Affiliate management is NOT a 9-to-5. It’s more like juggling flaming chainsaws while answering emails in a moving car. So how do you stay on top of it all…without burning out or losing track of what matters most? That’s what today’s episode is all about. Because let’s face it…when everything feels important, nothing actually gets done.
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
How Paul Pruitt Climbed to the Top of the Affiliate Leaderboard in Just 2 Years
Tools of the Trade: What Every Affiliate Manager Should Be Using
7 Major Roadblocks to Scaling Your Affiliate Program (and How to Fix Them)
The Best Ways to Celebrate Your Affiliates (and Keep Them Loyal)
After Studying 8,000 Affiliate Programs, I Found This Surprising Truth
Time Management for Affiliate Managers
Affiliate management is not a 9 to 5 job. It’s more like juggling flaming chainsaws while answering emails in a moving car. So how do you stay on top of it all without burning out or losing track of what matters most? That’s what today’s episode is all about. Because let’s face it, when everything feels important, nothing actually gets done.
Let’s get started. So time management, it can feel like a bit of a myth for affiliate managers. There’s so much to do. I mentioned in the intro, it’s like juggling chainsaws, right? Answering emails and trying to drive a car. It’s so hard, especially if you run multiple programs. And I know a lot of you are running one program. You’re either a part time affiliate manager who also owns the business, or you’re a partner in a business or you’ve got five other roles in the company. But also a lot of you are full time affiliate managers and you’re doing it for multiple programs.
And so it’s, it’s different depending upon what role you’re in. But I’m going to talk about, okay, whether you have 15 hours a week to run your affiliate program or 40 or you’re running three programs for 50 hours, whatever. I’m going to break down the strategies that I use and how, how I think you should manage your time regardless of those situations. You know, it’s a lot different for me now. Not only am I, am I an affiliate manager for multiple programs, but I’m running a company. You know, back when I was a full time affiliate manager for one company, I didn’t work, I didn’t do a podcast like this. You know, podcasts like this take a couple of hours to plan, you know, to think through.
Just like what do I even want to talk about? So I’m not talking about the same thing I talked about two weeks ago, you know, because I don’t even know what two weeks ago this episode was, you know, so I have to go through and make sure I have to plan how I’m, you know, what I’m recording and then I have to plan the episode and I have to, you know, I Don’t operate off of a script, but I operate off of bullet points. And so I want to make sure, like, okay, tell this story. And so then I actually have to record it and then I have to get it edited and then, you know, we have the marketing behind it. It takes time. Not only that, but I’m managing our team and I’m managing our other content and I’m managing, you know, X, Y and Z within the company, the finances, whatever. Much like when I first started, you know, when I first started I wasn’t just an affiliate manager.
I’ve shared that story so many times. I was the cmo, the affiliate manager, I was the cto. I also ran the overall company in the sense of I wasn’t the CEO, but I ran the day to day. You know, if one of our salespersons, you know, needed a, needed something, needed a pin, I was the one who had the pins, you know, and so I, you know, I was single and I, we didn’t have kids and I was working a million hours a week, but still it was hard. And then I transitioned from that and I was a full time affiliate manager.
But then I became the head of, I became the CMO again for this other company. So I went from having 40 hours a week to just do affiliate management to. I also had to worry about our paid ads and our, you know, our Facebook ads and, and this is back in the early 2010s. So, you know, there wasn’t like a lot of other advertising back then, like there is now.
There wasn’t TikTok and stuff like that. But, you know, but I started to manage my time within the affiliate realm. And so like I said, I want to share the strategies that I use and that I teach to stay sane, to stay focused, to be productive. These are what I’m going to share today. I’m probably not going to share anything earth shattering, but when you hear them as a whole, you know, they’re simple, they’re powerful, they are tailor made for the chaos that the affiliate management world brings.
But when you hear them as a whole, I think you’ll see that, yeah, the simplicity, you’ll probably either, A, this is my, I hope A, you’ll be reminded of something simple that you got out of the habit of doing. B, you’ll see the bigger picture and go, okay, yep, I see how those things work together. I need to be doing all of those things, not just a couple of them, and see that maybe you might even learn something new. Like, yeah, it’s simple and it’s simple to me and it’s simple to a lot of you, but maybe there’s something you haven’t heard before.
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So if you think, if you’re getting through, you know, the first five or ten minutes, you’re like, I’ve heard all this before. This is so obvious and simple. Don’t stop listening. Keep listening. And I think there’ll be some good stuff in there for you. So why is time management important? Let’s, let’s talk about why it even matters. Listen, I understand. Like I said, there’s a lot of chaos. Okay, I have. Gosh, probably sometime last year, I talked about how the affiliate manager brain. The affiliate manager, you know, you have to be good at relationship building.
