A Day In The Life Of An Affiliate Marketer

A Day In The Life Of An Affiliate Marketer  - Being in the affiliate marketing business is not that hard now with the internet at your disposable. It is much easier now compared to the days when people have to make use of the telephones and other mediums of information just to get the latest updates on the way their program is coming along. 

So with technology at hand, and assuming that the affiliate is working from home, a day in his or her life would sound something like this…

A Day In The Life Of An Affiliate Marketer 

Upon waking up and after having breakfast, the computer is turned on to check out new developments in the network. As far as the marketer is concerned there might be new things to update and statistics to keep track on. 

The site design has to be revised. The marketer knows that a well-designed site can increase sign ups from visitors. It can also help in the affiliate's conversion rates.

That done, it is time to submit the affiliate program to directories that lists affiliate programs. These directories are means to attract people in joining your affiliate program. A sure way of promoting the affiliate program. 

Time to track down the sales you are getting from your affiliates fairly and accurately. There are phone orders and mails to track down. See if they are new clients checking the products out. Noting down the contact information that might be a viable source in the future.

There are lots of resources to sort out. Ads, banners, button ads and sample recommendations to give out because the marketer knows that this is one way of ensuring more sales. Best to stay visible and accessible too.

The affiliate marketer remembered that there are questions to answer from the visitors. This has to be done quickly. Nothing can turn off a customer than an unanswered email. 

To prove that the affiliate is working effectively and efficiently, inquiries would have to be paid more attention on. Nobody wants to be ignored and customers are not always the most patient of all people. Quick answer that should appear professional yet friendly too.

In the process of doing all the necessities, the marketer is logged on to a chat room where he or she interacts with other affiliates and those under that same program. This is where they can discuss things on how to best promote their products. 

There are things to be learned and it is a continuous process. Sharing tips and advices is a good way of showing support. There may be others out there wanting to join and may be enticed by the discussion that is going on. There is no harm in assuming what opportunities ahead. 

The newsletters and ezines were updated days ago, so it is time for the affiliate marketer to see if there are some new things happening in the market. This will be written about in the marketer's publication to be distributed to the old and new customers. 

These same publications are also an important tool in keeping up to date with the newly introduced products. The marketer has put up a sale and promotion that customers may want to know about. Besides, they have to keep up with the deadline of these sales written in the publications.

It is that time to show some appreciation to those who have helped the marketer in the promotions and sale increase. Nothing like mentioning the persons, their sites and the process they have done that made everything worked.

Of course, this will be published in the newsletters. Among the more important information that have been written already.

The marketer still has time to write out recommendations to those who want credible sources for the products being promoted. There is also time to post some comments on how to be a successful affiliate marketer on a site where there are lots of wannabees.

Two objectives done at the same time. The marketer gets to promote the product as well as the program they are in. Who knows, someone may be inclined to join. 

Time flies. Missed lunch but is quite contented with the tasks done. Bed time….

Ok, so this may not be all done in a day. But then, this gives you an idea of how an affiliate marketer, a dedicated one that is, spends the marketing day. 

Is that success looming in the distance or what?

A Day in the Life of an Affiliate Marketer

We've had a few requests recently from readers who want to know what we do on a daily basis. This is a really good question although a little difficult to answer because we are often working on different projects at any one time. In the past few weeks for instance, we have been looking at ways of making money without having to rely on Google and we don't mean writing new ebooks, or joint ventures or coaching or anything like that. We mean actually making money from a website related to a particular niche. We want to see if we can get traffic to that website without having to rely on Google and backlinking.

So we have kind of put all of our usual work on the backburner at least for the next few months to see if this will work. If it does, our newsletter list will be the first to know.

This is kind of how we have been working for a while now. We spend a few months on our niche sites and then suddenly we will have an idea for something and that will take all of our attention and we will be off working on that for a few months. We did a bit too much of that last year and it wasn't necessarily a good thing. It wasn't so much that the projects we were working on didn't work, only that we didn't give them a chance as we kept moving from one thing to another. It was back to the bad old days when we were trying to make a living from this business and we kept jumping from one method to another….aargh!

But, fortunately we are good at stepping back and seeing if we are heading in the wrong direction and we are finally back on track. So for now, we are focusing on one website and seeing if we can make money from it without Google intervention.

However, getting back to the whole point of this post, I think those who asked what we do on a daily basis were interested in what we do on a daily or weekly basis in relation to our Amazon sites. Mostly, all we really do is backlinking. We no longer write up new reviews or if we do it is very rarely. The reason we don't is that we have plenty already up on our sites that we can work with. We've mentioned this before on numerous posts on this site but we basically look at reviews that are already getting traffic and/or sales and work on those. We work on them by getting more backlinks to them and editing the content until it is the best review it can be.

