5 Things Every Affiliate Marketer Does

Posted on August 20, 2010 by

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An affiliate marketer has to wear quite a few hats. For new-comers in the field, here is a high level discussion about the top 5 things that make an affiliate marketer’s workload.

If you know what’s involved, and depending on your strengths and weaknesses, you can devise a plan of success.

If you are like me and embrace multiple methods and own a number of websites, then as you grow bigger it gets more cumbersome. Speaking from experience, I follow multiple ways to monetize. I own a few sites, develop them differently and also promote them differently.

  1. Website Development

    2. You need to have a website. The days for direct linking to a vendor site using ppc are over. Not many vendors allow it now a days. I use php or a CMS like for most of my sites. Also I use php for the back end stuff like tracking, cron jobs, datfeed uploads etc.
    Also php integrates very well with mysql databases. There are many free php scripts you can find on the internet to do website related tasks.

    Can it be Outsourced?  Yes, but will be expensive for new affiliates. I would suggest starting a CMS like WordPress and then getting familiar with php and mysql.

    All my sites have a mysql database in the background. Sites that are datafeed based require some php scripts to automate the feed download and parsing process where possible. Then data driven sites run on a php engine of sort to display the data.

  2. Website Maintenance
    As an affiliate marketer your job is to test, rinse and repeat. So your websites will need to constantly change, evolve and grow.Content driven sites require regular content development. Coupon sites need latest coupon updates. Datafeed sites will require datafeed refreshes. Unless you keep your sites updated with the current information, it won’t be of much value to your visitors.Depending on the nature of of the website, you may be able to automate some aspects of its regular maintenance.One aspect I find very helpful is to keep all my affiliate links in mysql tables. So when its time to change a link, I just have to change the mySql record, so I don’t have to look for pages where I may have the expiring link. From time to time I still miss a link and sometimes get reminders from affiliate managers about an expired link. Its easy to swap a dead affiliate link, if its stored in a database. If I had my links in directly in the html pages, I would need to find all the pages that has the dead link and then replace them.

    Can it be Outsourced – This process is the most time consuming. I would rather not outsource it because of two factors. Cost and then confidentiality. I wouldn’t want to reveal most of sites to 3rd parties.

    I try to automate as much as I can. And I wish I could automate more. Some of the tasks that I have on auto pilot running as cron jobs are as follows.

    • Site monitoring – Alert me (thru email) if my sites are down
    • Datafeed download and parsing – Scripts that pull the datafeed files from the networks, parse them and post them to my mysql tables which in-turn keep my websites pages updated.
    • Tracking – Though I use google analytics, I use my own tracking system that tracks visitors from the point of entry into my site till conversion. It also tracks my ppc campaign ROI and seo as well.
    • Automated twitter posting- I have scripts that scan the web post relevant news items, developments to my various twitter accounts to keep my twitter stream interesting.
  3. Website Promotion

    4. Pay-Per-Click Advertising- Create new campaigns, monitor/tweak/stop ongoing campaigns

    Social Media – Stay active in the social media like facebook, twitter. Make connections. Don’t try to sell on every occasion. Limit your affiliate related activities to 5% of your total activities on the social media. To make it clear, if are twitting, out of 100 tweets not more than 5 tweets should have affiliate links.

    Search Engine Optimization – Developing targeted keyword rich content.

    Email Marketing – Using auto-responders and newsletters to keep your visitors involved. I use a service called Aweber. But there are other services like iContact, VerticalResponse.

    Don’t be scared to use or try most methods of promotion. Some will work, some will fail. But you will gain valuable experience. One rule of thumb though, if it costs money like pay-per-click advertising, start small, go slow, err on the side of being conservative. Put a cap on your daily max and review results everyday to see what works and what doesn’t.

    Can it be Outsourced – Yes, most of these tasks can be. Content development is something you can easily outsource through services like Elance. PPC can also be outsourced but not while starting out.

    If you want to do email marketing, you should always go with hosted service like Aweber/MailChimp etc. This is something you should never do in-house. If you do it in-house and do it wrong you will get black listed as a spammer and may also lose your hosting account.

  4. Keyword Research

    5. Keyword Research is actually a sub-task for both PPC marketing and SEO. All my keyword research starts with the free Google keyword tool and then expands with paid tools like Wordtracker and KeyWord Discovery. Wordtracker also offers a free tool that limits keyword ideas to 100 only. But that should be good enough to start out.

  5. Accounting & Book Keeping

    6. Yes, you need to do it too. Affiliate marketing is a business, so treat it like one. You need to keep track of your expenses, your revenue, money flow. No, don’t go out and hire a CPA as you start. And spreadsheet will do just fine. But you will need better systems as you grow. And at some point you will want to for a llc, hire a cpa etc. But then when that time comes, you won’t have the need to read my posts. You will be writing your own.

    How Much Time Will All these take

    A lot. But you are doing everything every day. On a daily basis I can’t do everything everyday. So the tasks that are time sensitive, like coupon updates, take precedence. There is no point in putting off a coupon for so long that either it will expire or won’t have enough days to run.

    One of the rules I follow is
    Automate  then Outsource then DIY

    Automate everything you can. Outsource repetitive tasks that you can’t automate. Then you are left with things that can’t be automated or outsourced.

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