PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Organizing Your Time and Your Priorities
Contrary to what many people who are new to the affiliate marketing business
may know, this business existed before the Internet. At that time, the work was
tedious; your only tools were your business card, the telephone and the sales
letter. In addition, it was a real challenge to get your hands on updated
information about the products and services you were promoting.
But the advent of the Internet changed all of that. Now with the help of
technology, you can deliver you affiliate marketing message to thousands of
people at once.
Now that you have planned and organized the structure of your affiliate
marketing business and created your website, your next step is to create a
project management outline to handle the day to day task of affiliate marketing:
- Consider first the personal goals that you were asked to outline in the
first section of Affiliate Max Cash; is this a part-time or full-time
commitment?
- Look at your personal work style; are you an early bird or a night owl?
- Are there any other time commitments that you need to consider, such as
activities with children?
These three pieces of information will give you an overview of how to
organize yourself and your affiliate marketing tasks. Here is an example of the
daily project management tasks of a dedicated affiliate marketer:
- Set a start time that you can manage consistently. Begin your day with an
update on what has happened since you went offline.
Start with your e-mail, read each one that is newsworthy and follow through
with the appropriate action, i.e., reply, file or delete. Resist the
temptation of the "I’ll do it later" monster, which only wastes
time. Make a practice of completing whatever you start, i.e., if you open
the email, be ready to do whatever it takes to take it to the next level.
- Pay special attention to the e-mails that have questions to answer from
your website visitors, they are very important and should be answered within
24 hours of their request. Nothing turns off a customer faster than an
unanswered email. You have probably experienced for yourself how annoying it
is not to get an answer to a question, so this has to be a priority. It is a
good idea to set up an auto responder to notify the customer that their
email has been received and their question is in the process of being
answered.
- Next it is time to review your affiliate marketing program information.
There may be new developments or products that you need to add to your
website or information that you want to pass on to your website visitors
online or in an e-mail.
- Review your affiliate marketing program statistics for clicks, sales,
leads and commission payments. If you have advertising campaigns running
that generate independent stats, you need to include them for evaluation of
effectiveness.
- On to your website logs. First make sure that all of your pages are
responding properly when requested. Investigate any errors that are found.
Second check your visitor statistics and compare them with the previous week
and month.
- If your website design is 1 year old, it is time to start thinking about
how to revise it. Remember Internet time is much different than time in the
physical world. 1 year for an online business is like 5 years for a brick
and mortar business. Giving a well-designed site a fresh look does not have
to be a radical change, the point is to keep your visitors interested.
- Studies on website design show that a well designed site can increase
visitor activity on your site, i.e., increased subscriptions, forum
registrations or giveaway requests, as well as boost your affiliate
conversion rates. Make a list of the areas that most need improvement, i.e.,
adding a syndicated news feed, as well as what simple change can you make to
improve the overall look of the site, i.e., border color.
- You begin the update of your newsletter and content articles for your
website, including the latest developments or added benefits to your
affiliate marketing product or service.
- With that section completed, you can focus on showing appreciation to
those who have helped you in joint ventures, link exchanges or other
promotions and sales efforts. Remember that the Internet is a community;
giving credit where credit is due can bring more prospects to your affiliate
marketing website.
- The last section of your newsletter or content article can be devoted to
writing recommendations for those who want credible sources for the products
being promoted.
Along with some success tips for affiliate marketing newbies. This
accomplishes two objectives at the same time; you promote your product and
the program.
- You end your newsletter with a brief description of the topics that will
be discussed in the next issue.
- Now it is time to place your submissions to search engines, article and
affiliate program directories to support your marketing efforts. These
directories are the means by which you can attract people to joining your
affiliate program, spread the word about your site to interested buyers and
gain greater exposure for your site in general. You can use these same
publications to keep up to date with the newly introduced products.
- If you have sub affiliates working with you, make contact with them now
and review their progress fairly and accurately. This includes phone orders
and postal mails that need attention. Discuss their needs for resources; are
the ads, banners and articles working for them? Do they need additional
information? Do they have recommendations or suggestions? As you begin to
have more direct referrals remember that it is important to stay visible and
accessible.
- The issues that your affiliates discuss with you can be posted for
feedback in your affiliate marketing forum. This gives you a chance to get
first hand experience and information that you can pass along to your
affiliates and use yourself. If your discussion group is interactive, you
will be able to share tips and advice in real time, which is an excellent
good will builder and may motivate others to join your program.
Does this day sound overwhelming to you? Okay, we admit that it may not be
possible to do all of this in one day, but the point was to give you a realistic
view of the type of daily tasks that makes affiliate marketing such a
challenging and rewarding business.
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