Effective affiliate marketing means planning your marketing efforts and then systematically doing them. This means developing a marketing schedule and sticking to it.

Your marketing plan may be to sell 1,000 affiliate widgets in the next three months. You have the methods laid out before you; you have money set aside to pay for the various marketing methods.

You also have the product, or access to them, ready to go. Do you have the time to do all that you want to do? If you do, is the right amount of time allocated to each aspect of your marketing plan. On the other hand, are you haphazardly approaching your plan? Is your modus operandi, "whatever I feel like doing today is how I'll market today"?

That's the wrong way to approach your marketing plan. With so many ways to market to so many niches you will become overwhelmed. You will not know where to start. You need to break down your marketing plan into bite-size segments. Then you need to allocate each segment to a particular day's menu.

You may have e-mail campaigns, article writing, trade shows, chat forums, cold-calling, speaking engagements, and information seminars as part of your marketing plan. You may have flyer distribution, online video-conferencing presentations, and direct mail writing as part of your campaign as well.

You may pay others to do some of these things but still need to schedule meetings with them to explain what you want done concerning your affiliate product. You need to schedule time for each of these activities. Then you need to tackle them one-by-one.

The best thing to do is to get out or onto your day-planner and start slotting specific marketing efforts into specific time-periods of specific days. Do this. When you see that such and such needs to be done on Monday at 10 a.m., then you will do it then. Then it is done and you can move on to the next marketing item. Before the month is out you will see many aspects of your marketing plan in operation or completed. The result should manifest itself in greater affiliate sales.

You may want to refine your marketing schedule beyond just slotting tasks into different time-slots of different days. You may want to schedule your marketing activities according to budget allotted to each marketing effort.

You may want to schedule all high-budget marketing efforts first, at the beginning of the month. You may want all low-cost or no-cost marketing efforts to follow them. Get out that planner and your marketing plan and slot in the most expensive marketing initiatives into the first two weeks of the month. The rest take up the second half of the month. This is just an example of how to structure your marketing efforts.

The thing with all this is that you have a schedule in black and white before you and are working from it. You are not letting outside forces, or whims of thought dictate your marketing work each day. It's surprising how quickly your marketing plan will run smoothly when you schedule aspects of it this way. Look at the time you need for each marketing effort. Look at any help, personnel-wise that you may need for any activity. Then schedule your efforts.

When you organize your marketing activities this way you only do marketing that you budgeted yourself for. Because you are sticking to a plan and a schedule for that plan, you do not branch off into areas that require you to spend even more money. A plan and a schedule for it keep you focused so you do not go over budget. You also do not waste time doing activities you should not be doing. You are not sidetracked because your focused plan and focused schedule do not allow for that.

Keep your marketing plan under control by scheduling every aspect of it. Schedule them by budget expenditure, time needed for each aspect, availability of personnel you need to help you, or any other way. Just make sure you set up a marketing schedule for your marketing plan. You will get your marketing done more efficiently to greater affiliate profits when you do.