Lammo.net: Affiliate Marketing Blog

Our next installment of our Day in the life… series is spent in the company of Red Barrington. Red has been around in Affiliate Marketing as long as I can remember and is the Business Development Manager over at Yardstick Media.

Here’s a typical day in Red’s life:

5.45am “miaow”, “miaow”…My cat Thomas jumps on my head in his own endearing way to let me know he’s hungry and wants his breakfast. It’s usually met with a swear word or two.

6.00am - alarm goes off and I listen to the headlines on 5 Live while trying to wake up (with the cat miaowing throughout), before heading down stairs to sit in front of Sky Sports News and eat my Weetabix (after feeding the cat of course).

7.00am After getting dressed, doing my hair, applying half a ton of makeup and giving Thomas a quick cuddle, I’m finally ready to leave for work.

8.00am - arrive in Bletchley Park where Yardstick’s offices are. After about 20 minutes, I finally manage to login into my laptop and I start going through my emails and replying or flagging them - although about 80% of them are spam (no, I really don’t want t bigger ‘love stick’ thanks). I deal with all the consumer enquiries that get sent from all the data collection sites we have as well, so there is plenty of emails to keep me busy. I usually start making a list too of what I need to do for that day (gotta love the lists!).

9.00am Diet Coke break – I can’t stand coffee and need a caffeine fix! I usually take a few minutes as well to check the BBC football site as well as my favourite Arsenal sites to see what the gossip of the day is.

9.05am- 10.00am - this is pretty much stats O’clock, where I spend about an hour or so going through registrations that we have collected on our sites over night and how our partners are performing. I usually have to email reports to these partners as well as speaking to any ad agencies to tweak campaigns to ensure they are optimised.

10.00am – 11.30am I spend half my morning catching up with partners and agencies that we might be working with at the moment - chasing them on getting things live, where we are with certain promotions or how we can improve campaigns. I do a lot of this by email and MSN as it seems to work much better than phone calls these days! I’ll also try and grab 5 minutes with the MD to discuss budgets (groan!), strategy and any other issues we might be having at the moment. It’s important to keep everyone informed as to where the department is at the moment and whether we’re achieving are objectives.

11.30 Diet Coke break II. Usually in between hassling some poor soul about putting our links up!

11.35am -1.00pm Start writing newsletter content for our varying publications. This usually involves scanning the forum for any good discounts/offers that might interest our users as well as writing a few articles and thinking up some new polls for our users to participate in.

1.00pm – 1.30pm Lunch. I usually sit at my desk and eat my lunch, I know it’s a bad habit but it gives me time to check my personal emails. I teach part time as well, so my email is usually brimming with the latest student excuses for not submitting their work on time. Teaching does keep me busy, but I do enjoy doing it (most of the time!).

1.30pm – 2.30pm- meeting with my techie. With the recent launch of Red and Sticky, I’m still getting used to CMS systems and what they can and can’t do, so I usually have to sit with my techie quite a lot to go through a list of odds and ends that need sorting out.

2.30pm – 4.00pm - sourcing new business. I try and spend at least an hour, if not two, a day sourcing new traffic partners to work with and contacting them. You can have the best sites in the world but if you don’t’ have any traffic, then you’re buggered!

4.00pm Diet Coke break III. Usually accompanied by some kind of biscuit.

4.05pm- 5.45pm - more content writing. I also spend a lot of time emailing our content partners to source articles for Red and Sticky. This is in between answering yet more emails and chatting to our partners about traffic and campaigns.

5.40pm Leave Bletchley and drive home.

6.45pm Arrive home to Thomas, who every day tries to convince me that I’m mean for not coming home earlier and feeding him. While the cat is busy scoffing his dinner, I start to cook mine, while opening the days post and keeping an eye on one of the trashy soaps I like watching – what a genius invention ‘+1’ channels are!

8pm After eating a light dinner, I head off to my street jazz dance class, where I’m learning to dance like Britney Spears apparently, although I doubt I’ll ever get there (well I won’t be shaving my head that’s for sure!). That or I head off for a game of netball - I play Wing Defence, in a team that is like ‘the Bolton’ of the league; play ugly and don’t win very often either!! (sorry Bolton fans)

I’d like to thank Red for giving us insight into her day, if you would like to share you life with us just email me: johnATbigideamediaDOTcom

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