Lammo.net: Affiliate Marketing Blog

It’s a bumper “Day in the life of” this week, as we take a peek at the typical working day of the hardest working man in Affiliate Marketing, Nadeem Azam. Nadeem is CEO of Azam Marketing, and one of the friendliest people I’ve ever met. So without further ado, it’s over to Nadeem:

9:15am – The alarm goes on my bedside clock and I am shocked to see it is 9:15am. I was working again until my usual 4am last night and so getting up at 9:15am is a struggle nevermind 8:15am. If I had gotten up an hour earlier, I would have had time to shower, shave and have breakfast and go to my first meeting of the day without rushing, but now it’s a case of getting the first two done with haste and skipping breakfast.

9:50am – Some of the treasured sights you’ll enjoy in central London on a crisp spring morning are the City-slickers striding to their high-flying jobs, clusters of German students on their way to Camden market, American families on their first vacation abroad waddling to McDonalds, and a loony online marketer hurtling down the street to go a critical meeting he should have left home for half an hour earlier.

10:00am – Thankfully I reside smack bang in the middle of the West End of London and many of the media and marketing agencies are but a 400 metre sprint away, so I arrive at the office a mere 10 minutes later. Entering the offices of these fancy agencies is like being transported into another world. There are 300 inch flat-screen televisions bowing down at you from every wall and zipping along the marble tiles glistening with precious stones are Beautiful Young Things dressed in ripped jeans and sandals.

10:00am – 11:00am – I have a meeting with an Account Director and Business Development Director at the agency. Many of the mega-agencies have dozens of people with expertise in offline marketing but relatively small teams devoted to online marketing as it’s hard to find experienced people in what is a nascent field, so they employ Azam Marketing to carry out work on their behalf. I present a progress update on SEO and PPC we are doing for two clients and then we discuss the division of labour for a joint pitch we will be conducting in three weeks time to try to win the marketing contract for a French retailer expanding into the UK.

11:30am-12:45pm – Meet up in a hotel in Paddington with two representatives from a company based near Reading looking up to set-up a cashback website. They are keen on eDealsUK’s white-label cashback site service, but require significant customisation and are asking for some unique features to be integrated into their cashback site. The work will take considerable programmer time, but I am willing to satisfy their requirements as they are a fairly well-known brand.

1:30pm – 3:00pm – the meeting with the potential white-label cashback partner overran, so it’s a mad dash across London on the tube to the offices of a client in the City who would like us to completely revamp the website we did for them a couple of years earlier. I meet our Director of Design and Development, Ather, 20 minutes before the meeting and we go through the pitch documents we have prepared the day before. When we enter the stockbrokers’ offices on Gracechurch Street, for once I feel in my element as everybody is wearing a suit unlike the t-shirts and jeans that seem to be de rigueur in online marketing! They are asking for all the bells-and-whistles for their website this time, including showing real-time share prices and a live online trading platform for customers. It will be a mammoth project, but is exciting. We promise to send them detailed documentation about how we will handle the project, costings and a time-line.

4pm – the day’s meetings are over and I head back to base. I tell myself I’ll quickly look through my emails for 15 minutes before I grab a bite to eat as I’m starving.

5:30pm - I’m still sitting there tackling the email mountain and frantically trying to get matters resolved before everybody else finishes work for the day. There’s all kinds of pressing concerns to deal with, from a rogue affiliate of our Affiliate Management client Purple Parking using spyware to try to generate leads which has lead to abusive phone calls to Purple Parking’s office, to our webmaster asking who he should replace the dozens of links selling DVDs via Benson’s World with as they’ve closed down their affiliate program on Tradedoubler, to having to contact one of our domain name registrars for the sixth time to fix the bug which will not allow us to renew one of our most valuable domain names which is expiring in five days.

6:00 – 6:30pm – Lunchtime! Today it’s hummus and salad in pitta bread which I grabbed on the way back from the meeting in the City. It’s a bad habit of mine, but I always read a magazine such as Marketing or Precision Marketing while I’m eating.

6:30pm – 8:00pm – Everybody in the UK may have gone home, but it’s the middle of the working day in the Americas, so I have a conference call with one of our clients in the United States. I follow it up with a Windows Live Messenger conversation with one of our designers in Argentina. Although most of our staff are in the UK, we have a designer and programmer in South America. I follow that up with composing a six page spec. sheet for a new website and fire it off to the guys in Argentina.

8:00 – 11pm – After a tea break I ring Dave, our Search Marketing Director, and fill him in on the meeting with the agency this morning. He agrees to send them some metrics and other information they are asking for. Then I have a conference call with eDealsUK to fill them in on the meeting with the white-label client earlier in the day. I write-up and send eDealsUK the potential partner’s requirements. I then have a long phone call with Ather to discuss progress with several design projects we have on the go.

11pm – 12 midnight – I spend an hour reading and posting on various affiliate and online marketing forums and blogs. I’ve heard from many people that online marketing forums and blogs are a waste of time and they are “too busy” for them, but I am determined to have more knowledge about my industry than anybody in the world: that is what will allow my agency to continue prospering, not watching Pop Idol or reading about the antics of Pete Doherty in Grazia magazine which “too busy” bods often have more than enough time for.

12:00 – 2:30am – The post-midnight zone is my favourite time to work. The whole world is sleeping, and the only people online are three of our UK team who are also workaholics and my night owl affiliate buddies. Apart from an occasional phone call from the Americas or one of my graveyard shift colleagues, there’s little in the way of distractions and me and Marilyn can really focus on our work. It’s a mixed bag tonight: I have about eleven windows open and am studying CVs from prospective new staff, writing an article for our blog, posting on the Affiliates4U forums, searching for ex-flames on Facebook to see if they’re with someone (they are), reading what’s happening in the world on the BBC News and FT websites, and dealing with outstanding emails. I also chat on Messenger with some affiliates. It’s not like seven years ago as many of the old timers have gotten married and had kids, and no longer work ACT (Affiliate Central Time), but there’s still a few of us who’ll be there every night at 2am swapping tips, working on joint projects and gossiping about what’s happening in the industry.

2:30am – 4:00am – Just as I’m about to have an ‘early night’ by hitting the sack at 2:30am, I remember I haven’t added some charts I have received from Sinead Hernen, who heads the Affiliate Management division of our agency, to a Powerpoint presentation. It’s for a pitch I am giving at 11am tomorrow morning in Canary Wharf to a prospective Affiliate Management client. I start integrating the charts and then realise there’s another slide I could improve… and then another and another… I am known for being a perfectionist and, an hour and a half later, I am still making small tweaks to the presentation; I am determined to win the client and want the presentation to be pucker. I eventually finish it at 4am.

4:00am – 4:15am – I used to check our affiliate statistics three times a day, but now it’s just once. I login to the interfaces of the advertisers we are promoting – most of them are on independent platforms or those of the agencies we work closely with – and look to see how much money we have made.

4:30am - zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Wow, what a day! I don’t know how you manage to cram it all in without burning out Nadeem! Huge thanks for sharing your day with us.

Don’t forget, if you would like to share your typical day with Lammo readers, then just drop me a line (johnATbigideamediaDOTCOM) with the details.

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