Affiliate marketers deal with tons of content daily, and they often have to generate it themselves. Let’s be honest: It’s often frustrating when you want to get more results in less time but understand you’ll have to spend hours or even days creating one piece of content. It seems that others do that a lot faster, right?
Plus, our post-COVID reality makes professionals worry about their businesses even more. Most understand that now they need to work even harder but with the same quality to stay afloat. All these stresses discourage creativity, lead to burnouts, and lower active brain work. It seems we all need a magic pill to double productivity and get the most out of our professional skills for better marketing results.
In this article, you’ll find practical tips on how to write more affiliate content in less time. Let’s check what you can do to organize writing work like a pro.
Organize your pre-writing routine
You know that affiliate content creation is not only about writing. A pre-writing routine like information research, search intent, content planning, and outlining take place too, and it stands to reason that you can’t do all that at the same time. Why? Doing so would lead to brain overload and writing holdback. As a result, it takes much more time for you to complete a content piece.
If you want to write faster and spend less time on content creation, try separating all the pre-writing practices and have them all ready before you sit down and start writing a piece itself. Here go your practical tips on how to do that:
Brainstorming sessions
Brainstorming is the process of searching for ideas (content, marketing, business ones) that will transform into decisions later. When working on affiliate content, brainstorming sessions matter because that’s when you can come up with creative topics for your future marketing articles, blog posts, or social media content.
Organize individual brainstorming sessions once a week to generate more valuable content ideas you’ll use later. To save time, you can do that during home office hours, when you’re having lunch in your favorite cafe, on your way home.
Take a notebook everywhere you go and write down every idea once it hits you, even if you consider it awkward or irrelevant to your project at first. Quotes, exciting slogans, thoughts from books — everything matters and can turn into your next content piece. This pool of ideas will save you time when you need to decide what to write next.
Doing research
Once you decide on a few blog topics to turn into your affiliate content pieces, don’t hurry up to start writing. First, you need to research, gather the information, and craft detailed outlines on what you’ll cover in those articles.
The tip here is to do research and outline several content topics at once. Even if you spend the whole day on that, it will save you a lot of time later in the week.
Let’s say you’ve spent Monday researching and outlining the information for three affiliate articles. Now you can do nothing but write those three posts on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. As a result, you’ll have three complete pieces to publish and distribute on Friday. But if you didn’t do that pre-writing work, you would have to research and plan every separate article a few times per week, which would leave you less time for writing and no time for content distribution. Why? Because topic research is time-consuming and also includes the preparation of visuals and references.
Visual content and links for references
To save time on content creation, make it a habit to keep all the potentially relevant images, graphics, and other visual content in a particular folder on your computer. Also, create a list of resources where you can find original and royalty-free visuals or where you can create illustrations for your articles. It will save time on image search when you sit and start writing a content piece.
Creating high-quality affiliate content, you’ll also need to refer to some data: scientific research, Google analytics, industry surveys, reports. When outlining your pieces, think of what data you’ll use and what types of visual content you’ll need to illustrate your idea for readers. Prepare all this beforehand, and you won’t have to stop and freeze your writing process. As you know, it can be challenging to get back to writing when you “lose” a thought or have to divert to another type of activity.
All this pre-writing work is your chance to reduce the writing time. With all the resources, references, outlines, and visual elements ready on your plate, you won’t get distracted by searching for a picture or a quote to mention in your work. Plus, it helps implement intentions in the brain and curb your procrastination. With pre-work completed, our brain believes the task is much easier to do now, and it becomes more productive.
Make the most out of your writing process
Now it’s time to start writing. Which practical tips can help you make this process faster and more efficient?
Get rid of distractions
Don’t worry; this tip is not about what we all have heard thousands of times already, a la “turn off your smartphone” or “get rid of desktop notifications.” It’s about your workspace organization and the creative process of using a writing app for more productive work as an affiliate content creator.
So, first off, clean your workspace as much as possible:
- Say no to clutter on the table.
- Take a comfortable chair.
- Put a live plant near your desktop or laptop (they boost productivity and reduce stress).
- Make a cup of green tea (it’s proven to make the brain work better).
Then, pay attention to the writing app you use. Some have a distraction-free interface, while others allow you to adjust their features accordingly. For example, if writing your affiliate content in Google Docs, you can hide the menu and make it full-screen to make it lean.
Another tip here:
If possible, use two computer monitors when writing. Therefore you will not spend time switching between tabs to check your resources or research data.
Know how to work with templates
Affiliate content marketers are active users of different templates, and that’s OK. Templates save time, energy, and resources, allowing you to automate some processes and better focus on more creative or demanding tasks. While the most common templates marketers use are for business plans or customer service emails, you can also create master documents for every type of content you write.
Prepare them beforehand, and now, when you have ready templates for blog posts, case studies, reviews, and any other content types — just fill them in each time you need to craft corresponding writings fast.
Manage time while writing
What else you can do to speed up writing is to set a timer. This time management trick helps you get started and focus on a particular piece for a specific timeframe. Just put an alarm clock on your table (feel free to use online timers like Pomodoro, if that’s more comfortable for you), set some time (20-30 minutes are great to start), and continue writing until this time is over.
Allocating such time blocks motivates the brain to work faster until the job is done. It’s the result of the Zeigarnik Effect: We don’t like starting the task, but when we begin — we can’t leave it unfinished. So the timer is our mental motivator to keep going.
Another time management trick to encourage yourself to write faster is setting strict deadlines. It helps you focus on the result and organize your prioritization process accordingly.
Why do deadlines work? They raise a stress level, tricking the brain into getting things done and priming us into action. Psychologically, we want to get rid of that stress, so we start working faster. When you don’t have any particular deadline for completing a content asset, you are not being pushed to keep moving. So you can postpone writing to the last minute or waste a lot of precious time on one task.
