Organising your Affiliate Life

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Gyppo

Gyppo

My Balls Convert
Nov 20, 2006
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Melbourne, Aus
www.earnersblog.com
I was originally going to do a blog post about this but I really haven't had the time lately. But I thought it'd be interesting for people to post how they manage to keep their Affiliate Marketing & Web ventures organised.

Here's a few things that I do, I'd love to hear some others too.

Portableapps: I have a full firefox profile with all my affiliate logins & passwords on an dual encrypted flash drive. This allows me to take the drive almost anywhere & have my home setup in front of me (Including logins, bookmarks & stats).

Keypass: One thing I stress is don't use the same Password for all your shit. It's an easy trap to fall into & something I only recently got around to changing. Keypass allows you to generate strong passwords & store them in a secure encrypted database that you can carry anywhere. You can keep copies of it backedup at home incase your flash drive goes nuts.

Excel: Probably my favourite program in the world. I use excel to keep track of almost everything, conversions, trends & statistics. If I decide that today I wanted to fire up 150 squidoo profiles to market products, I'll set up an excel file to include the profile URL's, lensmaster URL's & which products that url is promoting. This is good for keeping track of exactly how many minisites you're running & also good for quick reference when interlinking sites together for better serp rankings ;)

What about you guys?
 


Using desktop sticky notes widgets/gadgets have always been useful for me.

I create bookmarks to all my stats in my Firefox toolbar so I can quickly click and check.

I also carry portable firefox on my flash drive with all my bookmarks, it's been really useful.
 
Roboform for managing passwords here. New passwords for all sites, encrypted and requires master password anytime you sit down on your computer, and I don't have to remember the fucking passwords. Way more secure then letting your browser remember the passwords.

Evernote for documents, notes, saving data like posts from WF, and more. My post about it here.

Excel used like Gyppo

Pocomail for Pop3 management (filters+folders) for hundreds of sites + mailwasher for easy spam management.

Yet, I still feel unorganized.
 
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A local copy of PHP and Mysql!

And some custom apps I've written that have api's that I can connect to from my servers to update the stats.
 
WHen i think i am ready, i am going to make myself a bad-ass content management system/application to manage all of my sites, Black and white hat, and keep all my seo tools, keywords in one place. Maybe sell some subscriptions etc.

Yup... thats my goal.
 
I also use keepass and portable firefox with a separate delicious account for my links. I use and recommend Portable thunderbird for my mail, remember to use ssl on your mail accounts if you are going to access them from Internet cafes or from free wifi.

forgot to mention, to encrypt the usb drive I use truecrypt, which is free and not too hard to set-up
 
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Another few tips:

Domain Dashboard: I monitor all my domains with domain dashboard, this allows me to keep tabs on rankings & indexed pages for all websites remotely. If ou don't want to buy this then you can use the Digitalpoint Keyword Tool for something similar .

Rules in Thunderbird: I'd spend way too much time organising my emails if i didn't have rules set up, worth looking into if you get a lot of mail from various places.

Google Alerts: I set up alerts for all of the products or services I work with, as well as Brandnames & Website Names/Addresses. This helps me keep on top of things from my inbox rather than wasting time searching for things.

Payments: If possible I try to get as much as possible going through a particular paypal account. If you don't withdraw the cash from your Paypal account then you can't be taxed on it. I also operate bank accounts in more than 1 country for direct deposits. Would be good to hear some other tax tips from people.

Credit Cards: I use a cashback credit card for all outgoings (whenever possible), there's a 1% cashback that's paid once a year. Can amount to a nice Cheque if you use it a lot.
 
About 200 notepads all over my desktop and more in organised folders.

Favourites in IE are pretty organised I never knew about the firefox profile thing (probably because I hate firefox and don't use it) but I'll have to look into that.

Rules: Very useful and can be done in outlook too.
I use outlook calendar for reminders.
 
Some good points there, organising is very important when doing affiliate marketing and most other jobs infact. It is best to get some sort of schedule written down for what you have to do and what you would like to do, etc.
 
Gyppo said:
Another few tips:

Domain Dashboard: I monitor all my domains with domain dashboard, this allows me to keep tabs on rankings & indexed pages for all websites remotely. If ou don't want to buy this then you can use the Digitalpoint Keyword Tool for something similar .
Click to expand...

I'm looking for something like that, it seems the DP tool isn't much use without a google SOAP API key (which according to this DP thread they are no longer giving out).
 
Evernote is awesome. I use it in the place of hundreds of word.docs scattered all over my desktop.

I also use Excel and Outlook a great deal.

For day-to-day scheduling, nothing beats a simple yellow notepad. I have a fresh sheet for each new day. At the end of the day I make a list of what I have to do that next day as well as any important reminders. When I do something, I cross it off. Since I hate transferring stuff to a new day that was scheduled for the old, it helps make sure I get everything done that I wanted. Plus, I can scribble down notes, etc to add into Evernote for more permanent archiving.
 
I also like to write things down on paper, a hardcover notebook works best. The only problem is that my handwriting tends to deteriorate when I get busy and I make clever shorthand which I then forget when I'm looking at my notes a few days later.

Also use notepad, Outlook, Excel, cellphone reminders and RoboForm.
 
Just curious - how many of you are doing affiliate stuff full time? It sounds like some of you are very organized, and I'd be interested in knowing if this is your 'job', or if you have to balance it with a full-time gig (like me...). There are some good ideas in here that I definitely need to implement, as I am trying to do a few hours of affiliate work a day, while juggling a full-time job and going home to a new baby.

Gyppo - great idea on the credit card. If you are doing PPC, there are some programs you can use to your advantage. I just signed up for a business card that gives reward points for travel, so hopefully I can get a vacation or something out of my PPC costs.
 
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