Maintaining your affiliate business on cruise control – can it be done?

Somebody once told me that a healthy business can be put on cruise control and allowed to run itself. Well if we are to use history as an example I absolutely disagree that a business will run itself for long before falling apart. In fact it’s much easier to say that a business running on cruise control will eventually fail. But what about a simpler business model, like say an affiliate marketing business, can it survive on cruise control? Plenty of people seem to think so and that’s often the reason for pursuing the affiliate dream. I mean the temptation of earning commissions while you are at the beach or out camping for the week is pretty strong.

I think one of the greatest underestimations of affiliate marketing is the huge amount of work and strategy building that goes into building a successful business, and there might also be a misconception that little effort goes into maintaining an affiliate business. I believe most full-time affiliate marketers worked their fingers to the bone to get to where they are, and have to continue working just as hard to maintain their affiliate business, but affiliates don’t often mention how much work they put into their business but rather blog about the good times at the conferences or tweet while sitting at the airport bar. So is it true that an affiliate marketing business can run itself while the affiliate is on one big holiday? Let’s take a look at a  few of the everyday issues you have to address to keep your affiliate business in decent shape.

• Maintenance of affiliate links and datafeeds- Affiliate links require much attention as they often result in dead links as changes occur on the merchant’s website and inventory; if you are a content affiliate you may have several hundred affiliate links that need to be maintained. Datafeeds can sometimes be the same story because if you have a feed that renders the wrong products or simply does not replace  out of stock products your feed begin to look very messy and inaccurate.
• Web design changes and content development- Does the new content make sense, does it convert, does your new web design render correctly in all browsers. I once made a simple change in my PHP code and discovered nearly a month later the change caused that page to break in Firefox. Not only was I embarrassed but I wasted PPC ad spend driving traffic to the page.
• Maintaining Website traffic – Community participation, SEO, link development, building email lists, managing newsletters, maintaining PPC. Traffic doesn’t happen by itself and takes a great deal of time to create and maintain.
• Promoting new products – Is your affiliate model based on product reviews? If so you’ll always need to find new products. This means joining new networks and merchant affiliate programs and inserting new product offerings on your site. This can be very time consuming but needs to be done.
• Maintaining WordPress- Updating databases and WordPress is a time consuming but necessary maintenance activity.
• Renewing domains and hosting – If you have many domains you’ll feel like you are always renewing. I’ve had entire days derailed by expired domains and hosting accounts.

And the answer is No! You can’t run your affiliate business on cruise control because it does require as much attention as any other business. Those were just a few things I came up with off the cuff but there are many more serious issues that could be mentioned.

A better way to look at affilate marketing, or freelance Internet marketing for that matter, is that under the right conditions it can deliver you a greater level of freedom. So while it is possible to manage your affiliate business from a laptop on the beach or a comfortable chair at Barnes & Noble, or to even take an occasional three day weekend, an affiliate business will not survive long on extended cruise control. So roll up your sleeves and get to work so you can enjoy the freedom affiliate marketing does offer.