Justin Dupre » Productivity

Tasks You Should Give Your Employees

Justin Dupre — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 04:40:59 +0000

Ah the fun and joys of affiliate marketing. They only get better when you add some staff to your team. A majority of your grunt work disappears, and you’ll soon start seeing valuable returns on the time you’ve freed up. There are several things you can have your employees do. These are just some of them.

Designing

This one is a no-brainer and pretty much a necessity for anyone doing anything on the internet. A Photoshop, HTML, CSS, and a PHP know-it-all is a wonderful addition to any affiliate marketing team. I’d be stuck in the deep end of the pool without mine. He’s much more efficient and cost effective than outsourcing stuff for $50 – 100 a lander.

Lead Generation

I just hired a new guy almost specifically for this task. You might have noticed someone posting on your blogs, or filling up some forums in what looked to be someone using my name. Sorry to say, but that was probably my employee. This used to be my task, and I could waste hours a day doing it. I can’t blame him, that he can’t come off sounding exactly like me, but it’s brought in a wonderful new amount of clients, forum members, and store consumers. The freed up time allows me to manage and launch more campaigns, and work on other projects outside of affiliate marketing.

I think I might have to hire ProfitAddiction for this job, though.

Research

I can set my employees out to find new targets for PPV, use tools to get general demographics and come up with the best demo mix for my campaigns pre-launch, and go hunting for competitor works. They’re also great for brainstorming other tasks and coming up with blog post ideas.

Other Boring Tasks

Affiliate marketing has a lot of boring and repetitive tasks we have to go through. Stick it to the employees. Uploading files, sifting through bad PPV targets, collecting sub-id reports, customer service, and all sorts of other things can be left to employees.

What do you use your employees for? Comment below, or join the private affiliate marketing forums for more in-depth talk about employee management.

Pros and Cons of Having Employees for Affiliate Marketers

Justin Dupre — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 20:46:16 +0000

Someone in the private forums requested I post about having employees, so I’ll write a series of posts about my experience with my employees.

I want to go over a list of pros and cons about having employees, so let’s not waste time and just get to it!

Pros

Getting Tasks Done – You pay your employees to get shit done. They know the job when you sign them on (if you’re a good manager), and even if its the most boring crap you could think to make a job for, if they don’t do it, you just pay someone else to do it! You can also hire people to do things you don’t know how to do. Keep yourself doing the thinking, give tasks you don’t want to do, don’t have enough time for, or can’t do it yourself to your employees.
Teamwork – Affiliate marketing can be a lonely job, sometimes. I did it alone for about 2 years before I hired my first employee to work in my office. Let’s just say my social skills went down the crapper. They were never that good (if you met me at ASW, you might agree. I’m pretty shy). With a couple employees on my team now, we can chat a bit, talk about whats going down in BKK and just have someone to talk to.
Extra Thinking – When you give your employees time to think about what they are doing, they can get pretty creative and give you some help with your own goals. The new guy I hired came from a more offline marketing background, and he has some great ideas to expand my business online, and eventually take it offline.
Ability to work at home – Since most of our work is done on PCs and the Internet, if you are sick or just feeling like you need a personal day, you can let your employees work from home. Last Friday, I did this myself to keep some stress off me when I launched the forums.

