Affiliate Marketing Playbook: 10 Top Rules For SuccessFirst up welcome to the 3rd article in the Affiliate Marketing Playbook: 10 Top Rules for Success. I am so pumped right now to share this with you.

I have found the most exciting information and motivational video and I am dying to share it with you. It has caused me to rethink this website’s direction, my vision on building a personal brand and well entrepreneurship in general.

I would like to introduce you to Gary Vaynerchuck.

His philosophies on entrepreneurship and success ring so true to me that I have spent the last 9 hours solid consuming his YouTube content, which thankfully is extensive. I just can’t get enough of it.

He has also written a book title Crushing It, which he makes freely available as an audiobook on YouTube. You will understand, after you watch the video, why he makes it available for free when he could encourage you to go out and buy it to make himself some more $$.

The audiobook is 8 hours of sheer brilliance, I’m half-way through it so far and I will review that for you all also once I’m finished it. If you can’t wait that long you can listen to your own copy free by clicking here.

OK so without further ado check out the video at the top, which is a compilation by a chap called Evan Carmichael, of my newest mentor Gary Vaynerchuck, and then we will discuss how this can change your fortunes and how you can put it all into practice.

Oh just a quick disclaimer, Gary is known for his use of curse words, if you have delicate ears and care about that sort of thing, be forewarned there is a bit in this content.

In the vain of being authentic, which I am taking to heart now, honestly if you can’t get past the language to watch the video, that will be your loss.

If you haven’t already check out the video, you can play it from the top of the page, before you read on.

#1 Determine Your Strengths

First you need to determine just what it is you can offer. What are your strengths? As Gary suggests do a self-audit of your inherent skills.

Man weightlifting massive strengthDon’t be afraid of this task. There is absolutely no point in trying to be someone you are not. You can not pretend for very long.

Lying to yourself is difficult, lying to others is downright hard work.

Find your strengths, focus on those and develop them and forget about your weaknesses.

So you have a notion that you want to be an Instagram influencer in the space of fashion and style for women over 60 because someone told you there was money in that niche.

But you spend your days in track pants and enjoy mowing the lawn and keeping your front yard looking immaculate. You will fail.

I honestly can’t be any blunter than that. Be your authentic self. Find your strengths and go all in on those.

As you can see in all the content I have written on this website I have been myself. I didn’t go out and take photos of me in a business suit in front of a personal lear jet and tell you I have made it. But I genuinely think affiliate marketing can get you and I out of the rat race and I will continue to provide my warts and all journey in an honest and truthful way to help as many people as I can.

Upon doing my personal audit I realise my strength is in personal coaching and motivation. I have a genuine desire to see people succeed and more of this website will now be dedicated to that aim.

At this point don’t think about how you can monetise or capitalise on your strengths just determine what they are.

#2 Work

Everybody has the same amount of time. “Stop watching Lost”.

There is no silver bullet to making a success of your life – you will need to put in the work. In the context of affiliate marketing you need to write those blogs, you need to spend time on social media marketing, you need to continue to educate yourself within your field of expertise.

Clock and gold coinsThis all takes time and effort. Passive income is a bit of a misnomer really.

Yes you can have passive income AFTER you work. Every single scam on the internet is geared towards those who do not want to work and want something for nothing.

They will take your money and you will still have to work.

But Heidi I can hear you saying I work full time, I have a family, I have commitments after hours in a volunteer role – whatever it is that currently takes up your time.

Take a good hard look at how you really spend your time. Break it down into half hour chunks of your day and find where you are wasting time that could be going towards building your online business.

People can function perfectly well on 6 hours sleep a day. That leaves you with 18 hours every single day that you can be productive. You work a 9 – 5 job there’s 8 hours. So you have 10 hours left to yourself, how are you spending those 10 hours?

I recently finished an excellent book titled The 10X Rule by Grant Cardone. This is an excellent read and basically guides you to giving 10x more than everyone else. Set your goals 10x higher, provide 10x the value, commit to doing 10x more than the average and you will be successful.

You can get it free as an audiobook by clicking here, because Grant Cardone also has a similar philosophy to Gary, he cares about his customers and he realises that by providing exceptional value he can win.

So wise up, find your passion, find your strengths and start scheduling your day so you can get to work, smashing it out 10x harder and building the life you want.

