Becoming an Affiliate Marketer – Lessons from a (senior) gym junkie

There I was last Sunday of January at the end of the longest summer holiday I have had for many years and contemplating going back to work the next day.  I was feeling sad that my extra-long holiday had come to an end and a bit anxious at returning back to the daily routine.

I am what is now called a Human Resources Business Partner and have a job which I enjoy.  But it is a busy job full of lots of challenges as it involves all aspects of managing people in a typical corporate environment.

It was not that I wasn’t looking forward to going back.  Going back to my day job would mean the time I would have to develop my Affiliate Marketing business would be a lot more limited.  I had used some of my time off to work on my business each day and had enjoyed the progress I had made.  I was beginning to worry that with less time in my day, I would fall behind, not see any results for my efforts and not have the energy to keep going regardless.

So, I decided to approach this the same way that I had built success in the past.

Approximately six years ago, I decided that I wanted to improve my fitness, health and lose a little bit of weight.  I had been trying for many years to do this, with some success at times, but struggled to keep it going.

Then along came James Clear’s Atomic Habits best-selling book and this changed the game for me.  I applied his approach to my fitness and health goals and never looked back.

I put down my ultimate success to a range of things.  My top five are:

1. Start from your identity. For me this meant identifying myself as someone who is fit, strong and trains every day and by owning this identity meant my behaviours would need to be a match. Each day I trained reinforced this new identity and build the self-discipline needed to become the person I was trying to be.
2. Make it easy. So, I joined a gym next door to my workplace and had all my gym gear in the back of my car ready to go. I don’t like driving home in traffic so the choice to train each night became very easy.
3. Hire a coach. I had been reluctant to do this but have now had the same coach for 6 years and this has made a massive difference.  It is great to have someone guide you over a longer period and hold you accountable for your progress.
4. Set small daily habits. For example, my small goal would be to just go to the gym, get changed and do one set of exercises as a minimum. In truth I never did just one exercise and go home.  I would stay much longer and often these times were my best sessions.
5. Track my progress. I worked out how to track my diet and exercise and then monitored my progress. I kept it easy to begin with and got more sophisticated over time.
6. Focus on the process and let the outcome take care of itself. This is my personal mantra. I intentionally set more open goals as I wasn’t sure exactly what my results might be. I focused on what I was doing each day and more importantly, how to make it fun for me specifically.  In my case, that meant building relationships with the people that I was training with.

I don’t know which of these made the difference or if it was the combination of them that helped me achieve my goals.  It doesn’t really matter as long it is works.

So, what does this all have to do with my Affiliate Marketing business.  Well, everything because, as Martha Beck says:

In returning to back to my paid job, my challenge is to apply the same principles to my affiliate marketing business to ensure I could achieve my goals. So, this means:

1. Setting my identity as an Affiliate Marketer and being clear who I need to be? What would I be doing and what would it feel like to do this every day?
2. Making it easy to do my marketing tasks each day. To achieve this, I set up a clear space and desk at home with everything on it so that I can hop into affiliate marketing mode straight away and get going.
3. Coaching, which in this case, comes from Dean Holland each week and at end of the month.  Due to time zone difference, I am not able to attend the coaching sessions live but make sure I watch each session every week.
4. Setting small daily habits. For this my small habit is to aim to do a minimum of half an hour each evening that is focused the traffic strategy I am using.  Building a regular habit, even on days when I feel tired or my will power is lacking, means I am building my self-discipline and reinforcing my identity as an Affiliate Marketer.
5. Track my progress. For this I fill out the Tracking Sheet each day and track progress of adverts in my MS Adverts account and in Aweber.
6. Focus on the process and let the outcome take care of itself. In this case the process involves tasks such as watching and applying the weekly training, creating blog posts, blog hopping, working on my traffic strategy, etc.

This project is still a work in progress, and much like my fitness journey, it didn’t happen overnight. However, I am confident that as long as I keep showing up each day and follow the same principles I will get there.