Daily Tasks
Email - As an affiliate marketer you won't get that much email related to your business.
Merchant partners may send out the occasional affiliate newsletter, but in my experience most don't communicate with affiliates other than to advise of new offers. Likewise is true of the affiliate networks, which will notify you of new merchants and those that have left the network. Keep your eyes open for emails with the subject line: 'Check Your Merchant Status'.
You won't receive much email from customers, as most of those will be directed to the merchant.
However, if you DO receive email queries about products or services offered on your site, respond promptly with either the answer, or an offer to redirect their question as appropriate. Both the customer and the merchant will recognize and appreciate your effort. Because the customer asked YOU the question, it means that she trusts your site, and is probably planning to buy the product.
If you have an opt-in email list (as you should), you'll likely receive 'remove' requests from subscribers via email, despite the opt-out link within your newsletters. Don't respond personally to the correspondent. Just quickly remove their email address from the list. Justified or not, spam complaints are something you don't ever want to get.
Site Monitoring - Is your site online? On a Daily basis type your URL into your browser's address bar* refresh the page and find out!
The danger in not knowing that your site is down comes when you are running a pay per click advertising campaign. The click costs add up whether your site is functional or not. If your site is down, you are paying for advertising, but no one is buying.
If that thought scares you, NetMechanic is a service that will check to see whether your site in online, every fifteen minutes, 24 hours a day. If your site is down, they'll notify you by numeric pager, alphanumeric pager, or email, so you can resolve your downtime problems immediately. Check out their free trial, which will check your site every fifteen minutes for 8 hours so you can see how their service works.
NetMechanic
http://rosalinds.com/netmechanic.html
Link Checks - Broken sales links are the bane of any affiliate marketer's existence. It's easy enough to make sure your links are working by regularly using one of the following tools. In many cases your HTML editor will have a built-in link checker.
NetMechanic
http://rosalinds.com/netmechanic.html
4 Site Owner
http://www.siteowner.com/svstem/linkcheck.asp
Check Statistics - When I first started out, I checked my stats hourly, and sometimes more often. Because I'm now so familiar with the income 'trends', I check only 'key partner sites' daily to give me an indication of how my business as a whole is performing. I recommend that you check your statistics daily until you've been at it long enough to know what to expect day by day and week by week. Simply visit the statistics interface for each network and individual affiliate partner and input your total revenues into Quicken or other accounting software. Using Quicken frequently will also keep you informed as to whether certain checks have become overdue.
Make Time for Yourself -1 list this last in the 'daily' section, but it really belongs at the top of the list. A business that involves sitting at your computer for lengthy periods of time can lead to weight gain and repetitive strain injury if you don't take proper care of yourself.
I personally try to get my daily exercise out of the way before I turn on my computer in the morning. It's the easiest way I know to prevent getting 'side-tracked' by my business interests.
Continue reading here: How to Prevent Commission Theft
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