If you haven’t read the first post about Setting Limits on Distractions I’d suggest you read that first as this post continues that one.

So now that we’ve set hours and we’ve learned how important it is not to use your job as an excuse, the next thing I want to talk about is when you are actually working and how to set limits on things that could distract you while your working.

Email

Email is great! In fact, it’s probably the number one way that I communicate with people I work with…even more so than Social Media or Instant Messaging networks.  While email is great for business and essential, it can become distracting.  If you are anything like myself, I probably get close to fifty emails a day!

I love receiving emails from people and I try to respond to every single one of them, but the bottom line is that I’ve realized I can’t send a paragraph or two email back to every single person that writes to me.  It’s just not possible for me to do it!  There is just too much, so much in fact that I could spend most of the day responding to each one and I’d still keep falling behind!

So how do you do it then?  Well, I don’t really think there is a great way, I think you just have to admit defeat haha!  I try to write back to as many people as possible, and I even have a folder saved on my computer with answers to questions that I get all the time that I can simply copy and paste in to an email and send whenever I get asked that question.

Mostly, I’ve learned to simply hit the delete button on some emails instead of trying to answer them all…

Instant Messaging

This is probably one of the biggest distractions for affiliate marketers or any internet marketer that exists when they are working.

I use to be horrible at this!  I use to have my instant messaging program up all day long while I worked and even if I was just on doing recreational stuff online, I’d have it open.  I’d be chatting with people online all day long everyday!  It was a huge distraction!

Eventually I had to learn to set hours for having IM up, and now I don’t even do that, I only get on for about a hour late in the evening.  The funny thing is you hear people talk about how much networking helps them, and that’s their excuse for keeping their IM programs open, but guess what, I haven’t noticed a drop in revenue since I’ve quit using it…now my friends simply send me an email…

imagine that… haha!

Statistics

Another thing I see affiliates get hung up on is all the stats that are out there, it’s so easy to start looking at your stats with the affiliate network and offers your using, your Google Analytic  stats, split testing stats, heat map stats, etc, etc, etc that before you realize it, you spent the day looking at stats and never actually applied those stats on anything that will help you grow!

Stats are great and they are the key to affiliate marketing, but if you are always looking at stats and never putting those stats to use, it does you absolutely not good!  Glance at your stats then make the changes you need to make where ever you need to make them!

Conclusion

There are so many more distractions when it comes to working from home, but those are the ones that I think can take most of your time and are the most common for all affiliates.  If you have any others, I’d love to hear about them in the comments and also give us an example of how you don’t allow them to become distractions!

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One of the biggest factors that keeps me from completing work that I know I need to complete is… other people!

While there are so many great benefits to working from home, there is one huge disadvantage!  That disadvantage is that no one else seems to realize that you do indeed… Work!

I’m sure this is something that most of you experience or have experienced in the past with family members and friends, however, I’ve come to realize one important thing about this phenomenon that I’d like to share with you today.

As much as we like to blame other people for the things that we don’t get done, it’s not entirely their fault!

I know I know I can hear you know… they should respect that you are working, give you your space, not interrupt you, show you some respect…blah blah blah!!!  The bottom line is that it’s your job to set limits on distractions that will inevitably come your way as a work from home entrepreneur.

I can’t even begin to express to you the number of times that I’ve been working hard on a new website, updating content, or working on an affiliate project and I’d get that phone call…my dad asking me to help him with something, or my wife (now ex-wife) needing me to do something for her, or even my daughter when she’d interrupt me.  It’s frustrating!

Of course I’m not trying to be a prude about it, and there are times that I welcome the interruptions, especially from certain people (like my daughter) however, the problem is that I enjoy helping those around me just as I’m sure that you do, and there are too many times when I ignore what I need to get done in order to help someone else with something that could wait until I have free time.

This is a sure fire way to have your affiliate earnings or websites drop in revenue.  If you’re not careful you’ll constantly have more and more distractions come your way and it will become easier and easier to put off stuff that you must complete in order to take your business forward!

So what are some things you can do to help avoid problems with family and friends?  How can you say “NO” without them getting upset or them feeling like you just don’t’ want to help them?

