Brandon Adcock dot comMy Thoughts, Mostly on Direct Response Marketing

This post may seem completely obvious but few people can successfully implement it.  As I progress in my marketing career one of the things I become most protective over and work on the most are my traffic sources.  Even if someone copies your landing page and sells the same products as you, without a traffic source they have no sales.  This is why I worry more about being protective and territorial over traffic sources than I do landing pages and offers.

After you find traffic sources that work for your campaign, your goal should be to minimize competition and maximize exposure.  You want to find ways to keep your competitive out and scale your campaign to get maximum volume.  Here are some trips/techniques to start dominating your traffic sources

• Make multiple accounts.  On some self serve ad networks you can make multiple accounts and run your ads simultaneously, forcing out competition
• Out bid your competition.  If your ROI is very high, start bidding a little higher to get more volume and force competitors out
• Prebuy the adspace.  If you are buying reserved inventory and it is working out, start locking it down by purchasing more and more of it for future days.  I already have ad space purchased for June 2010.
• Ask for exclusivity.  When you find a place that works, say you will pay more, more frequently, or prepay if they don’t allow anyone else to advertise what you’re advertising with them

I always contend it is better to dominate one/a few traffic sources than run a little bit on every source you can find.  Play around with some ad platforms, get good at them, choose the ones you like, and then figure out the tricks to dominate them.  There are so many places to purchase ads right now, it is a matter of find what works for you and scaling.

This post can be applied to lots of different jobs and lifestyles, but it is mainly aimed at affiliates and business owners.

When I left my corporate job last year (6 days away from being 1 year to the day, not that I’m counting ), I did it for 3 reasons:

1. To Make significantly work more money
2. To be my own boss and not deal with a corporate hierarchy/BS
3. To work less and on my own schedule

At this point in my life I have accomplished all 3 goals, but that wasn’t always the case.  When I first started, it took awhile to learn to make more money and in order to do it I was working longer hours, and at the time I was ok with that.  But as I learned more and my business grew, I learned how to work smarter and not work longer.  January 2009, right after Affiliate Summit West, is when I started doing this, and my earnings have increased dramatically every month since.

My old schedule consisted of me getting up around 9am, working all day, eating dinner and then working until 2-3am, sometimes longer.  My days of doing that are gone, in terms of affiliate marketing.  My current schedule is usually to wake up around 10-10:30am, get to the office in time to go to lunch and I am out by 6, and I do 1-2hrs of work outside of this office, tops.

The reason my schedule has changed so much and my earnings have gone up is because I started focusing on the most important/high volume tasks and less on every task that will make me money.  For instance:

• I’ve pretty much stopped doing SEO for affiliate sites. It takes up too much time that I could be spending on media buying or not working at all.  When in reality, the money you can make from SEO is peanuts compared to high volume media buying.  I don’t mean to piss of SEO people or say SEO isn’t a valuable/important task, because it is, I just choose no longer to focus on it given my current business model.
• I stopped running every offer.  I used to run 4-6 verticals at a time, now I focus on 1-2 and make them large.  Once I started doing this (I was a 1 man operation) I was able to scale my verticals much bigger than when I was trying to focus on tons of campaigns.  I contend it is better to be one of the top players in a niche instead of being a small to mid-size player in several. But to each their own.
• I started focusing on traffic sources that required less oversight/daily optimizations and could yield much higher sales volumes.  I decided that I would stop spending countless hours optimizing keywords in PPC campaigns or blocking sites in content campaigns, and I would focus on spending money with large ad networks where less attention was needed.  Yes I know I am leaving some money on the table, but I am ok with that.  I don’t have to earn every available dollar.
• I realized that you don’t win an award for working longer hours than the next guy.  No one gives a shit about your tweets that let the world know you’re working an all nighter, no one cares.  So why work long hours if you don’t have to?  Learn how to beat your competition through being smarter instead of working around the clock.
• I stopped doing so much competitive intelligence.  I used to make it my job of knowing who was running what offer, where they were running it, etc.  When I started focusing on my stuff more, I started to better.

These are just a few things that I started doing that have helped me to work less and earn more, allowing me to live the lifestyle that I ultimately wanted.  What are some things you do?