While being a gaming affiliate is a full-time job to many, there are plenty of affiliates out there who hone their craft exclusively during their spare time. For part-time affiliates, running websites represents a way of making some extra money on the side while not having to forego steady full-time employment as their primary source of income. This series of articles will contain valuable tips and strategies to help part-time affiliates make the most of their resources and thereby maximize the potential of their side businesses.
Defining Success
The first thing to understand about being a successful part-time gaming affiliate is that the term “success” is relative. Your needs, by definition, are very different from the needs of the top affiliates in the industry. In the overwhelming majority of cases, part-time affiliates run their side businesses entirely on their own, while full-time affiliates enlist entire teams (or at the very least outsource aplenty) to help build their sites’ Web presence.
The best affiliate sites out there, the ones raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars or more each month, need to be #1 to be considered successful:
- They need to rank and compete for the most important and expensive keywords in their verticals.
- They need to have the largest audience, highest traffic figures, and most subscribers.
- They need to be early adapters to the latest trends in social media, SEO, and mobile gaming.
As a part-time affiliate, you need to remember that pretty much everything you manage to achieve while running a side business, no matter how insignificant it may seem in the grand scheme of things, is essentially a bonus:
- You’ve had a tough, long week at the office, but you still managed to crank out a blog post or two? Super! Give yourself a pat on the back.
- Your site’s giveaway contest generated an additional 20 followers on your Twitter feed? Awesome! That’s 20 more opportunities to get your content re-tweeted.
- Two players signed up to online poker sites you’re affiliated with in the last month? Congratulations! Go spend your CPA revenue on a nice dinner and night on the town.
Setting Realisti
c Goals
Awareness of how success ought to be defined is thus critical to a part-time affiliate’s assessment of their business’ success. Placing unrealistic expectations upon yourself and your site(s) is a sure recipe to feeling like a failure, no matter how much you achieve.
If you’ve specifically chosen to be a gaming industry affiliate on a part-time basis, your life is probably busy with a whole slew of other things. All things considered, you should reap a great deal of satisfaction just from being able to manage a small side business in the first place. There’s no way that your limited resources can compete with the big boys, so it’s important to treat every step forward you make as a gaming affiliate as an accomplishment.
Next Time…
In our next article, we’ll offer some suggestions for how part-time affiliates can best plan out their weekly schedules so as to maximize the quality of the time they have available for webmaster-related work.
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