You may notice that lately I’ve been putting up a few posts that suggest ways to increase your productivity as an affiliate, and there is a reason for it (other than an apparent lack of interesting blog topics as of late). The way I see it, I can sit here and point you to the greatest tools, tips, and resources for affiliate marketing in the world, but if you can’t sit yourself down and accomplish anything, you’re never going to make it as an affiliate.

And helping you make it as an affiliate is what this blog is all about.

Seth Godin recently said “ideas are easy, doing stuff is hard”… he’s right, kind of. I’d say that the toughest challenge for a lot of struggling affiliates is that they do a lot of stuff, but they never really get anything done. They find themselves emailing, taking Skype calls, chatting over IM, tweaking a website or AdWords account and at the end of the day they haven’t accomplished anything to move them closer to online success.

The world of an affiliate marketer can be a cluttered one, and many of us have to declutter before we can be productive (and successful).

Leo from the Zen Habits does a fantastic job suggesting ways to simplify and optimize your life (both work and personal). In a recent post, Haiku Productivity, Leo shares some guidelines for focusing your efforts to maximize your daily productivity. His cleverly numbered list consists of:

1 goal at a time
2 times per day to process email
3 most important tasks to complete each day
4 smaller tasks to accomplish a day all in one 60-90 minute burst
5 sentence emails (like Haiku, more words doesn’t mean higher quality communication)
6 RSS posts read per day - good for the RSS junkies out there
7 minutes of wasted time (Leo sets a timer for 7 minutes every time he gets off task and starts messing around…sounds strange but it might be brilliant)
10 RSS feed in your feed reader - again quality, not quantity
100 personal items - read the post for more on this, very interesting

If you’re an affiliate who feels like they are constantly in motion but never getting anywhere, the Haiku Productivity approach might be good for you. Read the whole post and let me know what you think!