So this is how our day generally looks. I don't know how much detail you might want to see here because some of you may not give a flying fig about when we have breakfast or not or whether we exercise but either way it is all here and you can always skip that sort of stuff and move on to what you think are the important bits if you like. So here it is:

Wake Up!

We both generally wake up sometime before 8am. Wanda is an early bird so will usually be up before me but either way whoever is ready to start work first for the day will send an email to the other to say they are ready. The other will respond to say they are also ready and when that happens I will get in my car to drive over to Wanda's (she only lives a few streets away so it only takes a minute or two). In other words, we don't really have a set start time, it's just when both of us are ready to start work for the day but in general it's probably around 9am.

Exercise or Meditation

The first thing we do (and this isn't all that consistent) is exercise or meditate depending on the mood we are in. Sometimes we do neither. At the moment we are working on the PACE program (which is excellent by the way), to get us fit for our next overseas trip. So we have been running up hills and working on the treadmill and using the bike and doing a bit of calisthenics. We sometimes do Qi Gong or we might do a mediation. After the exercise we will make up a Better than Coffee drink mixed with MSM and vitamin C – that keeps the post-exercise aches and pains away.

Breakfast

Next is breakfast. Pretty standard stuff here so skip and move on to the next bit….it's usually scrambled or poached eggs on toast if you really need to know.

Time to Start Work

By this time, it's usually about 10am and we are ready to start work. We have an office set up in Wanda's home so it is kept separate from the rest of the house which is always a good thing. It's nice to be able to close the door at the end of the working day. We have two computers in there and a white board. That's about it really. Nothing special.

Answering Emails and Comments

The first thing I normally do is answer emails and also comments on this blog and the Affiliate Reviews HQ site. We get a lot of them and some days it can take a while particularly Monday mornings because we don't usually answer emails on the weekend and they can build up.

Wanda on the other hand will answer the emails and comments from our niche websites.

Once that is done, we close down our email accounts for the day. If we keep them open, the emails keep pouring in and we are tempted to stop to read and answer them.

What's Next

At this point, we could be working on a number of different things but we will assume for this blog post that we are working on our Amazon sites and I will use the basic plan that we use when we do this.

We will also assume that we are working on two brand new pages that we have already written reviews for and we have found 3 keywords for each page that we want to rank for. We normally only work on two pages at a time when we are backlinking as the less the better. It's just so much easier to manage.

So our plan for the rest of the day might involve one or more of the following tasks:

1. Find 10 potential guest sites – For this task we would each find 10 related sites that we think might be interested in taking an article from us. We would send each of those sites an email and add each site to a spreadsheet in Google Docs. This allows us to keep track of who we have emailed and when.

This might take an hour or two hours or even three depending on the topic in question. We like to find sites related to our product review in some way so it can take time. But we know that it is worth it because we will end up with very high quality backlinks.

2. Respond to positive emails – If we have received an email from a guest site saying they will take an article then we respond to the email telling them that we will start working on their article.

3. Writing guest articles – Once we have a site that is willing to take an article from us then we start writing. Although to be quite honest  nowadays we get someone in Elance to write articles for us but back in the early days we wrote everything ourselves. We've written hundreds upon hundreds of articles over time and after a while you get quite good at writing up an article in as little as half an hour.

These guest articles will link back to our 2 product reviews and hence get us backlinks. In each of the reviews we will usually add three links – two to a product review and one to the home page, but sometimes all three to the product review, or 1 to one product review, 1 to a second product review and the third to the home page. In other words, we mix up the links.

4. Writing content for our sites – Again we very rarely write up our own content on our niche sites anymore. So we will generally just spend time in Elance writing up job projects to get 10 articles written at a time. For sites that we are working on we might add one or two articles a week to keep Google happy but we aren't terribly consistent with this.

5. Commenting on related sites and social networking – We don't go too crazy with this like we used to but we try and place maybe 5 comments a day or every second day on related blogs. And maybe a bit of social networking and bookmarking. This is really just to diversify our link building efforts – our focus is more on guest blogging than anything else as described in Step 3 above.

Time to Stop Work

At around 3.30 to 4pm we will finish up work for the day. We very rarely go any longer than that unless we have something that we are really enjoying or we have to get done.

So to summarize this might be our plan for the week for the two of us when we are in backlinking mode…

1. Contact 100 sites a week to see if they will accept a guest article.

2. Write up guest articles based on the response you get from step 1.

3. Write one or two informational type articles to add to our site to build up content.

4. Comment on 20 to 30 blogs.

You'll notice that we don't allocate time for Facebook, Twitter, reading forums or other peoples blogs. These things are okay if they specifically relate to your business – for example, if you are into Facebook marketing and you make your living this way but if not they should only be a small part of your day. Keep them as a reward at the end of the day after you have already accomplished what you need to do for that day.

