How to Avoid Burnout With Online Marketing

I want to talk about online marketing burnout and how to avoid burning yourself out with three simple tricks. 

What am I talking about when I say online or affiliate marketing burnout? Essentially I mean becoming completely overwhelmed by trying to do too many things at the same time, resulting in complete failure and sometimes quitting.  

We’ve all been there. It’s very easy to get burned out doing all of the things that are involved in making affiliate marketing work for you. It is not an easy business to be in. There are a lot of components to affiliate marketing and a lot of things you need to learn as you continue down this path. 

It’s very easy to get stressed out because we’re constantly buying traffic. We’re sending traffic to a landing page and we’re hoping that traffic will convert into sales. When it doesn’t convert into sales, it causes stress, it causes anger. Sometimes it causes other feelings that just aren’t good for our health.  

Affiliate Marketing is Like Poker

Worse than that, it can cause us to make irrational decisions. Affiliate marketing is sometimes compared to playing poker. I used to play poker and if you fail too many times at poker and you lose too many hands, it’s called going on tilt and you start to make irrational decisions.  

With affiliate marketing, it’s very much the same thing where you’re testing and tweaking and trying different strategies. You’re trying to turn your money into more money by investing it in certain practices that you’re doing online. That’s why I like to sometimes compare it to poker. It can become very stressful and risky for people to get started in affiliate marketing.

So this post is going to address affiliate burnout in particular. 

I’m sure you’ve felt this feeling before. No matter what level of affiliate you are, you might have felt stressed out trying to test many different things. You’re not sure where to put your money or your time. You don’t know if you should be doing an authority website or if you should be building it in a specific niche. Should you be targeting certain offers? What traffic source should you be using? What types of ads? Landing pages? It can quickly get overwhelming!

There are just so many different options, so many different things to do that it becomes kind of a scrambling effect. Your brain is scrambled. You don’t know where to go. You don’t know where to focus.

We’ve All Been There

Now, I’m here to tell you that I went through the exact same thing. I still go through it sometimes now when I’m setting up new campaigns and there are no conversions and I can’t explain why. It’s just one of those things that we have to live with as a marketer.

But this isn’t just for marketers or affiliates. It’s for people that are doing any form of online business. One of the things that I speak about in most of my videos is “How do I manage my time and how do I focus my efforts?”

It actually came up recently when I was having a conversation with one of my friends on Telegram and he asked me a question.

“Joey, how do you actually do everything? Like, how are you doing everything in the day? You’re you know, you’re doing YouTube videos, your personal brand, and, you know, you’re running three or four campaigns on different traffic sources. You’re training people through Powerhouse Affiliate and you run an offline real estate company. How do you actually do all that?” 

My Personal Plan to Avoid Burnout

That’s when it made me think about burnout and how I actually avoid it. So I want to explain what I do when it comes to affiliate marketing, especially because a lot of my content is around training people on how to be better affiliate marketers.

The first thing I do is I only focus on three actual campaigns. So even though you see all my videos with all of these traffic sources, I’m basically showing people campaigns that will work. I’m showing my strategies on how I build campaigns.

When I find these campaigns, I don’t have time to manage all of them myself. I make them available to people like the premium members inside Powerhouse Affiliate who get to see my case studies. They get to see the data. They get to see all that information. If they take that information and copy the campaigns and take them themselves, that’s great. I would like to see that. If not, then that’s fine too.

I can only focus my own time on three campaigns. The reason for that is because each campaign has multiple different traffic sources. So if anybody is out there saying it’s very easy to run affiliate campaigns and you don’t need a lot of time, they are lying.

Consider the Parts of an Active Campaign

Consider this for a single campaign. If I was to run one campaign with one traffic source these are the bare minimum tasks that I need to focus on:

• I’m going to need to create images
• I need to create multiple landing pages
• I need to set up my tracking
• I need to set up sales funnel
• I need to make sure the offers are working
• I need to collect payments
• I need to optimize
• I need to make new landing pages because I’m constantly split testing

Now, that is just one traffic source, one offer that is going to take maybe 1-2 hours per day to manage. If you add another traffic source to that, you’re going to add another hour or two per day because you need to make sure you’re watching that traffic source and each traffic source runs differently. 