This is why I became an affiliate manager, because I was the only one on our team, our small team of about seven people who was good with people, who was good at marketing, who was good at data analysis, and who was good at, you know, thinking through kind of the management side of things, you know, which kind of encompassed all of those.
We had people on our team who were great at relationships, but they didn’t know the first thing about marketing or they were great at marketing, but they, they didn’t know the first thing about analyzing the data. They were really good at the data. But, gosh, you, you get on the phone with them and it’s like talking to a brick wall.
So it combines all of those things and you’re doing all of those things. Sometimes within an hour or two of your day, you’re analyzing data and then switching to relationship mode to be able to talk to the person about the data, to talk to the affiliate. And then you have to turn around and you have to think about the marketing. And sometimes it’s all three, because the reason why you studied the data and the data shows that their sales are down. Well, then you gotta key the relationship side to get them on the phone, to even get them to talk to you and build the relationship. And then you gotta put on your marketing hat. Okay, well, their sales are down 40%.
How do you help them to increase their sales back up to, you know, the way they were before? And, you know, the data analysis side, I will say, has gotten a lot easier in the last two years. Like, we just, I mean, I just finished writing a program. It’s a GPT that I created. I’ll make it public pretty soon. I mean, hopefully within the next couple of weeks or months as I fine tune it. But essentially we’re able to download the date, like the spreadsheet for the day, for the previous day. And we’ve written it to the point where the GPT analyzes the data and tells us exactly what we need to know.
Like it tells us the trends, it tells us everything. And so we start catching these things like, well, this affiliate’s down 8% in the past 30 days. Is down 8%. That big of a deal. It’s really not, because that could be anything. I mean, sometimes like month over month, you know, 3% of the If you think about that, like that’s part of it. It could just be the timing. You know, there’s all kinds of factors that you then have to take off your, you know, like the pure data hat and say, okay, well there’s a reason for that. You know, you have spring break. Was that month. Okay, that makes sense. You know, there was a couple of holidays, you know, okay, let me, you know, oh wait, actually they’re down 8% every June over May.
So it’s nothing, don’t even worry about it. But it analyzes the data and it catches that 8% and you go, okay, now they’re, I’m going to yellow flag them. So I want to pay particularly close attention if they’re 8% in April and May and June, well, that’s a problem that we need to start addressing. And they’re already on my radar. And so, yeah, the data analysis has gotten a lot easier because of technology, but it’s chaotic. You know, the other thing about affiliate management is it is deceptively reactive. If you don’t manage your time, your day will disappear. Responding to Slack messages, you know, quick questions, quick emails, Facebook messages, whatever, you know, IG messages, DMs.
And what happens is it becomes, like I said, it’s very deceptively reactive. And you realize all of a sudden it’s 5:30, you’re finishing up for the day in 15 minutes and you’ve done nothing that you wrote down at the beginning of the day. You’ve effectively, it feels like you’ve accomplished nothing. We’ve all been there, we’ve all had those days. It doesn’t matter if you’re an affiliate manager, whatever, we have all had those days. And so what happens, we get this mindset that like, okay, if I don’t respond right away then it’s going to ruin the promotion. If I delay the outreach too long, we’ve got. Relationships go cold, and then you get burned out and you end up dropping the ball.
And so one of the quick tips here, this is not in my notes, but it just kind of occurred to me and maybe it is in my notes, but later, you know, one of the things that occurred to me is you have to identify what are the. Oh dear God, if I miss this, like if I don’t follow up in the next, if I don’t respond to this in the next 30 minutes, that’s going to cause a problem. If you’re in the middle of a big launch, a limited time launch, a one week promo and somebody emails you about the promo.
Yeah. Responding at 1:15pm versus 4:00pm could be the difference between them sending an email today and not sending an email at all. And if they’re a big enough affiliate, that could mean 10% of your sales. That’s something where you’ve got to react. But it’s an affiliate that’s never made sales and probably isn’t going to anytime in the near future. Same situation, same launch, same promo, same short time period. Is it really that urgent? No, it’s a completely evergreen promo and they’re asking a question about, you know, something, is it that urgent?
No. Can it wait till later in the day or even tomorrow? Yeah, it’s a one month promo and, or it’s a promo that’s coming up, let’s say, you know, it’s whatever day, it’s April 10th and it’s, they’re asking a question about a promo that starts in June, is it urgent? No. Can it wait till tomorrow? Absolutely. So time management is not about doing more, it’s about doing what matters first. It’s about prioritizing what is, is urgent. And most days frankly it’s less than 20 to 30 minutes of stuff actually urgent. And it’s about prioritizing your mental bandwidth, your mental, I guess you can even say your mental health so you can actually lead your program. Because if you burn out and you get caught up in all the, you know, just everything, I mean, you’re gonna be no use.
