Can you imagine a professional piano player who rehearses once a month when he has time?
Me neither. And that is because such a person does not exist. In order to excel in anything, you need to put time in and do it daily.
Luckily for you and me, we can do affiliate marketing in tiny time-bites.
Five minutes here, 15 minutes there. It all adds up. As long as you do it daily, five days a week, you are doing well.
Except for the few times where doing affiliate marketing in small bites is the worst thing you could do.
In most situations, you can split your affiliate marketing tasks into smaller bites.
It is a good idea to batch the tasks. Find affiliate products to promote this month on the first day. Add them to the calendar and plan your content on the second day.
Split up the affiliate products you chose into bites you can review one time-bite at a time.
When everything is planned, there is no wasted time when you sit down to do the task. This tactic works well with smaller information products (also called info products), with software and even physical products from Amazon and similar marketplaces.
It also works well for the preparations.
An important part of affiliate marketing is to build a list of email subscribers. This means creating a free eBook, audio file or video you give to your new subscribers to get their email addresses. This is important work.
It is easy, though, to do that in time-bites of 15 minutes.
You just need to plan ahead and choose what to do in each timeslot. Make a list with tasks such as:
That said, there are times when this bite-sized approach will come back to haunt you.
When you want to promote a product that demands a lot of your time, say, more than ten hours, then the bite-sized approach is not good enough.
Attempt to use it anyway, and if you have, say, four times 15 minutes per day, it will mean that you had to spend two weeks or more on one product. Unless you have other products ready, this means that for more than two weeks, you would be unable to promote anything.
In other words… You would make no money for half a month.
Maybe this product could make you a lot of money. If that is the case, save it. Instead of working in your spare time, go through it in a period where you have several hours free per day. Maybe during a vacation at home.
Here is an extra tip for you: Nobody says you can only promote a product once.
If you do email marketing (which I hope you do), then you can promote the same product months apart. If you add it to a blog or Medium, you can write about it again with another hook and angle.
Aim for evergreen products, and you have excellent passive income for years to come.
What if small bites of time are all you have?
How would you handle this? Assuming that those 15 minutes at a time, spread over the day is all you ever have… Even during your vacations, you would not have time to go all-in.
What would happen if you decided to promote this product after all?
As mentioned, if you just go ahead and spend maybe an hour a day reviewing the product, then you would spend the first two weeks making no money.
Or worse…
You do what many lazy affiliate marketers do. You cheat. You use swipe files and pretend that you have seen the product and know what you are talking about.
(Swipe files here are written emails or articles you get from the vendor to use as an affiliate.)
Maybe you can get away with it. A well-known non-English marketer do it all the time. It is obvious, because when you talk with him in private, his English is understandable but filled with errors. When you read his reviews, they are written in flawless English.
But it could also go wrong.
Somebody asks you a question you cannot reply to. Or what you think is a good product is in reality really bad. Your name and reputation are now on the line.
How should you handle this then? Just give up promoting the time-demanding products?
No, you do not have to.
You can still do them bite-sized, just in a completely different way. Instead of working on one or two products to promote in a week, you work on those two products AND this third one.
The third one being the big product.
Spend 80 percent of your time on the products you promote in the near future. And 20 percent on the time-consuming one. This way, you will still make money every day, all month. And you can also promote the big one which can potentially make you more money.
It is not a perfect solution, but it will satisfy both your short-term goal and your long-term one.
At least, you do not need to go without income for half of the month when you use the system this way.
In the end, this is your business and your choice.
If you feel that you can handle the consequences, great. Go for it. If you would rather play it safe, you can do that.
At least now you know where it might be best to go all-in, timewise, or stay out. And when you can safely work on your side-hustle one tiny bite at a time.
Make the choice that is best for you and makes most sense to you.