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 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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May 4th, 2010

If you are going to work in this business, that is the affiliate marketing business, you need to learn one thing…
In the last post about understanding how Google ranks ads, we talked about
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.