You’re not going to be creative on the things where you need to be creative, like actually coming up with campaigns, actually coming up with promotions, actually analyzing, you know, past what just AI can do, but analyzing the data and developing those relationships. And it’s, you know, the old quad, the four quadrants. Right. You know, Stephen Covey, I believe, where it’s the urgent and the important. Yeah, that’s probably 30 minutes a day and those have to be dealt with urgently. But really focusing on the non urgent but unimportant tasks Is it urgent that you leave a thoughtful comment on on one of your top affiliates Facebook posts? No.
If you’ve done so recently, let’s say you talked to them two weeks ago and you don’t leave that comment, is it going to destroy the relationship today so that they make no sales tomorrow? Absolutely not. Of course not. But is it a missed opportunity to deepen that relationship long term, which could affect sales a year from now? Yeah, especially if you keep putting it off. And so it’s really, you know, about balancing that quadrant one and those quadrant four things. If you remember, quadrant three is non urgent and unimportant, so we’re going to completely eliminate those. And then the other quadrant is like the urgent but not important and that’s where we get stuck.
It’s that quadrant that ruins our day. It’s that quadrant that leaves us going at the end of the day, oh my gosh, I have accomplished nothing. If it’s quadrant one urgent and important and you have to spend 5, 6 hours on it that day, you don’t feel like you didn’t accomplish something. If you get to spend three, four, five, six hours, whatever. In quadrant four where it’s not urgent but it’s important, you don’t feel like you wasted your day. It’s when you spend time in the urgent but not important or the non urgent and unimportant quadrants that ruin your day. All right, so let’s look at the big time wasters.
These time sucks that eat up your day and again, end up feeling at 6:00, 5, 30, whatever that you’re like, I’ve accomplished nothing today. The first one is reactive emailing. It could be reactive dming, reactive texting, whatever. Again, outside of big promos, do not open your inbox first thing in the morning. Do not check your messages first thing in the morning. Not for the first hour after that. Yeah, what I want you to do is I want you to have fixed times. This is basic how to manage your inbox 101. Right. Two, maybe three times during the day when you check your email, they don’t have to be the same times every day. I do not put my calendar around when I check emails. Okay?
So when I take my son to soccer training early, meaning like 3:00, 4:00 sometimes versus, you know, when he’s normal time at like 6:00. I move when I check email that day. You know, I’m not planning my day around email, but I do make sure that I plan when I’m going To check email each day. Now again, in a big promo, something where there is, there’s a lot more Quadrant one stuff urgent and important, I do bump that up and I typically do start the day with a quick check of email. Is there anything that I do need to respond to? Yep, there, there’s that one message. Cool.
I knocked the way. Then I reset mentally and say, okay, now for the next hour I’m going to do things proactively. Your inbox should not be your boss. There was, I can’t remember who said this, but something like, you know, the inbox has basically just become a repository for other people’s priorities. That should not be the case. So whether you do two times a day, even up to four times a day, I don’t care. Doesn’t matter to me. But they are fixed times for that day.
It might be different Monday from Tuesday, Wednesday, etc. But you know, for me, like today, today I checked email at 11 and I will check it again at about 3:30. Those are my two times that I’m going to check email for today. That is it. I am not. Unless, you know, again, something weird happens. You know, my wife Tara says, hey, you know, I just sent you an email about such and such and it’s super important. Yeah, I’ll go check it real quick. And I will be disciplined to not get sucked into the vortex of checking other emails. So use technology, use filters, use rules, use, you know, tags. If you have a va, which we’ll talk a lot about next week. If you have a va, have them go through your email first.
You probably, once you’re at a certain level, should never be the first person to see your email. Somebody else should be seeing it. And so for me, that’s why I only end up with like two emails a day, sometimes as many as five that I even have to be the one to respond to. So that’s the first one. It’s just being reactive in your communication. Same thing with DMs. Don’t check your DMs first thing. I check them at the end of my email sessions. That’s when I choose to check. Actually, you know what, I changed that. I just changed that the other day, so let’s not try. I put in my note that I, that’s I changed the other day.
Maybe I’m working with a possible new workflow that I’m testing out to see if it actually helps me. Because a lot of the DMs that I do involve then following up via email with more stuff I’ve actually tweaked to kind of test out just this week, doing checking DMs first and then going over to email. Because what was happening I found was I would go to email, then I would go to my DMs and I would respond to them, then I have to go back to email.
And then I again, I wish I was more disciplined, but I’m not. I would see something else. And then I get sucked into that and it’s like, dang it, now I’m, you know, I’m in that vortex for an hour instead of 45 minutes and I get off schedule. So I’m, I’m playing around with just kind of tweaking how I do it. It’s not to say you need to if that doesn’t apply to you. But yeah, you know, I’m trying that. All right. The second thing is over customizing communication.