Organize your post-writing stage
Once your draft is ready, the work isn’t over. Now you need to spend some more time proofreading and editing, and it often happens to be even more time and energy-consuming than writing itself. Which tricks could help you do this faster?
Proofread and edit faster
It stands to reason that you use editing tools like Grammarly or Hemingway to check writings and correct any grammar or stylistic mistakes. But try considering them like helpers, not pro editors: Even the most innovative tool can’t recognize spelling mistakes like “your” vs. “you’re” or “then” vs. “than.” So, proofread your affiliate content even after your editing tools have finished their checking.
Here go tips on how to do that faster:
- Zoom in or out of your draft. It will allow you to notice all the typos.
- Read every sentence out loud. Although it seems to take more time, it’s the opposite. By reading sentenced out loud, you won’t miss any mistakes, as it can happen during scanning, and you won’t have to go back to the draft again and again in search of tiny drawbacks.
- Ask a friend or a colleague to read your draft if possible. With a fresh eye, they have more chances to notice all the typos or readability gaps in your work.
Motivate your brain to work better
As an affiliate marketer working with all kinds of content and websites, you might believe that the more different tools you use, the better. Tools and apps for productivity, writing, organizing time at work — are all great helpers; but, they’ll hardly make you work faster if you don’t care about your mental and physical condition.
To work faster, generate more ideas, and boost results, you need to focus on practices that increase your concentration, creativity, and self-organization. At the same time, you need something to decrease procrastination, mood swings, and burnouts. What can fuel your energy and brain’s performance is known as biohacks.
Applying them to your daily routine regularly, you’ll motivate the brain to work better. Not only is it great for your business plans, but it also serves your better health and overall well-being.
So, here’s what you can do for influencing your brain’s performance:
Do mental exercises
As you probably heard, mental exercises like meditation, expressing gratitude, savoring, or acts of kindness can influence health and a brain’s performance. Studies show they improve our attitude to work and the world around us, increasing our sense of well-being by 10%.
For affiliate marketers, these practices might be of interest because they help unleash creativity, boost focus and attention to work, and positively impact memory and productivity. All these qualities matter for work performance, don’t you agree?
Here go few exercises to try:
- Do something nice every day: give a compliment to a friend or a colleague, donate to some project, or volunteer in a shelter. It’s your exercise to practice kindness.
- Think of practicing gratitude: keep a journal where you’ll thank for five things that happened to you every day; write thank-you emails to friends; post corresponding messages on social media, etc.
- Try 5-10 minutes of meditation daily: Choose a practice that seems most comfortable for you; it will de-stress you a bit.
- Practice savoring, aka an act of reviewing and appreciating your experience while it’s happening.
- Listen to music while writing your affiliate content. Sure thing, this practice won’t work for everyone (some prefer working in complete silence); but studies prove that music boosts attention and brainpower. Just consider music with no lyrics: Studies say that lyrics reduce attention performance at work.
Remember about physical activity
Being an affiliate marketer requires focus and determination when handling several projects simultaneously: finding potential customers to increase affiliate sales, retaining affiliate customers, outreaching websites, producing quality content, collecting email addresses to share content with the target audience, planning strategies to generate organic traffic and retaining affiliate customers. All while trying to keep the average cost of the affiliate program affordable.
Sooner or later, it leads to stress, weaker immune systems, anxiety, and burnouts.
When you’re in such a state, it’s challenging to keep working and generate awesome content in a short time frame. To deal with that and keep your performance on track, make it a habit to spend at least 30 minutes on physical activities daily.
Good news for those who don’t like or have no time for the gym:
According to studies, it’s aerobic exercises that influence our memory and concentration most. For example, walking can increase creativity by 60%! Dancing, jogging, and stair climbing do wonders too. So even if you don’t have any desire to go to the gym, you still can find an opportunity to impact your physical activity and work performance.
For those super lazy, there’s also a solution:
Consider a standing desk for working. Not only is it great for health (say goodbye to poor blood circulation and back pain), but such a desk can also improve your focus, increase energy, and boost brainpower for your more efficient work.
Consider nutrition habits
You’ve heard that “you are what you eat” mantra. Yes, nutrition habits are hard to keep when you have a heap of affiliate marketing projects on a plate; but they help boost immunity and work productivity long-term. So, consider the following:
- Say no to sugar, fried food, refined flour, and saturated fats.
- Eat products that improve our cognitive functions: dark chocolate (enhances focus), salmon (thanks to omega-3 fatty acids, it serves for better brain function), blueberries (improve learning capacity and protects from stress).
- For coffee lovers: Try bulletproof coffee, as it works to improve memory and enhance cognitive function.
- For tea lovers: No worries, your fav drink affects brain activity, focus, and mental clarity too.
Watch your sleep hygiene
Let’s face it, affiliate marketers often give up sleep hours for more projects to complete. However, sleep deprivation does nothing but harm to your overall health and working productivity. To influence your focus and efficiency at work, do your best to sleep 7-9 hours per night and make this sleep healthy.
For that, make a bedroom 100% dark because light prevents melatonin secretion and lowers sleep quality. Also, avoid blue light from the screens of your mobile devices for 2-3 hours before sleep and organize your sleep schedule the best you can.
Conclusion
Together with organizational skills and little tricks to influence the brain’s motivation, your right mindset can skyrocket your work with writings and help you remain an efficient affiliate marketer. You just need to separate pre-writing and actual writing processes, eliminate distractions and use corresponding tools and templates to your benefit.
And please don’t hesitate to ask professionals for help if you see they can help you organize work processes better. After all, their mission is to make your affiliate marketing more manageable.
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