There are several reasons why you want to start with Affiliate Marketing. For me, I want to improve my financial situation and eventually achieve financial freedom. This will allow me to escape my 9 to 5 prison, have a cozy retirement, and get more time for me and my family.
What I’m doing with my time spent behind the bars is what you are curious to know right?
Stick with me. With this blog my intention is to document everything, at least, everything I consider important that you should know.
Anytime, if you have a question then ask me. You can write a comment below or simply send me an email to the address I give in my contact page.
This week has been again a busy one. If you have read my latest posts, I’m complaining about my lack of time to run my business.
When I find some time for it, then I’m in a panic because, as I consider the pile of tasks I need to do, I don’t know which one to pick first. As I can’t really do them all at same time, I need to find a way to prioritize.
So I decided to attack this problem like I would do with a project in engineering.
First, I would dress a list of the tasks I need to do for my business and then attribute to each of them a priority number based on what I need to deliver and then, estimate the time for completion. Here, the deliverables for my business are simply the tasks I need to complete during the week and that will help to grow my audience.
Having done this, I would next create my schedule in function of my priorities and the resource time I have to fulfill the needs.
This resource time, I mean the time I have available to work solely on my business could be estimated by finding my typical week. This typical week is based on experience or could be found by observation over several weeks.
Finding my availability
A typical day for me, that is from Monday to Friday, would look like this:
- 6h30 wake-up time;
- 6h30 – 7h30, breakfast, kids time for school;
- 7h30 – 8h30, in transit (transport);
- 8h30 – 12h00, work time;
- 12h00 – 13h00, lunch time (I count half an hour of free time);
- 13h00 – 17h30, work time;
- 17h30 – 18h30, in transit (transport);
- 18h30 – 19h45, dinner + washing dishes;
- 19h45 – 21h00, free time;
- 21h00 – 21h45, physical workout and shower;
- 21h45 – 23h30, wife’s time;
- 23h30 go to bed.
Let me explain…
My wife works outside typical hours, she’s an artistic gymnastic coach since many years. We only meet at 21h00 in the evening. The rest of the time either I’m at work or she is at work. So this only moment we have in a day is important for us.
Cut some of this time? I tried but it’s not negotiable. 😉
My daughter is a high level, National grade, gymnastic athlete. She trains over 22hours per week, and she is on a special sports-studies program. Most of the revenue my wife is doing goes directly to pay for my daughter’s trainings and competitions. My wife also pay for school materials, inscriptions and clothes so her salary is important.
I reserve 30 minutes per day for training in workouts. This is mandatory to keep the shape, so it’s non-negotiable. I pass almost all of my daytime sitting in front of a computer, so I consider important to have a dedicated period to make physical activity during a day.
Health is important and required to take full benefits of life. I want to be in good shape in order to put the best that I can into my business and pursue my dreams. When health is in question, I want to put all the odds on my side, see “Ghosts help me find my why”.
Cutting the sleep time? No. This is also not negotiable otherwise I will lose my efficacy at work. My sleep time is already too short so it’s no question to shorten it more, it’s again a matter of keeping health.
With that said and the time justified, I found that in a typical day I have 1h15 of free time. To this, I can add a 30min taken inside the hour I have for lunch time. So in total, I got 1h45 each day Monday to Friday.
What about the weekends?
Weekends are difficult to establish in terms of typicality. Normally I have to juggle between kids activities (my wife being at work in the weekends’ afternoons), prepare meals and work on the house and lawn necessities. There are also times when social activities, friends, vacations, and summer parties change the routine.
Saturday
- 8h00 wake-up time;
- 8h00 – 9h00 breakfast time;
- 9h00 – 12h00 kids activities;
- 12h00 – 13h00 lunch time;
- 13h00 – 15h30 free time;
- 15h30 -18h00 house/lawn maintenance;
- 18h00 – 19h30 dinner time;
- 19h30 – 20h30 free time;
- 20h30 – 21h00 shower;
- 21h00 – 00h00 wife time/relax;
- 00h00 go to bed.
Sunday
- 9h00 wake-up time;
- 9h00 – 10h00 breakfast time;
- 10h00 – 12h00 free time;
- 12h00 – 13h00 lunch time;
- 13h00 -14h30 free time;
- 14h30 – 16h00 house/lawn maintenance;
- 16h00 – 18h30 softball game and shower;
- 18h30 – 19h30 dinner time;
- 19h30 – 21h00 free time;
- 21h00 – 23h30 wife time/relax;
- 23h30 go to bed.
On Sundays the period between 10h00 to 12h00 is often free so I can use it also for my business.
On both Saturdays and Sundays, I observed that I have time periods in both the afternoon and the evening where I’m usually free.
If I add all the free time and transform it to business time I got the following:
- Monday to Friday 1.75hrs x 5days = 8.75hrs, lets round this so I got 9 hours I could spend working on my business;
- Saturday I can free up to 3.5 hours;
- Sunday I have 5 hours I can use
Overall, this gives me for the week a total of 9 + 3.5 + 5 = 17.5 free hours I could use for my business.