Let me be clear. Relationship building matters, but perfection kills momentum. What you have to keep in mind is, especially when you’re reaching out to your affiliates, most of them are glancing at this thing, they’re getting the key points. So trying to over customize your emails, your DMs like that, you’re spending that extra, you know, you’re spending twice as much to get 2% greater results.
That’s not a good trade off. So have a base template, personalize what you can, what makes sense. And that’s it. That’s it. So for me, like, if I’m doing reach outs, if I reach out to you, and frankly, if I get an email that’s like, hello, Matt, I’ve noticed that you went to the University of Tennessee and you live in Fort, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and all this stuff and you like soccer and yada, yada. I’m like, and.
How is that relevant to me? You know, but if I reach out to you and I customize two things, your name. And instead of just saying, like, if I reach out to you and say, hey, let’s say your name is Jessica. Hey, Jessica. You know, saw your post today or, you know, saw your post last week about such and such, and I thought that your audience would be. Thought that this other product would be a really good fit for your audience. Okay, that’s enough customization. Or if I say, hey, I was just checking out your profile and I really thought that such and such product would be a really good fit for your audience of moms. Okay, what this says to me, you know, me.
Me being Jessica with the audience of moms, of course, you know, but, you know, okay, you took a minute, but you’re not like, oh, my gosh, this doesn’t need to be overly customized. That’s just an example. Like, anything beyond that and you’re just wasting time. You don’t need to scroll through 40 of their posts and read all the comments. Like, you, their audience is moms. That’s good enough. Like, they promoted a similar product. Good enough. The same is true.
Like perfecting graphics and making graphics for 42 different sizes. You know, we started doing this recently. I said, give them the canva template. If they want some obscure size, they can make it themselves. Like, here’s the thing, most people don’t want an obscure size, but if they do, they’re willing to take 14 seconds to make the other size. And now, A, I don’t have to take the 14 seconds, although it’s usually more because I’m, you know, I don’t know what sizes they want. So I’m making 30 sizes. And B, now I have to put 30 things. And, you know, it just, it takes a long time. And you say, oh, it’s only like five minutes. Yeah, it’s five minutes, but it’s five minutes every day. That’s 25 minutes a week. That is one. Whatever 90th. I mean, that’s over 1% of my work week. A lot of 1% add up to 20% of my work week.
You know, perfecting graphics, perfecting swipe copy. Most people are using AI now anyway, so you don’t really need to create perfect swipe copy. They’re going to take your template and run it through their own AI and rewrite it anyway. So you don’t need to perfect swipe copy. What we do is we come up with a few different audiences. For most of our clients between Two and four different audiences, we create different swipe copy for those audiences and we say here it is and then they do what they want with it. Another big time waster is just overthinking the simple task.
You know your affiliate emails don’t need to be the next great American novel, right? If it is not mission critical, get it to 90%, hit send and we have a template. I’ll put a link in the show notes, but you can download our affiliate email template. The reason that it’s a template is because this, the formula, what it has in it, it works. I follow it 90% of the time. When I don’t follow it, it’s usually because I’m trying to convey one thing to the affiliates. And as long as I convey that one thing, then I’ve accomplished the mission.
You know, I remember back in the day when I was a full time affiliate manager only running one program, I might spend 20 minutes agonizing over the first sentence because I really wanted it to be like funny. And you know what? Doesn’t matter now. Agonizing over a subject line, Absolutely. Again, you can use AI for that because what I’ve done is I’ve split tested literally thousands of subject lines for affiliate emails. And the results of those emails, the open rate, and then we kept them in a database essentially so that I could go back and see, like just spark my, you know, creative juices.
Well then when ChatGPT came along and AI, you know, became a thing, we just loaded those subject lines into a GPT and basically said, okay, here’s how every one of these split tests went. This one had a 39% open rate, this one had a 42, this one had a 51, this one had a 53, so on and so forth and it learned. And now like we get the subject lines pretty perfect and it doesn’t require me to agonize over. That’s something that is worth agonizing.
By the way, spending five minutes agonizing over a subject line back in the day was worth five minutes. Because getting 55% to open it versus 45, that’s a huge they could, for some of the programs that we were running, that could be a 10 to $50,000 difference. So it’s totally worth it. Like to our company. To me, five minutes could be worth 250 to $500. I got to be honest. Let’s just call it the 250. What is that? That’s three grand. I don’t make $3,000 an hour. Newsflash on that one. There are very few things I can do to make $3,000 an hour. Spending five minutes agonizing over a subject line was definitely one of them.