Set Work Hours!

I just heard the groan…I know lol, one of the greatest benefits to working from home is that you are free to create your own schedule, however, just because you have specific hours set does not mean that you always have to work during those hours!

If something comes up, by all means, change your work schedule for that day and enjoy the time with your family, friends, or other obligations, but by having a set time of when you work, your family and friends will over time become accustomed to you not being available during those times!  And those times that they do call and you are extremely busy you can simply say, sure I can help as soon as I get off work at 4pm!

Don’t Use Your Job As An Excuse!

This is pretty self explanatory, but in order to avoid any confusion, let me give an example from my own personal life…

There are going to be times when you simply don’t feel like helping the person that is asking, whether it’s because you are extremely tired or maybe just in a foul mood, it’s imperative that you don’t use your job as an excuse to get out of it, especially if it’s with your spouse or children!

I remember one time my wife was asking me to help her with the dishes and to pick up the house, I didn’t feel like it…at all! So what did I do?  I told her I had some work that needed to get done and needed to be done as soon as possible.  I then retreated to my office, shut the door, and loaded up World of Warcraft (if you don’t know what game that is, your an idiot! Just Kidding!!!).

Of course, no sooner than I started to really get in to it, my wife comes barging in to make sure I was actually working…okay fine she was just trying to be a good wife and bring me something cold to drink…and busted me!

Needless to say the next time I had something important to do and she needed help with something, she didn’t believe me!

So, if you are being asked to do something by someone else and you don’t feel like doing it, then tell them your grandmother died (for the 30th time) and hope they don’t bust you, but never ever use your job as the excuse if it’s not true because when the time comes that you actually need to do something important your family and friends won’t believe you when you need them to!

Stay Tuned

If you’re not subscribed to my RSS feed, I’d suggest you do so now so that I can charge more for advertisements on this…errr actually I mean so that you don’t miss Part Two of Setting Limits on Distractions!

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If you are going to work in this business, that is the affiliate marketing business, you need to learn one thing…

You will fail, in fact, you will most likely fail a lot!

There isn’t much you can do about it, oh wait…there is one important thing that you must do with failed campaigns…

Learn from them!!!

Seriously, if you are expecting your first campaign to be successful in this business you have a ton to learn.  Failure is part of business and in this business it’s amazing just how much you’ll fail.  In fact, 90% of the campaigns I start never make money.

There is no formula to always have a successful campaign, there are so many factors that stop a campaign from becoming profitable, including factors that are completely out of your hands.

Don’t give up, instead keep learning and pumping out campaigns and your time will come and you’ll make a ton of money from this business.

With All Sincerity,

Good Luck

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In the last post about understanding how Google ranks ads, we talked about how Google rank ads in the Search Network.  In this post, I was to discuss how Google ranks ads that you are bidding on in the Content Network.

We already know that they care about bid prices and quality score, and I’m pretty sure most of you realize by now that the higher your bid the better, but we also know that you can’t just bid extremely high cause you’ll lose money, thus, just like with the search network side, there are things you can do on the content network side to raise your quality score in order to get a higher position with a lower bid.  This will allow for higher profits margins and more traffic from being in higher ad positions.

So let’s take a look at a couple of the factors that affects your quality score on the content network side of Google.

• The Ad’s Past Performance On The Site & On Similar Sites – Just as Google takes your ad CTR and stuff in to effect on the search network, they also take this in to effect on the content network.  However, the major difference is that with the content network, Google looks at it on a more site by site basis instead of across the board.  This means that maybe on one set of sites that are similar to each other you are getting a great CTR while on another set you aren’t doing as well.  Google most likely (it isn’t always the case) still give you a great position on the one set that is doing well, and will only penalize you for the sites you aren’t performing well on.

• Relevance of Ads and Keywords to Site(s) – If you remember in the last post, the search network post, we said that Google looks at how relevant your ads and keywords are to your landing page.  On the content network, Google is more concerned at how well your ads and keywords relate to the website they are being displayed on and not so much on how well they match your website (landing page).