#3 Put Business In Perspective

Yes we all want to be successful, that’s why you would have clicked on this post in the first place. The mere fact that you clicked on the title of this blog – 10 Top Rules for Success – means you want more for yourself than you currently have.

Blue techno eyeball floating in spaceSuccess is different for everyone. What I consider successful and what you consider successful maybe two completely different things.

You may have a ton of bad days growing your online business. Maybe things are not progressing as quickly as you would like, maybe your number one post disappears off page 1 due to some Google algorithm update, maybe your sales have tanked and you are not sure why.

Take a step back and put in into perspective. Take a good hard look at yourself. It is just a bad day, not a bad life.

I think Gary’s idea of thinking to yourself, at your very darkest hour in business, that someone just called you and told you your mother or daughter has been killed might be a step too far, but hey if that works for you to get your business into perspective then use it.

Understand money and possessions come and go. If you are so attached to your possessions rather than the value you provide to your visitors, viewers or customers then you will be destined to fail.

Put your business into perspective, possessions can be replaced, fortunes can be rebuilt but family and the core things in your life that make you happy are priceless.

#4 Execute Your Ideas

You don’t specifically need a wonderful, brand new, never thought of before idea or concept to be successful. What you need is execution. With 98% of start-ups failing within the first year you can see brilliant ideas without execution are doomed to failure.

Ideas are shit without execution on mobile phone screenThis gets back to #2 above – you need to work. A great idea is useless until someone puts it into practice, until someone commits and executes it thoroughly and consistently over a period of time.

Work ethic aka hustle as we all so trendily refer to it these days is king. Without hustle, you have nothing. Nothing will magically become successful without hustle.

Don’t underestimate the amount of hustle, you will need to become successful. If you only do what the average person does, you will always be average.

My new favourite phrase “Go All In”.

You can curate content. What does this really mean? It is simply rebadging existing content with your spin on it. There is so much fantastic content out there on the internet through the various social media platforms and the millions of blogs that are written every day you don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

You don’t need a brilliant new idea. I will leave you with this thought on executing ideas “stop wasting your time on trying to think up the next Uber and spend 90% of your time executing an existing idea (yours or someone else’s) and you will be successful”.

#5 Don’t Overlook Storytelling

As an affiliate marketer you have the jump on everyone else in this department. You are already a storyteller. You don’t tell fiction tales, but every time you blog you are telling a story with your personal spin on it.

once upon a time with a coffee cupFirst and foremost you need to understand what the consumer wants. Then you craft your story to give them what they seek. This is the essence of brilliant marketing.

Let’s take product reviews on our websites as a case study. Yes people came to your site because they wanted details about the product they may be thinking of buying, and while they might need to know the facts eg. it’s a 2 litre cooker, what they really want to know is that you can cook enough to feed your whole family in this 2 litre cooker.

If you have been in sales at all you would have heard the phrase “sell the sizzle not the steak”.

This is storytelling at its core. You need to provide a captivating and heartfelt story to sell the sizzle and this goes back to being authentic. You can only tell a great story if you can speak from the heart.

Understand your niche, know what problems they have, what entertains them, what they want to know and give that to them in the form of an interesting story. Whether that’s through your brilliantly written blog or a 140-word tweet.

#6 Care About Your Customers

This section of the video had me in tears of laughter. But aside from that, the core principle you need to get from this is to run your business with your heart not your head.

Hands holding baby's feetIn times long past we lived in smaller communities, where you knew your neighbour, you had the small Mom and Pop corner grocery store and you had to provide great service to your customers.

The internet is making that real again. The affiliate marketing business is bringing us closer together – there is a real person reading your blogs.

Every time you consider a product to promote or a blog to write, every time you post to social media, every action you undertake to grow your business think about how you would want to be treated and do that.

Always consider your reputation, successful businesses and personal brands are built on reputation.

We are a super savvy crowd these days, people can smell a fraud from a mile away. Don’t be that person. Don’t be that blog.

Those who do not care about their followers will go the way of the dinosaurs, don’t let that be you.

“Emotional Intelligence will domain business over the next decade. And you know what it feels good” Gary Vaynerchuck

#7 Stick To Your DNA

DNA manYou need to do you. Understand yourself and be self-aware. Again this goes back to #1 Bet On Your Strengths. You need to know your DNA and come to grips with who you are.

If like Gary you thrive in chaos then embrace that and surround yourself with people who can fill in the gaps. He says in another video that he couldn’t get a job in his own company, he simply doesn’t have the core skills required to get an entry level job in his own company.