But for most things, if you get it to 90%, you’re good, you’re good. You know what I call productive? Busy work is another time suck. Just endlessly making the affiliate dashboard look perfect or the affiliates enter look perfect or adding more social media posts when you already have 200 examples. That is disguised procrastination. That’s what one of my good friends calls it, disguised print procrastination. Because if I go from 200 posts to 250, I’ve technically accomplished something. I’ve added 50 posts, that is, that’s productive, quote unquote productive. But it’s really just busy work. So very simple.
Ask yourself this question. Is this helping someone to take action? Is this going to help someone make additional sales? And if so, okay, how many additional sales do I, you know, project that we’re going to make from this activity? And if it’s two, but it takes me three hours. Most programs, I mean again, if you got a $10,000 product that is very much worth it.
Most programs, not worth it, not worth it. So as the old Facebook saying goes, done is better than perfect. Especially when time is tight. Affiliates need leadership. They don’t need perfection, they just need guidance. They don’t need that perfection. So I want to share with you a five part kind of time management framework for affiliates. This comes names. Name a book that’s been written in the last 50 years about time management. I probably shouldn’t say that. Name a book that sold more than like 10,000 copies about time management. I probably read it. Some of my friends are in the time management niche.
Craig Jarrow, for example, Time management Ninja. You know, like this is stuff I’ve studied and I’ve kind of tweaked what they’ve, you know, offered over the years. Whether it be, you know, David Allen, you know, getting things done comes to mind. Craig Jarrow, like I said, time management Ninja. Bunch of others, you know, where I’ve just kind of applied what they’ve taught and I’ve tried things and this is what I found works for me. So is it going to work for you?
I don’t know, but it works for me. Number one, talked about this earlier. Prioritize by impact. Prioritize by impact. Your top three tasks each week, each month, each week, each day should directly map to revenue or relationships which ultimately the relationships lead to the revenue. Is this going to help me solidify or build a better relationship. Is it going to help produce sales? If not, don’t do it.
Punt on it and delay it, delegate it, whatever. Right. A lot of times if I’m like, you know, this could make an impact, but it’s probably not going to make a big one. Then have a va do it. Because then it’s like, well, if they screw it up, who cares? Probably wasn’t gonna have an impact anyway. But if they get it right, well, we can try it. And then if it works, oh my gosh, that worked. Now it’ll become something that maybe, well, they, if they worked, they might just keep doing it. We’ve discovered something that I don’t have to do that does impact revenue. Yay. Or B, okay, it worked on a certain level, but I think if I do it, maybe it’ll get, will have a bigger impact.
But we’ve proven, we kind of stress tested it. Right. Proof of concept. The other thing is make sure you do a weekly preview and limit yourself to three or four big weekly tasks. This is not like check email, duh, like anything more than three or four kind of big weekly projects that require more than a couple of hours. It’s probably going to be too much because yeah, I say don’t be reactive, but they’re are times where you have to be a little bit reactive and there are things that you have to get, you know, you have to make sure you’re answering your emails, you’re answering your DMs, you’re responding to phone calls, you know, you’re scheduling meetings with affiliates, you’re probably, if you’re reporting to a client or whatever, you’re doing those things.
Those are the have to dos. That’s not what I’m talking about. So what happens is we put seven things that we want to do and then we have to do all those other things and we only get three done and we go, I failed. Well, what if you’d only put three, you succeeded, you know, and so limit that to about three, maybe four. The other thing is if you’re, you know, if you’re kind of staring at your to do list like I am right now, I’m looking at my to do list. There are five things. I just said do three or four. There are five.
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Now, first of all, I’m going to move one of those to next week. I already know it. I’m not worried about that. But which one am I going to do first? The question is like, what’s going to move the needle the most, and I tie it directly to revenue. Because I build in purposely on my calendar. We’ll talk about this in a second in more detail. But I build in the time to build relationships. It’s already on my calendar, and so that’s not moving.
So it’s not really in my top three. So I’m looking at, like, relationship building. I’ve already got taken care of proactively. What’s going to impact revenue the most, both short term and long term. So sometimes I have to sacrifice one or the other a little bit, but preferably not too much. You know, I don’t want to sacrifice too much short term for long term and too much long term for short term. The second thing, again, basic principle, right? Batch and block.
Every time you have to switch context from data to relationship, from email to DMs, from, you know, checking stats to having a phone call from every time you have to do that, it’s a product of. One of my good friends called it a productivity tax. Because when we shift gears, we pay that tax. It’s a productivity leak. This is what I’ve heard somebody else call it. Our brain takes a little bit of time to catch up. And so what happens is, if you spend 30 minutes on data and then 30 minutes on email, that’s what you think you spent. You think I worked for an hour? You really didn’t. Because if you spent the full 30 minutes on the data and then switched to email, the first five to seven minutes, your brain’s adjusting and you go again, five to seven minutes.