Cons

To Close For Comfort – Your employees have a chance to get very close, sometimes too close to the core of your business. It’s important you make them aware of what they are doing and how your business works. It is your job, though, to make sure they don’t know so much that they steal all your shit and make a business with your business. If you need to, hire someone you know that wants a job, not lead their own business. There are people out there that don’t want the risk of running there own business. I pay my employees a commission on top of their salary, and that’s my incentive to keep them in their jobs, and not stealing my stats (and oh yeah, I don’t let them touch my stats or go into my affiliate networks).
Also, having them sign non-competes and non-disclosure agreements is key!
Sick days/not showing up/etc – It sucks when your employees don’t show up when you really need something done. It means you have to find someone else to do it, and probably pay a contractor more, and they aren’t next to you so you can take them through the steps to get it done right. Of course, you can probably just keep your employee working at home. If they don’t just show them the back of your hand against their face! (JK, yo)
Buddy Buddy – Because we don’t have traditional jobs where we run a big, traditional office style job, things can get a bit comfy. Your employees become friends, you go party together, and share some good times. They might start slacking a bit on their job. You’ve got to keep your employees in check. I run a lax office out of my condo, but I can’t stand it if someone thinks they can just slack on a job I give them during office hours. Just gotta let them know who’s boss, remind them what they’re working hours are, and that they can’t undermine you just because you are friends.

Got any pros or cons with your employees? Let them be known in the comments below or the forums!

Productivity Tips for Your Lazy Ass

Justin Dupre — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 11:45:49 +0000

It’s time to get some campaigns rolling and make that money rain. But wait! Did you see that cute video with the puppy dogs and the kittens? How about the season finale of Lost? Oh yeah, you also have that quest scheduled with your guild in WoW coming up later, too. Soon enough, you’ll be so distracted you won’t even be thinking about that money. This post is all about staying productive when other, more fun distractions can pull you away from that money game.

1. Get LeechBlock for Firefox. I wouldn’t recommend Firefox for the piece of ass it’s become in the last few months (my install crashes a few times per hour) if it weren’t for the full choice of plug-ins and addons it has. Leechblock is a cool plugin that keeps you off websites that take up time. Block every video website you frequent. You don’t need the news or Twitter either. Stop wasting your times of those game sites and forums, and block those, too.

2. Really want to know how they finished off Lost? Watching the whole season takes half a day or so. You could opt for that in one day, spread it over multiple days, or if you really need to start pounding out projects and find the urge to watch to much, do yourself a favor: Spoil it. Find a plot analysis, read it, and be over with it. It sucks, but you just saved yourself 12 hours by reading for 15 minutes rather than finding out the long way.

3. Get 2 computers. One will be strictly for work. No games, all those bad sites blocked 100% of the time, only use business email addresses and IM accounts on this PC with all the software you’ll need for you landing pages, software, servers and all that other fun affiliate stuff. Keep this one in your office. You can use your other pc in a seperate location for personal use, but still use leechblock to make sure you aren’t accessing those personal sites when you should be working.

4. If all else fails, back up the notebook and hit the road. Sometimes a walk to the local coffee shop is invigorating and inspiring, so it will get my ass in to working gear much sooner.

LeechBlock: An Essential Tool to Productivity

Justin Dupre — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 20:46:25 +0000

We affiliate marketers have way too much freedom. It’s great to get out of the 9 to 5 work pattern a typical office job gives you, but there certainly were benefits to it. There was a guarenteed paycheck as long as you show up on time and do your required work. In the home office, if you want your money, you’ve got to work for it without a boss to tell you what to do. If you quit working, you might live off a few campaigns for a month, maybe even a few years if you got some good stuff going; what happens when that runs out?

Your income will never be consistent forever, but by constantly working your ass off, doing research, designing new landing pages and searching for new traffic sources, you can better your chance for an early retirement. It gets hard to work with billions of fun websites at your finger tips that you can dilly dally on all day. I know I suffer from this. That’s why I downloaded LeechBlock.

LeechBlock is a Firefox plugin that lets you block out websites you frequently visit throughout the day. You can day-part, setting which days and hours you want it to block sites, which is perfect for my 10 AM to 6 PM work schedule (lately I’ve had to flip it around though, as I’ve found myself being quite the night owl). Block Facebook, Twitter, Wickedfire, and all those other pretty useless sites that get in the way of your productivity. Nickycakes even suggested this tool.

Looking for even more productivity? Get the landing pages and creatives out of your hair. I’ve got landing pages and creatives all on sale for only $5 each. Buy them today!