Note: I enjoyed writing this post, which is rare. Usually I try to post content on my blogs that people will find profitable, but this time, I wanted to post something that made the reader feel something positive. This post can be appreciated by seasoned affiliate marketers and newbies alike, which is why it’s so fun to write.

I finally hit a slump. After 12 months doing affiliate marketing 6+ hours a day, 7 days a week, I hit a brick wall that was 50 feet thick and 5,000 feet high. In other words, it was insurmountable under any circumstance. Well, maybe that’s exaggerating it a bit, but when you’re all alone sailing the hurricane-fueled waters of internet marketing, losing just a tiny bit of direction often seems like you’re on your way to the bottom of the ocean, not just a little off course.

That’s what happened to me. I had an offer that was killing the competition and getting me a daily consistent ROI of 500-700%. It was an easy offer to manage, all-graphic landing page, merchant supplied creatives, lots of traffic from Google content network, and a 50% landing page CTR with a 40% conversion rate at the offer. I was happy, making great money, finally on weekly wires with this ad network, and had the next 6 months of profits from this campaign all budgeted for new projects and other campaigns.

Then out the blue one day, I checked stats in the afternoon and found that the numbers were horrific, only about 5% of the normal amount. Freaking out that the offer died and my AM didn’t tell me, or that my ads weren’t running, or worse yet, that I was being scrubbed like a 10-year-old who just said “uncle fucker” in front of grandma, I ran straight to the Prosper 202 spy menu to check stats there, and sure enough, not a lot of traffic.

A few things happened after I talked to my AM. Earlier in the month. I had to pull teeth to get a tracking pixel on this offer, and it wasn’t until the pixel was placed that things started to go South. First, my AM called, said “bad news, our payout should have been $1.75, not $2, we need to immediately drop your payout, but in addition, this merchant hasn’t paid us since September 08 and we’d like you to stop the traffic right now.” (This was in March 09) So at this point I’m kind of stressing, but not too bad as the campaign would only lose about $1200/month and was still really profitable if I went down to $1.75, but to stop RIGHT NOW? I mean dude, I have this money budgeted for the next 6 months.

Then the ax came down, the AM said “Truth is 3 days from now we’re meeting with the merchant and will likely drop them for non-payment.” So here I am with this GREAT traffic source, AWESOME conversion stats, and PLANS for the future profits, and this flaming bag of shit is thrown on my doorstep.

No biggie I thought, I’ll find out who else has the offer or a similar offer and jump ship. I did that but the payout at the second network was just too low to make the campaign worthwhile and I’d have to get busy on a new campaign ASAP. Add to that, 24 hours after I switched the links to the new network, the great hand of Google, like a pimp hand to a wayward ho, came CRASHING down against my chin in the most spectacular Google bitch slap of the year. They killed 100% of the campaign, no reason, no explanation, no excuses, nothing.

So there I was, sitting there thinking “no biggie, I’ll get back to work.” and for a week, that’s what I did. Then the FTC got it’s panties in a knot and decided to go after gov’t grants and google cash offers, so all the guys running those jumped out of the niche and started hammering the other offers extremely hard, which made my efforts to find a new profitable niche a lot more expensive than I anticipated.

So I worked and worked for 2 weeks, never really putting anything together and each day, growing more and more depressed. I questioned my talent, my ability, my knowledge, and most of all, I questioned if this was the biz for me at all. Nothing seemed to go right.

Then it came to me one night in the middle of pwning a 6-pack of Guinness stouts, “you don’t have to hit a home run your first at-bat each game, just get on base, then go from there.”

So for the next few days I did just that. I stuck to some basic maintenance of some older sites. I dropped 40-50 links a day each day and started to see some organic conversions come across for the higher payout niches, I also started getting excited about doing the simple tasks. You know, for a long time, I thought I had to be everything from the CEO to the janitor, making sure I had 100% of the project plan organized and being completed on a constant basis throughout the day. I realized that’s not the case.

I started just telling myself “I’ll do 3 major things today, if I get them done in 8 hours, cool, if not, I’ll re-evaluate tomorrow morning and redefine my day’s priorities.” This was just what the doctor ordered. I wasn’t worried about the “big picture” all the time like I was previously. I still knew what the big picture was and documented accordingly, but by and large, I could just focus on the task at hand, and not get flustered with worrying if the other tasks were perfect.

I’m at the point now where I know tough times will be there in the future, and I’ll get depressed again over some dumbass campaign dying suddenly, but I’ll also be better equipped to handle the after effects of such a slump.

This scenario is like Las Vegas in a lot of ways. Tons of bright lights, tons of boobage, and tons of booze, but you have to remember that it all has it’s price, and if you play your cards right, you’ll come out better in the end.

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