The life of an affiliate marketer sounds like a dream to many people. They think that it’s full of days on the beach, relaxing with the family, having fun. They don’t always understand the work involved.

Let me tell you about a normal day for me. I do affiliate marketing, running several sites. I have two small children, one 4 years old and the other is 16 months old.

I get up in the morning and get the kids breakfast. After that it’s off to the computer, to check email, stats and my forum. The email takes anywhere from a few minutes to an hour, depending on whether there’s anything that needs a reply or immediate work on a site. Stats take a few minutes, just to see how things are going.

The forum on my site can require just a little time or more than an hour, depending on what has happened. Maybe there were a lot of posts to review and respond as appropriately. Maybe a spammer hit in the night. I back up the forum regularly as well, dating the backups so that I have several on hand at any time, just in case.

As I enjoy making information based sites, much of my day is spent in writing for my sites. I have a number of topics I can write on so that writer’s block on one topic isn’t a problem. There are other topics to write on. These articles may be for posting on my site alone or they might be used to submit to article directories using iSnare’s service.

I also work on my datafeed sites. Datafeeds may need to be updated or I may have a new idea for how to use a datafeed. Datafeeds need to be tweaked so that they aren’t identical to everyone else’s datafeeds.

Another possible activity on a given day is submitting my sites to directories. I use the list at Info Vilesilencer so that I have hundreds of sites to submit to. I use a software that lets me automate a part of the process. I still have to select the appropriate category, but it fills in the blanks, greatly simplifying my efforts.

At the moment, I am only using forums minimally. They are excellent for marketing when used appropriately, but also quite time consuming, and at the moment I am focusing on building sites. Soon enough, I will need to head on back to the forums to promote the newer ones on them.

I also have pages that need updating several times a week. These include blogs and an article directory.

In between, of course, I have to take care of my family and my home. This all takes quite a bit of planning to keep things running smoothly while paying lots of attention to my kids. In all honesty, I think this is why my business builds as slowly as it does; I simply have less time to run it than other online marketers.

My work day runs, regularly interrupted, until I go to bed each night. Even on my days off, I at least log in to check email and stats, to make sure no crisis has developed.

Is this the easy life so many imagine? Not by a long shot. However, it works well for me, as it allows me to work at home, children around me, and I can interrupt my work anytime I care to in order to do things with my kids. It’s not the easy life you might dream of, but for me it is wonderful.

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