But five to seven minutes four times a day, it’s over, you know, over half an hour. Roughly four or five times a day, that’s a half an hour times five days a week, it’s two and a half hours. You’re giving up weeks a year, switching tasks. So I theme everything, work in blocks. Very simple. If I’ve got three emails to write about upcoming promos for clients, I don’t write. Let’s say I want to send three emails on behalf of client 1, two on behalf of client 2, and three on behalf of client 3. I don’t write 1, 1 and 1 for client A, B and C. I write all three. For client A, take me a half an hour. I take a super quick mental break. Sometimes it’s just to go walk a lap around my office.
You know, just something to disengage for as little as 35 seconds. It’s about how long it takes me to walk around there, you know, Then I come back and I write the two for the next client. And then I do same thing. I do that, that takes an hour and 15 minutes and that’s my block. And then I want to do outreach. I want to do outreach for one client from 2 to 2:45 and then another client from 250 to 330 and another client from 3:35 to 4:15 or whatever the case may be. And you can use a timer, you can do the pomodoro, whatever. You could do them in 25 minute sprints.
You know, maybe this one’s 50 minutes because you really need to focus, but then the next one’s only 20 and you take a super quick break again. I’ve personally found that one minute is enough. You know, it’s, it’s more than enough. And so the other thing you can do, like, which is managing your calendar, is just to put recurring blocks, even if you’re not sure what’s going to go there.
But you’re like from 11 to 12, I know I’m going to be doing something creative. And that’s your creative block. And then, you know, you can fill it in the day before. Third thing, systematize everything you can. Every task you should, that you repeat should. I mean, you either need to delegate it or systematize it. It should become a system. How do you onboard an affiliate?
Step one, step two, step three, step four, step five. How do you activate affiliates? And you want to know how to activate affiliates? Grab my templates. I will give you the activation templates totally free if you want to know how to do that. But there’s, there’s step one, step two, step three, there’s use the template and then you create a zap using Zapier. So like for, with, with affiliate onboarding, for example, what triggers me even knowing that I have an affiliate to onboard is we use Zapier to tell me it slacks me and says you have a new affiliate. And then that new affiliate, awesome. We need to onboard that affiliate. Here are the steps that we use if we’re running a contest. Again, I have an SOP for like, okay, a contest starts on this date.
Here’s when we want to announce it, roughly depending upon the day of the week, things like that. And we systematize that. So we just create systems around everything so that it becomes repeatable. Not repetitive, but repeatable. Number four is to use the tools and people that save you time. I mentioned, you know, using Zapier. That’s a tool that saves me from having to log in. Do we have any new affiliates? Nope. Okay. Well, that was a waste of 30 seconds of my life. Again, 30 seconds.
But it adds up when you do that three times a day for each 90 seconds, and it’s 90 seconds of nothingness. I don’t want nothingness built into my. I want nothingness to be intentional or like I said, I go walk a lap around the office. Not nothingness of doing a task that still requires some brain power. But I’m accomplishing nothing. There’s not moving the revenue needle. So I use Zapier to tell me you have new affiliates. And I go check that, I go check that Slack channel and I’m like, boom, got three new affiliates.
Let me go onboard them. Now. The onboarding is handled by a VA because it’s a simple. It’s a, it’s a. I just said the word. What is the. What does SOP stand for? Standard Operating Procedure. I could not think of the word for that. But it’s an sop. It’s a system. It’s been systematized. This is the email that we send. This is the spreadsheet that we add them to. This is, this is what we do in the system to make sure they’re activated. This is how we let them know what their link is.
This is how we invite them to the Facebook group. This is how we do all of the steps. This is how if they don’t respond to that email two days later, we follow up with them. Because it’s an asana task. These are like, that’s all, that’s all tools and VAs helping with that again, if you don’t have a VA, that’s fine. I highly recommend you get one. Well, my boss won’t pay for one. Cool. I would recommend you spend a couple hundred bucks a month on one out of your own pocket. I did that for years. My first full time affiliate management job where I worked for another company. It’s actually the only time I’ve ever done that I paid for years.
I paid for a VA. None of my clients pay for my VAs. We pay for VA’s through our company. It cost me money, but it makes me more efficient. You know, if you think about it, if a tool, if a person saves you five minutes a day, use it 200 days a year. It’s a thousand minutes. Thousand minutes divided by 60. Two days of your life that you save in little five minute batches. It’s totally worth it. So think about like everything. Like every time you do something, is there something that could have made this more efficient. Is there someone that you know, I don’t know.