• Your Landing Page’s Quality – Even though Google looks more closely at how related your ads and keywords are related to the website you are advertising on in the content network, they still care that you have a landing page that is of high quality.  There are tons of factors that determines if Google sees your landing page as a quality site or not, so the best I can do in this post is link to a page at Google about landing pages.

Those are the three main factors that Google takes in to account when determining your quality score for the content network side of Google Adwords!  You can see pretty easily that Google doesn’t have near the amount of stipulations for the content network as they do for the search network.

It’s a pretty well known fact that they are more strict on the search network then they are on the content network, however, it’s still imperative that you are using the above factors to your advantage when bidding on keyword or placement targeting on the content network.

In affiliate marketing most of the time, it’s the little things that boosts your ad over your competitors ad…the extra time you take that your competitor doesn’t!

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There are several factors that determine where Google places your ad when you are bidding on keywords in Google Adwords.  These factors are all added together to come up with, as Google calls it, your Ad Rank Score.  Some factors have more weight than other factors, but every single one of them is important in making sure you get the best possible ad position for your ad.

In this article I’ll discuss the factors that determine your ad position when you are bidding on keywords on the search network of Google Adwords.

In the next post I write, I’ll discuss the factors that determine your ad position when bidding on keywords on the content network of Google Adwords.

The formula for Ad Rank is pretty simple…

Ad Rank Formula = Max CPC Bid x Quality Score

Most of you know what Max CPC bid, it’s just the maximum you are willing to spend per click and is a number you set in your Adwords account on either an ad group level, or if your smart on a per keyword level.  It’s the biggest factor determining in what position your ad will appear within the search results Sponsored Links section.

This means that you can’t bid .10 cents on a keyword like auto insurance even if you have the best quality score possible and expect to show up in position one… it just isn’t gonna happen…

Moving on, so what affects your quality score?

The quality score you receive is based on a number of factors, however, once again there is one major factor that tends to be the most important.  That is your CTR (click through rate) of your ad.  The higher your click through rate, the higher your quality score.  The reason for this is because Google is out to make money…I know…shocker…right?

The only way that Google makes money is when someone clicks on your ad.  If you write an ad and Google shows it yet no one ever clicks on it, then they make nothing.  So naturally Google desires for you to have the highest CTR that you can, which also benefits you!  It means more traffic for you, and more money for Google as their being paid per click and the higher your CTR the more clicks you are getting for the same amount of impressions.

So the two biggest factors is your Max CPC (Max Bid) and Ad CTR (click through rate), however, what happens when you have a competitive bid price and a great Ad CTR but yet you still just can’t seem to beat that one competitor that is outranking you?

Well, there are several other factors that Google uses to determine your quality score, and while they may not give you as big of a boast as having a high CTR would give you, they can still help you tremendously.

• Your Account History – Not only does Google care about your CTR that you are currently getting on a campaign, but they also take in to account the overall CTR that you’ve received for all your campaigns, ads, and keywords.  The better CTR you have long term, the strong your account becomes.

• Ads Relevant to Keywords? – Google also takes in to account how well related your ads are to your keywords.  If your writing ads about selling a dog training ebook, yet your keywords are on ringtones, that will lower your quality score.

• Ads & Keywords Relevant to Landing Page? – Another factor that will affect your quality score is whether or not your ads and keywords are relevant to your landing page.  Again, if you are bidding on keywords and writing ads on things that aren’t related to the actual product or service you are promoting, it will negatively affect your quality score!

There are several other factors that will affect your quality score, however, the ones listed above are the ones that I’ve found to affect your quality score the most.

While Google doesn’t show the actual quality score you have, they do now give a number 1-10 to help you see how a keyword is ranking quality score wise.  You can see this quality score by going to an ad group and looking at the keywords and turning it on by click the show/hide columns button and selecting it.

In the next post I write, I’ll discuss what factors determine your quality score when bidding on keywords on the Content Network, so make sure you subscribe to my feed if you haven’t yet to make sure you get an update when the next one is posted.

Update – Understanding How Google Ranks Ads on the Content Network

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