If you’re looking for a magic “productivity pill” this article is not for you.

These tips are based on my own personal battles working from home, slacking off, and finding ways to stay focused and accomplish more.

Here are ten tips I’ve learned that will make anyone, affiliate or otherwise, more productive.

1. Accept that you will never accomplish everything in one day that you want. Get comfortable with leaving your desk with work to do.

2. Set a start and stop time for working each day. You may not have set “work hours” like most of the world, but you cannot work 24 hours a day. Pick a time to start and end each work day and stick to them.

3. Put family, personal, and social time on your calendar. What’s more important to you: work or family and friends? If you said work, you’re weird. You’re in the 0.2% of Americans who say that. That 0.2% ends up with heart problems, no friends and dies a lonely death at an early age. So schedule the time with your friends and family. Put it on your calendar and stick to it.

4. Turn your email off for most of the day. Set three or four times on your calendar and check your email at those times. Meanwhile, you won’t be constantly distracted by emails all day.

5. Schedule frequent breaks. Get away from your work periodically throughout the day to refresh your mind and body.

6. Write out a to-do list each night. In my experience 15 minutes making a to-do list saves up to two hours the following day. Don’t make this a never-ending list though. Only list what you plan to do that day. Keep another list for long-term projects.

7. Schedule a monthly “Task Snowball Day.” A Task Snowball Day should be scheduled on a day when you have no deadlines. Simply take your long-term project list and list them in the order of time needed to do them, forgetting importance. Start with the shortest one, then the next, and so on. On Task Snowball Day, I’ll get through 10-25 projects! That’s encouraging.

8. Get more sleep.

9. Exercise. If all you do is 15 minutes daily it helps. Use your breaks to move around. If you’re on the phone, walk around. Do some pushups or bodyweight squats or walk up and down the stairs for two minutes. And don’t forget your diet, as well. What you eat plays a big role in how productive you are.

10. Use separate work areas. I do computer work on one desk and everything non-computer related at another desk. It keeps me more focused on the task at hand.

I wouldn’t try to do all of these things at once. Pick one, do that for a couple of weeks, then another one.

Do some research on your own. Read a book or two on the subject. I recommend Stephen Covey’s “The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People” and “Getting Things Done” by David Allen.

Matt McWilliams is the 2010 Affiliate Summit Pinnacle Awards Affiliate Manager of the Year.

Download the entire FeedFront issue 17 here – http://issuu.com/affiliatesummit/docs/feedfront-17

FeedFront issue 17 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/article00date/2012/2

Charlie “Tremendous” Jones said, “You are the same today as you’ll be in five years, except for two things, the people you meet and the books you read.”

For affiliates, perhaps it could be worded, “You are the same today as you’ll be in five years, except for the people you follow on Twitter, the posts you read in forums, and the blogs you peruse.”

I grew up playing golf and one of the lessons I learned as a kid was from the late instructor, Harvey Penick.

“Don’t go to dinner with bad putters.”

What? How does that apply to business or marketing or well… anything outside of golf?

What Penick was saying was that if you want to be a great putter, hang out with great putters. Penick was suggesting that to learn more about putting and developing the right mindset for success, you must associate with great putters.
Go to dinner with them. Practice with them. Pick their brains and observe their attitudes, preparation, and routine.

The same goes for learning or improving at anything. If you want to learn how to develop a great marriage, hang out with people who have been happily married for 10+ years, not your two college buddies who recently got divorced. If you want to get into better physical shape, hang out with people who are active and eat healthy, and stop meeting your pals for greasy burgers and fries for lunch.

If you want to be successful in affiliate marketing, stop hanging out with affiliates who whine all the time about the industry, their merchants, or their performance. Quit reading posts from people who discourage you. Quit associating with friends who tell you that you need to get a “real job.”

Instead, find people who have a positive attitude about affiliate marketing and support you in your efforts. Find people who have been doing this for a while, had their ups and downs, failures and successes, and associate with those people. Find members at a forum like ABestWeb who are positive and helpful and read their posts.

In your personal life, make sure that your friends and family support you. They should understand that you are working; not playing on the computer all day, and that you are committed to being successful.
If they remain unsupportive or critical, they have one of two choices: get on board or get out of the way. That means you may have to end some friendships or avoid certain people until their attitude improves.

