Top Affiliate Marketer: A Day in the Life…

For some reason my mind keeps going back to the skit Commission Junction performed at CJU that showed a typical affiliate marketer starting their day at 10am in her Pajamas and sponge bob slippers yelling for her mom to pick up the phone when it rings. While surely a dramatization, I thought it might be helpful to offer up a day of my life in contrast:

Thursday, September 29th, 2005

5:30am: My wife’s alarm goes off, she is running today. I don’t have to get up till 6am, but my mind is already working on the things I need to do today. Halloween is right around the corner and that is where I have decided to focus my energies for the day. An question pops into my head: “How much better do top keywords convert?”

Kristen from BuyCostumes.com sent me a demographics study yesterday indicating that 500,000 customers used the search phrase “Halloween Costumes” in 2005. Although I run that search term in my campaigns, I don’t bid enough to be anywhere near the top because of the high price tag. BuyCostumes has provided some great content pages that show the top 10 costumes in various categories. So I have decided to create a site around this idea and test “Halloween Costumes” by bidding high and keeping my daily budget fairly low as a test.

5:45am: I have about 15 minutes before getting the kids up and ready for school, so I quickly jump on my computer and start looking for domain names to test my “top 10″ concept. Popusearch makes it easy for me to see what names are available quickly and I expand the concept to grab some names that might work more generically as well for Christmas and the future. I shoot an email to my GoDaddy rep and ask him to register the following names on my behalf:

10BestSelling.net
TenBestSelling.net
Ten-Best-Selling.com
Ten-Best-Selling.net
Top-Ten-Costumes.com
Top-Ten-Costumes.net
Top-10-Costumes.com
Top-10-Costumes.net
TopCostumes.net
Top-Costumes.net
Best-Costumes.net

6:00am - 7:30am: Family time. I have three kids, Addison (almost 9), Riley (5) and Jolie (2). Time to get them up, feed them, make the lunches, and get them ready for to leave for School.

7:30am: Quickly scan my email to see if anything important has come in that needs immediate attention. I notice I have about 6 disapproved ad messages from Google. They will have to wait. I answer a few quick emails from some of my consulting clients.

7:45am - 8:30am: Shower, Stretch, etc…

8:30am: Time to work. I check the Google disapprovals. They are all for some of my long running campaigns, it appears that Google has re-reviewed some of my ads, and has a problem with me using a company’s trademark name in my Ad copy. The other disapprovals are for companies who have decided that they are going to market their special promotions with pop-up ads, so my ads get disapproved. The pop-up ad disapprovals concern me more because that means contacting the company and potentially having to change urls, this will cause my long running ads to lose built up positioning in Google and have to start over. The issue of the company name in my ads is usually quickly resolved by getting the merchant to fax me a form saying it’s ok and then Google gets my ads back online. Since this is happening more and more, I have decided to get proactive. I create a standard trademark authorization form and send it to my merchant partners and affiliate network contacts.

9am: Chad from CJ is quick to respond to my email and IM’s me, He knows that’s the best way to reach me. We chat about the ad copy issue.

9:07am: The phone rings, I ignore it and let it go to voice mail. Someone wants me to promote something that isn’t in season, and I need to get focused on Halloween.

9:30 - 11:00am: I build Top-Ten-Costumes.com using the Typepad Blog software. Once complete I send Kristen at BuyCostumes.com a list of other Top 10 Creative I would like if they have time to create them.

11:00am - 11:30pm: I check my email and see an email from my GoDaddy rep at 9:40am indicating that they have secured my domain names. I point the Top-Ten-Costumes.com domain to my the new Blog I created, and forward all the other costume domains to Top-Ten-Costumes.com. I haven’t decided what to do with the other generic names yet, so I leaved them parked at GoDaddy for now.

11:30am: I send an instant message to a friend of mine to see if he wants to grab lunch. He does, so we decide pick a place and I head out.

11:45 - 1pm: I meet a friend for lunch. This friend of mine has a full time job, but about a year ago I also thought him the search arbitrage game. Last year he made more from his affiliate programs than his job, but his wife just had a baby, and he isn’t ready to focus on this full-time yet. There are about 4 other friends locally I have worked with who are at a minimum covering their mortgages with affiliate marketing, but keep their full-time jobs.

1pm: Back to work. My site TOp-10-Costumes.com site is now live under the new domain, and I have decided to add another chunk of AdSense code to the top of the site to add another opportunity for Revenue. I am going to be spending a lot per click on this site, so I want to make sure I get the most revenue per click. Using some of the tricks I gleaned from Joel Comm’s AdSense Secrets Book. I hack the TypePad templates to get what I need.

1:10pm - Phone Rings - Ignored. No voice mail left, must not have been too important.

1:12pm: Larry from Discovery Channel Store IM’s me. I chat with him. We have been discussing how we can work together for Christmas. I show him my Top-Ten-Costumes and keep working on the AdSense code as we are chatting. I show Larry a few options for displaying the Ads at the top of the site, and he helps me figure out which is best. We talk about the Top 10 idea for both Halloween and Christmas, and he is going to work on some content for me.

2:12pm: Beth Kirsh IM’s me. We have a very brief chat about Link high-jacking and I am back to work.

2:30pm - 3:00pm: I have gotten the AdSense code the way I want it and have updated Top-Ten-Costumes.com as well as my other Halloween Sites: Costumes-for-Kids.com, Costumes-for-Adults.com, Costumes-for-Pets.com, Halloween-Party-Supplies.com, and Team-Mascot-Costumes.com. They are all using the same basic template so it’s easy to make the change across all of them.

2:47pm: A Consulting Client IM’s me. We chat about the campaigns I optimized for him yesterday, and some new landing pages they are building and how we can target those pages with new search ads.

3:00pm - 3:30pm: A build the new Google campaign for Top-Ten-Costumes.com. I set my budget for the campaign to $50 per day and bid high on the top terms. In the next few days I will watch the reports to see conversion rates from this site, if it looks like I can be profitable; I will greatly increase my daily budget. I have always taken the approach of bidding fairly low running a lot of keywords, if this test works out and I can make money, it might change my approach on a bunch of my campaigns.

3::30pm: Time to check on my stats so far for Halloween. Even though I have generated approximately $50k in costume sales so far in September, my profits haven’t been great. As of Sept 25th, I was only up around $800. I am haven’t been too concerned though, because I know that people typically visit about 3 times before they actually buy a costume and a lot more people browse in September and purchase in October. But today my numbers have taken a turn for the worse and I am starting to lose money. I know I will make it up, but still I decide to cut my bid prices in half until I can figure out what is going on. I log into CJ to pull a commission detail report for BuyCostumes.com to see what sites are selling and what sites are not. I waste about 30 minutes trying to get a report on CJ, finally I IM my rep and he emails me a report in seconds. I now know how to get reports from CJ when I have a lot of transactions. I make some more bid adjustments based on the report.

4:05pm: Phone Rings - Ignored. No voice mail, must not have been too important.

4:06pm: A Friend IM’s me, we chat briefly about a potential new job opportunity he is considering.

5:15pm - 8pm. Family Time. Sara’s got to run out to pick up Addison and then has to run to a meeting at Jolie’s school, so I finish getting dinner ready, feed the kids, help them with their homework and get them ready for bed.

6:00pm: Phone Rings - Ignored

8pm - Some nights I might grab an extra hour between 8pm-9pm, but the premier of Alias is tonight, and I am already recording Survivor on my ReplayTV, so that’s it for today.

10pm: Time to sleep, I get up at 5:30am tomorrow to go to the Gym.

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