You need to track and optimize each traffic source separately as different campaigns. So it’s technically like running two campaigns. Now, if you add a third traffic source to your campaign, it’s like running three campaigns even though you’re only running one offer. 

Outsource

How are ever going to keep on top of all of that by yourself? It’s nearly impossible! The best way to manage all of that is to outsource. Before you do that though, you need to master your own campaign.

You need to master one campaign and one traffic source before you can bring on another traffic source and another traffic source. Once you understand how all of that works, then you can outsource. You can get people to start making the ads for you. You can hire people to create landing pages for you.

They don’t have to see your ads. They don’t have to see your setup. They don’t have to know what traffic source you’re using. They don’t have to know how you’re getting paid. You just tell them you want images like this. You want landing pages like this. They don’t need to know anything else. And you can keep that part separate so you can have people working for you while you’re doing other things like setting up another campaign. 

I regularly use places like Upwork.com for content creation, because some of the websites that I manage are dependant on search engine optimization. So I need somebody to create content daily and that is done through Upwork.com. I also use Fiver.com for some of the content. For example, if I’m creating YouTube videos in niche other than my personal YouTube channel, DayJobHacks.

Bankroll Management

The second thing you need to ensure you do to prevent burnout is proper bankroll management. You need to manage your roles. Going back to the poker example, you need to make sure you’re not blowing your budget and you’re not going all in on stupid decisions and you’re not going on tilt.

You need to sit back and take a look at the big picture. Sometimes you will find that you’re going to run 5-10 campaigns without making a single dime. You need to be ready for that and you need to make sure that you have bankroll management, that you have money ready to lose when you start buying traffic.

This is key to avoid burnout. If you don’t, then you run the risk of wiping out your bank account. If that happens then you’re going to be stressed out. So keep that in mind. Make sure you start planning your budget. Set your limits. Make sure you when you’re running traffic you focus on one traffic source first. Don’t try and bring a bunch of different traffic sources into the same campaign until you’ve mastered one. 

Diversification

I can sit here every day and run traffic. That is all I might do. Or all I do is optimize and all I do is make images. All I do is make landing pages. And I just do it all myself. That is going to lead me to burnout. And that is precisely why I do things like run my YouTube channel, which is speaking to a camera and doing videos and looking for other avenues that I can use my skills.

What I’m trying to do is diversify because I can’t just sit here and do affiliate campaigns every single day. It would make me go crazy. I’m constantly testing and tweaking. Once I’ve found my campaigns that are actually working, I’ve decided to just scale them out further using outsourcing.

But now I’m looking for a couple of things to take me away from that one thing that’s just monotonous testing, tweaking, running ads. It also sets me up for a better experience in terms of having multiple different revenue streams. The key here is that I am generating long-term traffic to my other brands and my training. 

Another thing I do is offline business. These tasks are all done by creating a system that doesn’t require a lot of hands on management. So real estate is one of those examples because it’s a lot like an online business in that it doesn’t require anyone to be there every single day. This is key.

Final Thoughts

So that’s what I’m focusing on. You don’t want to be that person that quits because you’re not succeeding. Just remember that everybody goes through this. We are constantly testing and tweaking. It’s a game in a sense, just like a game of poker. You’re constantly trying new things, but with poker, you’re gambling and with doing internet marketing and affiliate marketing, you at least have a chance to develop skill sets that will make you a better player.

You will actually beat the house in the end if you keep at it. Remember the three keys to success. 

1. Outsource when you’re ready and you’ve mastered your skills.
2. Bankroll management. Make sure that you have enough money to lose and you have enough money to test. But also, at the same time, when you do have a big win, don’t spend it foolishly. Use it to make sure that you’re ready for the next round because there’s always going to be new tests coming.
3. Diversify. Don’t just constantly build landing pages and do ads from the same thing. Try different things.