You must make the choice to fill your mind with knowledge from people who make you feel better, inspire you, and teach you how to improve. It will have a huge impact on your current and future success.

Matt McWilliams of Legacy Learning Systems (www.learnandmaster.com/affiliates )is the 2010 Affiliate Summit Pinnacle Award Winner for Affiliate Manager of the Year.

Download the entire FeedFront issue 10 here – http://www.scribd.com/doc/29057000/FeedFront-Magazine-Issue-10
FeedFront issue 10 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/article00date/2010/04

Remember 2001? Tweeting was reserved for birds and a Web site was an afterthought for most businesses. Affiliate marketing was hardly a viable career option and most of us still dialed up to the internet. It seems like so long ago.

Recently I was reading one of my wife’s old business books from college titled “Understanding Business”. In the section about entrepreneurship, it offers tips for attracting customers to an ecommerce site.
Saying that Web-based businesses were “still in their infancy,” the book offered tips for these baby ecommerce sites, ranging from Web design to customer care. The amazing thing is that all of the tips are still relevant today.

In spite of, or perhaps because of, all of our innovations online, the simplicity of what was true eight years ago is still true today when it comes to selling and customer retention online.

I’ve paraphrased some of the book’s tips that are still true today for both affiliates and merchants.

1. Keep it simple. Don’t require plug-ins that some people might not have. Avoid unnecessary graphics and special effects.
2. Provide value. The more information you have, the more likely people are to buy.
3. Make buying easy.
4. Display certification. Be secure and show it.
5. Post a privacy policy.
6. Be accessible. Give prospects a phone number, email, fax, and physical (NOT P.O. Box) address.
7. Get it right the first time. Merchants, note this: Customers who receive the right order on time are more likely to buy from you again… and your affiliates will love this.
8. Respond quickly. Immediate response gives the customers a sense of support and service (and importance).
9. Keep track of what’s selling. As a merchant, you have to analyze buying trends and habits to help plan inventory. Don’t run out of something that is selling. This upsets customers and affiliates alike. You have to know conversion rates too.
10. Build a support network. The book says “build relationships with other Web-based entrepreneurs.”

While forums were not as popular then as they are now, the advice still rings true. Participate in forums like ABestWeb.com, AffiliateTrust.org or others. Read, learn, and share. Attend conferences like Affiliate Summit. Meet with other affiliate marketers in your area. Becoming a part of a community will not only help you with your business, but will also help alleviate some of the loneliness that sometimes comes with being an affiliate marketer.

Thinking back to my own beginnings in online business in 2003, not much has really changed. Email is still my primary means of communication, but as always, I prefer actually talking to someone.
The data still doesn’t lie. If one header outperforms another, it wins, no matter how un-Web 2.0 it might be. And I still believe, perhaps more so than ever, that customer service is of the utmost importance.
It’s true in the online world for sure. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Matt McWilliams of Legacy Learning Systems is the 2010 Pinnacle Awards Affiliate Manager of the Year – www.learnandmaster.com/affiliates.

Download the entire FeedFront issue 9 here – http://www.scribd.com/doc/24376105/FeedFront-Magazine-Issue-9
FeedFront issue 9 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/article002334

“When it comes to getting things done, we need fewer architects and more bricklayers.” -Colleen Barrett
Are you an architect or a bricklayer?

Recently I received an interesting email from an affiliate. I tried my best to reply in detail and help the affiliate, but in the back of my mind I wondered if it would really help.

What this affiliate wanted to know was how to go from being a newbie to being a $100,000/month affiliate. Of course, we all want to know that, right?

What this affiliate failed to understand is that just like any other business, most people don’t jump directly from a newbie to a $100,000/month affiliate. They make $1,000/month, $5,000/month, $20,000/month, and so on.

This affiliate had a list of approximately 20 questions. He had all the best intentions in the world. He reads all the blogs, gets all the newsletters, and probably reads all of the forums. But, what I often fear with affiliates like this is that he will fail to act.

As the great German writer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe says, “Knowing is not enough; we must apply!”
I see many affiliates who suffer from the proverbial “paralysis by analysis” and it is unfortunate because these affiliates really do have a thirst for knowledge and a desire to achieve. But, too often they live by fear. Fear of failure, fear of losing money, and often a fear of missing out on the latest trend or tip that will make them an instant millionaire.