How can this be when he is the boss? He understands his weaknesses, he understands his DNA and what strengths he has and he plays on that.

You can not change your DNA, and therefore you need to understand it and stick to it.

Just because someone you admire is going off on some sort of tangent and making it work, doesn’t mean you should or can make it work even if you try to emulate them. If it goes against your core DNA then don’t do it. You can not sustain that sort of action over the long term and it won’t make you happy.

#8 Do The Things That Matter

As a one-man band, which most of us are, you may not be able to delegate the things that don’t matter to someone else to do to free yourself up to do the things that matter. I understand this, that’s my life at the moment too.

One man bandBUT you can prioritise the things that matter most and do them first.

Are you a perfectionist? You need to lose that straight up. Because to a perfectionist everything matters, and to be brutally honest you will be wasting your valuable time attempting to make things perfect that actually don’t matter.

Don’t sweat the small stuff, and it’s all small stuff. This is the title of another great book, and if you are allowing inconsequential things in your life to drive you crazy you need to read this book.

You, as the master of your destiny, need to determine the tasks that can bring you the best bang for your buck.

Determine what is crucially important to you and your business right now and micromanage the heck out of it.

You may change your mind at some stage down the track but right at this very minute, do what you determine to be the biggest thing that matters and leave the rest.

#9 Don’t Make Excuses

There will always be excuses if you want to find them and if you want to dwell on the obstacles you will fail. Don’t what if yourself into failure.

There will always be the what if’s. What if this happens? What if that happens? More often than not you can’t even guess what will happen let alone prepare for it, so put it out of your mind. Stop wasting your time on excuses about why you might fail and start DOING.

Wooden man under pebblesExcuses will kill any business, but certainly an affiliate marketing business, possibly faster than anything else.

Because we usually invest relatively small amounts of money (relative to an offline business you understand) people seem to cave under the smallest excuse and simply stop working their business.

Understand that you are responsible for your future, no-one is entitled to a happy ever after story end. We seem to be living in an age of entitlement.

You have to commit yourself to success and you have to take responsibility for the current state of your life, your business and your relationships.

No one is going to hand it to you, believe me. Harsh isn’t it?

You will need to deal with the obstacles that come your way. Entrepreneurship is a term that is bandied about willy-nilly these days. Anyone can call themselves an entrepreneur but what sets aside the successful ones from those who don’t make it is that they tackle their problems head-on and don’t make excuses.

If you find yourself making excuses for why your website isn’t doing as well as you would like, sit down and examine the excuses you are using. What is really going on behind the excuses?

Find the why and fix it. Before you drown in excuses and fail.

#10 There Is No Overnight Success

Our society is enamoured with people who appear to be an overnight success. Mostly celebrities, singers, Hollywood stars and the like. But through the rise of social media there are also Instagram influencers and the big names in the online business community.

Next big thing signIt is the media that puts them on a pedestal and promotes them as an overnight success but it is bogus.

These people have in every case worked for many years to position themselves where they get what is referred to as a “lucky break” and become the next big thing.

But the reality is that the current popular rapper didn’t wake up one morning and have Sony Music knocking on their door saying “we’d like you to be the next big thing. They didn’t turn up and offer to make them bigger than Snoop Dog!”.

Invariably the singer played little dive taverns for $50 a night, worked two jobs for 5 years to save enough to put down their first track, and spent countless hours shopping their stuff around every record label that would see them, with thousands of rejections before they got their “lucky break”.

There is no lucky, except that which you make for yourself, through sheer hard work and determination.

If you put into place all the other Top 9 tips you will be setting yourself up for the lucky breaks, but understand that it will take time.

Here’s To Your Success

I really hope you enjoyed the video and have found some great tips to increase your chances of success with your affiliate marketing business.

My hope is for you to achieve all the success that you dream of and that this blog has helped you in some way move closer to that target. I know it certainly has me, and I have already started to implement Gary’s suggestions right here in this blog.

If you’d like any further information please drop your comments in the box below and I’d love to help you out. And of course if you think this may be useful info for others get clicking and share us on your social media channels. 

See you at the top signature

About the Author

It doesn’t matter where you are starting from, what you currently have or don’t have, if you too feel like there is more to life than what you are currently experiencing and you want to take charge and create a better life for yourself (and your family) then join me and we will do this together.

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