We also don't allocate time for checking stats or our rankings. We used to do this constantly – it's hard not to when you are starting out – but we really don't check stats much at all these days. We just get on with the more important things instead of wasting our time worrying about whether we are still ranking for specific keywords or whether our traffic has dropped or not.

What you focus on is what you are going to get in both your daily life and your working life.  So our advice is to stop for just a minute today and see where your primary focus is at least in relation to your online business. Ask yourself the following questions and be truly honest with your responses:

Is your day relaxed or do you feel like you have too much on your plate and you don't know what to do next?

Do you feel like you have really accomplished something at the end of the day or do you find that you have spent most of your time reading and contributing to other people's stuff – forums, Facebook, Twitter, blogs and so on?

Are you focused on just one project or you do you constantly have multiple projects on the go?

Are you focused on just one website or are you constantly building more and more websites?

And the final and most important question:

Do you truly love what you do online or is it simply a means to make money?

You have to love what you are doing more than the money because if you don't then you may as well forget it, you are never really going to make it and if you do it is going to be short lived. Sure, there are some parts of the process that you aren't going to enjoy, like backlinking for instance….it's not one of our most favorite things, but essentially we really love this business and we love it with a passion.

If you enjoy what you do then the money will follow.

An Ordinary Day in the Life of an Affiliate Marketer

The internet has made it so much easier when it comes to being a member in the business of affiliate marketing. In fact, when compared to times when others had to use only the telephone to get their hands on updates and other such information, today's methods are so much more easier and effective.

Now, thinking of this technology and that an affiliate marketer has the ability to work directly from home, a day in their lives may go a little something like this.

 

Ok, so I woke up this morning, at my breakfast, and went straight to work. First thing first, right, I turned on my computer to see just what the latest happenings are, in regards to any statistics and updates that of course I must keep track of regularly to keep my business running smoothly. 

My website just is not cutting the mustard here, so I think today I am going to revise it. As you and I both know, if the website is not well-designed, I can never expect for my visitors to sign up for my service. So that is something I need to do in order to raise my rates of conversion.

Just a few tweaks here and there, ok I am done, on to the next task. Ok, I want to attract more people to join my affiliate program, so I need to promote it, and submit to directories. This will ensure that people are seeing my listings and could even increase my traffic.

Ok, bear with me here, now is the time in my day when I take a close and careful look at all sales I am currently getting from my affiliates. This takes a good amount of time because I must be both accurate and objective about it. This means tracking down orders via email and telephone. Check on any new clients that may be looking into my products and writing down the contact information they provided for later use.

Now onto my resources. You see I have an abundance of sample recommendations, button ads, banner ads, and advertisements I need to hand out. This helps me land more sales, which of course is important in my line of work, not to mention that is keeps my business accessible and visible at the same time.

Oh wait, I almost forgot, how silly of me. A few visitors sent me emails asking some questions about my products, so I must answer these write away. If I fail to answer them quickly or not at all, I could lose a potential customer really fast. I always have to remember that I must put customers and potential customers first. Of course, some are patient, but most want answers the minute the send them, so it is important that I show them just how professional I am and respond right away.

I forgot to mention that I logged onto my saved chat room at the beginning of the morning, see how hectic the life of an affiliate marketer can be. The chat room keeps in touch with other affiliates just like me, which use the same type of affiliate program I use. This is a great way to share ideas and testimonies about product promotion. Now, I have been an affiliate marketer for a long time, years really. However, I am always learning new things from other affiliate marketers. Furthermore, this chat room does wonders, because you never know who is listening it and may become interested, which means referrals!

Today is Friday and on Monday, I updated my ezine and newsletter, therefore, I need to look into the latest news on the market today. This way when the next publication comes out, this will be the topic of interest.

Newsletters and ezines are extremely important to my business. This is how I introduce all my latest products and services. I offer my customers sales and promotions that they may be interested in. Of course, I have a deadline I must meet, so this is a consistent process as well.

Now for those who help me along the way with my sales and promotions, I usually make mention of the person, their website, and just what they have done to fit the pieces of this puzzle together. 

Now I have to write out some recommendations because I have had request from some people wanting sources that are credible for these products. I should also make a quick visit to a few websites and forums that have people just coming apart at the seams wanting to get into the world of affiliate marketing. Just a few comments here and there on how to become a successful affiliate. This does three specific things for my business, first I get to help others who are interested, second I get to promote my products, and third I may just get a referral. It works all the way around.

Oh my, look at the time, I missed lunch and dinner. Oh well, it is time for bed now.

It may not be all done in one day. However, you have the general idea of just what it is like to be a dedicated affiliate marketer for one day.

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