However my weekends’ schedule change often, having to manage the family, activities, and also my mother I go to visit occasionally.
This number of 17.5 hours could be taken as a mean estimate because sometimes it could be less while at other times, it could be more. I still need to continue my observations over several weekends more in order to achieve a better estimation for my weekends’ free time.
Determining my business tasks, time estimates, and priorities
Here are my actual business tasks. They are all related to the process of growing my audience.
These should be inline with the 4 core areas of focus (see my last blog post “Overwhelmed? Work On What Really Counts“).
The first number following the task description is my time estimate to complete the task. The second number is the priority I gave to the task based on a scale from 1 to 4, 1 being the highest priority and should reflect a task that align directly with growing my audience.
- Write my blog post every week for Saturday; 4.5hrs; 1
- Answer a question in Quora; 0.5hr; 3
- Quora engaging and commenting; 0.25hr; 4
- Create and produce a TikTok Video; 2hrs; 1
- TikTok engaging and commenting; 0.25hr; 2
- Write a sequence of 7 emails with a workflow automation; 12hrs; 4
- Create a Facebook leads ad; 2hrs; 4
- Post on my Facebook page; 0.25hr; 4
- Internal blog hopping: Saturday share activity, read a post from a fellow marketer and write a comment; 0.5hr; 3
- External blog hopping: write a comment on an influential blog outside of my Internet Profits community group; 0.5hr; 2
- Write and publish my newsletter; 1hr; 1
- Answer a comment on my post; 0.125hr; 2
- Coaching, Facebook lives, etc.; 0.5hr; 2
Writing my post every week is my first priority. This is important because my Blog is my own asset. It is the hub of my business where I bring traffic to and where, with my newsletter, I build relationships with people.
Creating TikTok videos is also a first priority. Because TikTok is my primary method to generate traffic to my blog, it is important this task be performed many times a week. I have put TikTok engaging and commenting, a second priority
Since I want people to know me, and post my content in front of people that has a problem to solve in my niche, I need to present myself in front of these audiences. I do this by liking and leaving comments on those people’s posts. This is the best way I found to have warm followers in TikTok.
For the same reason I consider external blog hopping a priority 2 because it is important to make my blog known outside of my Internet Profits community.
Creating leads ads is not a priority for me right now, but I consider to start it so I gave it a 4 on my priority scale. Same thing for my sequence of automated emails because it goes with it.
Note that the writing of the entire email sequence will take a lot of time but I only need to do it once. It’s not a task that repeats itself each week like others. After it’s completed, I can remove it from my tasks list.
OK, now, with all the above information, I’m able to draft a weekly schedule, starting with my first priority tasks.
My Weekly Schedule
Here it is.
| hr | Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8 | |||||||
| 9 | |||||||
| 10 | I | ||||||
| 11 | J | ||||||
| 12 | /B | /B | /E | /C | /E | ||
| 13 | D | F | |||||
| 14 | D/ | F | |||||
| 15 | M/ | ||||||
| 16 | |||||||
| 17 | |||||||
| 18 | |||||||
| 19 | /L | /D | /A | /D | /A | /A | /K |
| 20 | E | D | A | D | A | A | K/ |
| 21 |
Capital letters correspond to the activities listed above. “/” marks the half hour.
This schedule is meant to be and stay flexible. It shows me a clear picture of my availability and what I need to accomplish during a week.
Note that there are tasks that are weekly, and tasks that have some specific duration.
For example, when my workflow sequence of email will be finalized this time slot could be freed for some other task.
For blogging, unless I had some event in the week that took some of my availability and I can’t compensate somewhere else, I have to post every Saturday. I’ve imposed this habit to myself in order to have a constant activity on my own asset and stay committed.
Why Saturdays? It is because Saturdays are what we folks in the Beginners’ Advantage community of Internet Profits call “The Saturday Share” where we share each other posts and are invited to comment on each of them.
As I’m making progress in my journey or if my time availability and tasks priority change, of course I will need to adapt the schedule.
Having done this exercise was beneficial for me. Somehow, it gave me a breath of fresh air. It released my mind of a burden and I feel good.
I know what I have to do and when to do it. Now I will have a good reason of feeling guilty on not getting the job done. 😄
I’m expecting to progress much faster now by being more committed.
How will I handle the unexpected?
I guess by focusing on the tasks of higher priorities and doing them on a time slot allocated to a task of lower priority.
I told you this schedule is a guideline and must stay flexible.
Do this exercise, it worth the time and it’s time you will get back as you increase in efficiency.
Please leave a comment below, I’m curious to know if you are someone organized where all your daytime is planned and scheduled or if you are rather someone who prefer to figure-it-out on the spot (I use to be this kind of someone).
How do you manage your business time if you do affiliate marketing as a side hustle?
On this, don’t forget to subscribe to my newsletter and see you here on my blog next Saturday for another very interesting topic!
And always remember,
It’s not about the time you have but more about what you do with this time that really counts!
Ciao!
Martin
Leave a Reply