I could have had AI create this graphic. So I’m going to pay 10 bucks a month out of my own pocket to have AI create these graphics. But man, at the end of the month, I’ve saved two hours. Do you make $5 or more per hour? That was worth it. Because what happens is assuming that you’re paid on some sort of a commission, where you earn money as your affiliates make money, the more time you spend directing your activities towards things that actually bring in revenue. And you have to, you know, and you spend a couple bucks of your own money.
Let’s say you spend a hundred bucks a month on. Let’s go higher. Let’s say you spend $300 a month on a VA and tools like Zapier and, you know, AI tools and stuff like that. You guys spend 3,600 bucks a year and you’re like, well, I don’t. That’s a lot of money. You know, that’s money that comes from my paycheck, essentially. Yeah, it is. But what if that helps you make $7,000 more a year on the low end because you’re more efficient and you’re focused on revenue building and relationship building
activities. You just netted $3,400 and you probably worked a little bit less, at least on the things that you don’t necessarily enjoy doing as much. So you’re spending more time doing the things that you love and that’s a win too. So, yes, we’re going to go a lot deeper talking about VAs in the next episode, because even five hours a week can help change the game so much. So next week we’re going to talk about how to work with virtual assistants to run an affiliate program. You don’t want to miss it. So if you haven’t yet, make sure you hit subscribe and do all those fun things because you want to come back for that. And then the last thing mentioned, it’s a five part framework.
Number five is for launches and big promos. You need to build buffer time. Okay. When you’re planning out your day, assume something will go wrong, because it will. All right, Links are going to break. Someone needs hand holding, Something’s going to come up. Buffer. Having buffer means you have margin. And the cool thing is if you build buffer in. I remember back. So this was 2019 and we were running our launch bullet. Big launch of our course.
No product, no problem. It ended up being like a half a million dollar plus launch. And I was not only the affiliate manager, but I was running the whole show. Like, this was my product. I was running everything. And so I was working 15 hours a day for two and a half weeks. It was exhausting. And I had on my calendar.
I remember exactly from three to four, from three to four, one afternoon, I had on my calendar buffer time. Now the previous, like two out of the previous three days, overwhelming majority of that buffer time got taken up by. We ended up having like emergency meetings to talk about things that were going wrong and what we can improve. And, you know, I ended up getting like a phone call and a text and stuff like that that I needed to respond to, that I wasn’t anticipating.
But I built that buffer time in. And on this particular, it was a Friday afternoon. My kids had games that night, and so I had to leave at like 6. But from 3 to 4, nothing came up. And I genuinely thought, like, I was like, there should be something I should do. But all the emails for the weekend and even for Monday were written. Everything was done, everything was scheduled. I was like, I, you know, texted my, you know, my sidekick Mark, and I’m like, oh, okay, what am I missing? What’s going. He’s like, nothing. Everything’s fine. Okay. It’s like now it’s like 3:05. I guess I’ll go take a nap. I remember I laid down on our couch and by about 3:07 I was sound asleep. And I ended up taking an epic nap.
About four, I think I set the clock for like 45 minutes. It was so unbelievable. I felt so good, so refreshed, and it got me through, you know, the next few days. Part of that I was able to do that is not only did I build that buffer in there intentionally on my calendar, but I pre did as much as possible. And that’s what I’m encouraging you to do. Pre write as much as possible. Whether it’s, you know, even like leaderboard updates. You can like, you know, okay, we need to send a leaderboard update Thursday afternoon. Don’t start writing the email Thursday afternoon. Write it. You could write that again months in advance, weeks in advance, days in advance, whatever it is, and then you just fill in the blank. Okay.
Wow, things are amazing. Look at it. You know, you can pre write that and tweak it a little bit, you know, to fit reality. Announcing a new contest. If you know you’re going to announce a new contest next Tuesday, don’t wait till Tuesday to write the email. Write it in advance again. Build that margin when you have it. Anything you can do, write in advance. And a lot of people say, what if things change?
Okay, first of all, things are probably not going to fundamentally change during a launch or a big promo. Maybe the details do. Maybe you, maybe first prize instead of being 5,000 is, you know, you drop it to 3,000. Cool. You replace a five with a three. What does that take? A quarter of a second. If you’re slow, you know, like it’s not a big deal. And so you can tweak things. But if you’ve done 95% of the work then yet at the very end of the launch you go, gosh, I ended up spending three extra minutes changing things. But you spent three minutes changing things instead of five hours creating things because you created them advance.
And there’s something about doing it in advance again, just from a busyness standpoint, a psychology style, a mental health standpoint, that really changes things a lot. So a couple bonus things just, I don’t know, they didn’t really fit into the last one. As far as, you know, things that have worked for me, theming days, you know, theming days or theming half days, you know, not. Does it need to be rigid? Think of them as like rhythms, right? Even, you know, just like a four hour period where you’re really focused on a specific thing. So for me, I don’t theme every day.
