will call back or leave you a message.
Watching Webinar
In affiliate marketing, most people use webinars to sell high-ticket products. They will send you an email to ask you to register for a webinar and promise you that you will learn this or that.
It is usually just a very long sales video; don’t fall for it; most webinars won’t teach you a thing.
How to fix this.
Do not register for those webinars unless you are taking a course or participating in some mastermind, and the course owner or mastermind will provide extra live training.
Checking stats
This also is a huge time waster, especially if you’re starting; you log in on your affiliate dashboard every 5 seconds, refresh it, and still see zeros.
I know most people spend more time checking their stats that the time they use actually to market their products, this is sad but it is true.
How to fix this
Of course, starts can help you to improve your marketing, but do not overdo it; for me, I dedicate Sundays just to checking the starts so that I know how much money I made during the week, the traffic I got, and keywords that drove more traffic, so that I can plan for the coming week.
If I bought traffic or am running a promotion, I will check starts at the end of each day.
Key takeaways
For me, those are the 6 time-wasting activities for affiliate marketers that can hinder the productivity and progress, I have faced all of them, for you have money of those activities did you overcome?
Are there any other time-wasting activities you have experienced? Let me know in the comment section below.
If you want to stop wasting time and do something proven to work, please watch this training.