All the while, they are missing out on doing. They are failing to act—actually working on their site and ads, building content, and testing.

When I am asked for advice on marketing our program, I usually limit my suggestions to 3-5 major ones based on the affiliate’s areas of expertise and I always end with this simple piece of advice; be sure your to-do list is no more than five items long.

Don’t allow your to-do list to become a mountain of tasks that are impossible to attempt, much less accomplish. It’s the number one reason I see so many well-intentioned and hard-working affiliates fail.
Leave a spot on your to-do list open for new ideas, too. If you read of a new idea and want to try it, try it! Don’t let it sit too long.

The marketing world, and particularly the affiliate world, is full of ideas: weird ideas, revolutionary ideas, and plenty of “why did I not think of that?” ideas. Many of them succeed. Still many others fail miserably. The only way to truly know what works and what doesn’t is to take action and risk failure.

Let me be clear, there is a time for planning and brainstorming and certainly researching. There is a time to be an architect. But Mrs. Barrett is right when it comes to affiliate marketing, we need more bricklayers.
What are you waiting for? Be a bricklayer—take action now!

Matt McWilliams of Legacy Learning Systems is the 2010 Pinnacle Awards Affiliate Manager of the Year – www.learnandmaster.com/affiliates.

Download the entire FeedFront issue 8 here – http://www.scribd.com/doc/20220412/FeedFront-Magazine-Issue-8
FeedFront issue 8 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/article00date/2009/10

Today it seems everyone has a website. You’re not everyone though; your site is your business. Your website should be professional and encourage your visitors to buy.

Shoppers today are cynical and have more choices than ever.

I’ve found that many affiliates are missing or misusing these five critical pieces on their websites. Are you?

1. Informational Content
Conventional wisdom tells us to get to the point and eliminate clutter on our site, but you need informational content to help convert the skeptics and less knowledgeable visitors.

Informational content serves two purposes. First, it’s a great service that customers won’t forget, converting confused customers into ready-to-buy machines. Second, a good article is chock-full of keyword-rich content that can vault you to the top of search engines and drive substantial traffic from links from other sites.

2. “Contact Us” Page
Often, the hardest obstacle to overcome is consumer trust. These people are about to give some serious information. You must do everything possible to earn their trust.

In Geno Prussakov’s book, “Online Shopping Through Consumers’ Eyes,” 83% of web users say a physical address gives them more confidence than a P.O. Box. Almost all say that no address is a major deterrent. Geno also notes that by a 4-to-1 margin, users prefer an actual email to a “contact form.”
Give them every way possible to contact you, it clearly pays off.

3. Privacy Policy
Is my information protected? What data are you collecting? Will I get spammed?

These are all questions that visitors ask themselves. Not having a clearly written privacy policy that answers important questions can cost you their business. In their eyes, you’re hiding something and must be a scam.
A good privacy policy lets customers know about things like cookies, your anti-spam policy, form encryption, etc. Every page on your website should like to your Privacy Policy page.

4. Customer Testimonials
You may not get emails often thanking you for your service, but when you do get a thank you, do you make use of it?

The first thing you should do is to thank your customers and show genuine happiness that you helped them. Then ask permission to use their testimonial. About 50% of people will let you. Testimonials are priceless trust builders, so make sure you take advantage of them. Place them throughout your site and create a prominent “Testimonials Page.” If you don’t have any testimonials, ask your affiliate manager if you can use the merchant’s.

5. FAQ Page
Most people will never view this page, but the ones who do want answers; and they want them fast! Anytime someone asks something, add it to the FAQ. Ask your friends to look at your site and think of FAQs. It will lead to more sales, guaranteed.

Any one of these missing components can cost you conversions and ultimately money. Check your site and make sure that you have all of these important pieces. If you have them, make sure they are thorough and up-to-date.

Matt McWilliams of Legacy Learning Systems is the 2010 Pinnacle Awards Affiliate Manager of the Year – www.learnandmaster.com/affiliates.

Download the entire FeedFront issue 7 here – http://www.scribd.com/doc/17376069/FeedFront-Magazine-Issue-7
FeedFront issue 7 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/article00date/2009/08