“A ship in harbor is safe – but that is not what ships are for.” – John A. Shedd

To succeed in affiliate marketing you need to have self motivation and drive to succeed. If you are the kind of person who would rather put something off if it can wait until tomorrow, you might not be best suited to working for yourself. Getting a site to bring in a small amount of money which you can use to supplement your income isn’t too hard. If you create a blog or website about a subject which interests you and gradually add a few adverts, you might find you are pleasantly surprised by the amount of extra money you have in your bank account each month. However, this is unlikely to make you super rich or be a reliable source of income that allows you to quit the day job. It is possible to make a living from affiliate marketing, but you have to be driven by the desire to succeed and not be the kind of person to give up at the first hurdle. Almost certainly, you will waste a lot of time with projects that never take off and you have to be able to cope with this without getting disheartened.

“You’ve got to get up every morning with determination if you’re going to go to bed with satisfaction.” – George Horace Lorimer

One of the main mistakes people make when they first start out is in becoming obsessed with statistics. Yes only 90 people viewed your site today and it was 100 yesterday. Does that matter? Probably not if you look at the big picture! Whilst you need to keep on top of what is and what isn’t working, there is a great tendency to log into each affiliate network every 20 minutes just to see if any more sales/leads have appeared. This is similar to the problem of feeling you have to check you emails every 5 minutes in case there is anything important there and getting no work done as a result. At the start of each day you need to make a plan of what you want to achieve and if you fail to do this, you need to catch up and make more realistic targets in the future. Whilst day-to-day plans are useful you also need to have a long term aim or goal which you are striving to achieve.

Malcolm Red on self motivation.