I guess technically I do because a lot of times Fridays is what I call a task snowball day where I just try to accomplish as many of my tasks as possible. All the backlog, no, I don’t care what’s the most urgent, what’s the most important. I just want to eliminate. I’ve got like right Now I’ve got 28, 34 tasks in Asana and I’ll do a task snowball day where I’ll knock out like 16 of them, maybe upwards of 20. And so it just cool. Now I’ve just done a bunch of things.
I have again, no care in the world. I might waste 20 minutes doing something, but I’ve knocked out a bunch of stuff. And that’s not something I do every day, not something I even do every week, but about every third or fourth Friday, you know, 15 times a year I do a task snowball day and it’s usually on a Friday, you know, but theming your days, like today I’m really focused on relationship building. Theming your day around, you know, today is like, you know, the second Tuesday of every month, I’m going to write 30, you know, 35 affiliate emails. You know, today I’m focused on updating affiliate, you know, backends or whatever, you know, those. That’s super important. Another thing is like, you know, set boundaries. This is hard to do sometimes when you have clients, but you Got to do it. You are allowed to log off if you are always available.
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You’re never focused. So this is a basic brain science thing. If you’re checking your phone for email at 8 o’clock at night and you’re seeing that you have stuff, what you’re doing is you’re training yourself to kind of like, oh, okay, I got a couple of new emails. I don’t need to respond to those. I’m just going to move on. You’re training yourself not to really focus. I want you, when you’re checking email, that you’re checking email for whatever time it is. So then when you’re off, you’re off. When you’re unavailable, you’re unavailable. You’re not unavailable, but no, you’re off, you’re unavailable. Delegate if possible.
You know, when we talk, we talked about this earlier, just delegate as much as possible. Train a va. We will talk about that in the next episode. So make sure you listen to that. And then last one, you know, just make sure you celebrate progress. It’s not about being perfect. If you do one of the things that I talked about in this episode next week, and you do it really well, celebrate, I guarantee you if you do just one of the small things, you will either be, let’s say it’s like you set boundaries, you log off, okay?
You don’t accomplish anything more because it takes a while for the brain science to change on that. So logging off at 6 pm and being disciplined in that for one week is not gonna, you’re not gonna be more productive, frankly, during the week, next week. But when you’ll start being more productive in a couple of weeks, I can promise you that if you consistently do it. But even if you’re not more productive, you’re more at peace. You’re more present with your family, whatever it is. So that’s a win. Celebrate that I was more present with my family this week. How about that? I won. I did something good. I won. Celebrate.
If you decide, you know, all you’re going to do is just systematize affiliate onboarding, that’s it. That is the only thing you accomplish next week. At the end of the week, you will have a systematized affiliate onboarding that is a win that I guarantee you worth 10 minutes at minimum a week. For some bigger programs it could be worth an hour or more, but let’s just say 10 minutes.
You go 10 minutes, okay? And then the next week you do something else, and the next week you do something else, and all of a sudden, in just three weeks, 30 minutes to an hours you’re You have no idea what kind of an impact that will have on you. And the bottom line, and it only gets better from there and things start stacking. That’s the cool thing, they start stacking. So if this was helpful, if you got like, if you, if you feel like this was helpful, take a screenshot or record a quick video or whatever so you can send it to me, you know, on social media, attmcwaims2 on X, Twitter, whatever. I’d love to hear just one thing that you’re going to implement.
You can also text me at 260-217-4619 and let me know, like, what are you implementing, what are you doing? So take a screenshot of something that you’re doing, or just send me a quick video or just a quick text message, whatever it is, and let me know what you’re implementing. So again, number one, prioritize by impact. Focus on those Q1 and secondly, those Q4, you know, quadrant four tasks.
Number two, batch and block. Try to at least set aside an hour, first half and second half of the day where you’re focused on something really important. Thirdly, systematize, number four, use tools and use people, not use people in that way, but you get the idea, right? And then fifthly, build buffer, you know, into your day, into your week so that you have those times to maybe, just maybe take a nap or to do something else.
Right? Don’t always assume that the day is going to go perfect. So what I want you to do is I want you to pick one strategy this week, just one, and then build from there. Just pick one strategy and build from there. Again, you can text me, let me know how it’s going at You can hit me up on exit 260-217-4619 at Matt McWilliams 2.I read every message. I promise you I’d love to hear how you manage the chaos, so make sure you do that and make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode where I’m going to talk about how to use virtual assistants to run a seven figure affiliate program. I’ve teased it a little bit during this episode. I’m excited about that one. Can’t wait.
I’ll see you then.