THE DAY OF AN AFFILIATE
Have you ever considered what the day of an affiliate might be like? What kind of tasks are needed for success in online marketing? Are there any magic tips to become a millionaire overnight?
For many, it is not entirely clear what is affiliate marketing and an affiliate marketer. In this article, I describe the most important affiliate jobs, tools, and the daily work of an affiliate. All in all, this is a description of what is affiliate marketing about.
AN AFFILIATE NEEDS LONG-TERM SCHEDULING
Affiliate marketing, in short, is an online business where a person promotes merchant’s or advertisers’ products on a website through so-called affiliate links received from the merchant or advertiser. To start as an affiliate you need a website, a business idea, online business training, and more detailed knowledge around your business idea.
If I give you an example. You can make your hobby or other interest a business idea. For instance, if you love to play video games, you start writing articles about video games on your website. You make an affiliate deal with some video game merchant and start to promote those products using affiliate links or banners that.
To reach the stage that you can really make money with affiliate marketing requires time and long-term planning and scheduling among other things. Yes, I know you may be disappointed, but there isn’t any easy and fast way to become a millionaire overnight, and you’re better to not try any of those offers that promise you such a thing. All those promises are scams.
Setting up your website and customizing it for your online business needs, getting trained with up-to-date online business knowledge, getting traffic to your site, getting experienced and receive authority among your audience, all that stuff needs time and long-term scheduling.
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No worries, even though all of my stories can seem tedious, that’s not it. Affiliate marketing is an interesting and creative job that is also fun. As in many other circumstances, the hard work rewards eventually and so will happen with your affiliate marketing, the success will come inevitably.
THE MOST IMPORTANT TASKS FOR AN AFFILIATE
The traffic means the money in affiliate marketing and there are tasks to do to ensure getting traffic. Everything starts from the fact that the content of your website is of high quality and it provides solutions for your visitors to help them to reach what they’re looking for. You can not just advertise and impose the products you are writing about. You have to write skillfully so that you reach your audience’s confidence and after that selling is much easier.
The search engines such as Google, Bing, and, Yahoo rank your site content and your keywords. When you’re ranked high on search engines, you get a natural traffic flow to your site. To leverage this ranking system of search engines is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Finding proper and relevant keywords happens through Keyword Research, and keyword research is among the most important tasks of an affiliate.
As an affiliate marketer, you may have several affiliate programs you’re dealing with and many products to promote. This needs marketing campaigns online. Using social media for your campaigns is nowadays an important way to get traffic. You have to control, monitor, and track all your campaigns on a daily basis. Through the following tools you can check out how your campaigns are going, is there any needs to make some corrections or put effort into some particular issue.
5 CRITICAL AFFILIATE TOOLS
You can find numerous affiliate tools out there. It’s best to evaluate them and make comparisons. It is also necessary to consider what tools you really need and which aren’t essential. In my opinion, the following tools are the most critical for an affiliate marketer:
- Website Builder with vast possibilities to customize your site according to becoming needs
- Website Hosting&Security
- Efficient Keyword Research Tool
- Comprehensive stats and monitoring tools
- Perfect Technical Support of your website
Affiliates have to make sure that the website works without interference, fast and secure, and if technical errors occur, the technical support fixes them quickly. That’s why most of the tools above are dealing with securing the website’s health.
AN EXAMPLE OF AN AFFILIATE DAY
Yeah, here we go to take a view of the day of an affiliate. This is quite an ordinary day “at the office”, but as you know, an affiliate doesn’t need any traditional office, he or she can work from home and in fact anywhere in the world. That’s one of the fabulous features of an affiliate marketer.
I start my affiliate day with a cup of coffee and a newspaper. Sometimes you get great ideas from the daily news. I live in Finland and that’s why I have to schedule my day reflecting it to the time zone in the US, my marketing target country. I wake up about 8 am local time and then it’s late evening in the US. It’s not the best-promoting time, so I’ll start by checking last night’s statistics, website traffic, conversions, and sales or commissions. It’s a great feeling when you see that you have earned money while you are sleeping.
It’s possible to make automated scheduling of your marketing pitches and other promo messaging. So I’ve scheduled my Twitter marketing approximately between 6 pm and 8 pm US time. It’s hard to wake up doing that at 4 am in Finland. My whole affiliate day is scheduled according to the time difference. Between 8 am and 11 am I work with several supportive tasks, and make the most of promoting tasks and personal contacts between 6 pm and 8 pm local time.
So I continue my forenoon tasks. Now it’s a great time to prepare my blog posts. The first task is to make keyword research for my upcoming posts. I search for 20-30 relevant keywords which I’ll use for my upcoming 20-30 blog post content. I create captivating titles for those keywords and break down the content idea into 4-5 subtitles. That’s the way I get a ready structure template for my posts and I can write those posts much faster than one in a row. If I write 3 to 5 posts a week, I have a template for over one-month of blog writing. That’s all for this morning. I’ll take a break and go cross-country skiing. After that, I take lunch and continue working at 6 pm local time.
I start my evening session by checking out some blogs and messages on the community forum. I help few members with their problems and visit for a while in a live chat forum. The community I’m working with is called Wealthy Affiliate and it’s an online business training platform. If you would join Wealthy Affiliate with me, you can register here to create your Free Starter Membership.
After that, I leave few comments on other member’s websites and they do the favor. My last tasks for the day are making daily promotions of the affiliate programs I have a scheduled marketing pitch queue on Twitter and I check the visitors and their actions. I leave different marketing pitches on Facebook groups and LinkedIn. I prepare new marketing material for my latest posts. I create a new Landing Page and link it to my proper web page and check the further links for referrals. Now I think it’s time for a tasty snack and an evening movie.
That was the description of the day of an affiliate. I have to say that there isn’t any ordinary day as an affiliate. The daily tasks vary and every now and then there are some problems that need to be addressed at the expense of other things. The daily working time varies from 3 hours to 8 hours. If no particular extra activity occurs, maintenance and monitoring the affiliate business can only take a couple of hours a day.
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my blog post. I wish you can benefit from it and share it with anyone who might benefit from it. If you’re interested in affiliate marketing, I highly recommend the platform I’m working on, the Wealthy Affiliate. For more detailed information, read my Wealthy Affiliate Review. If you have questions, comments, or other feedback, feel free to leave a comment below. I’d be happy to give you any assistant or help in any way I can.
Kari
Today life as an affiliate can be long and busy going about daily task. However, no one said it would be easy if so everyone would do it so I can say this over a period of time it will all be worth it
It’s just like you said Maurice. However when you make your basic work as an affiliate properly it will come a day when you have to only maintain and control your affiliate business and fine-tune it as needed. Then it is possible to enjoy the fruits of your work and to breathe a little.
Thanks for walking us through the day of an affiliate. I’ve noticed that although I don’t do the cross country skiing (that made me chuckle btw, cos I live in Australia where it’s so hot), I have noticed I’m starting to get into a similar routine, also keeping in mind the time difference between myself and the US. I am still working out social media engagements, but you’ve certainly set out a realistic and practical vision of how to manage activities while being an affiliate marketer. Thanks for an enjoyable and realistic post.
Planning and schedules are important for an affiliate. You have to make monthly, weekly and daily plans to achieve your main goals of your business. Even the big ones do not seem to be overwhelming when they are divided into smaller sub-tasks.The experience help to identify those really important issues at a given time which are worth investing in.