Lammo.net: Affiliate Marketing Blog

Running on auto-pilot - You’ve got to love Wordpress haven’t you? If I hadn’t told everyone I spoke to for a few weeks beforehand, you wouldn’t know that I’ve actually been on a fortnight’s holiday - Thanks to the mighty WP (as well as a couple of colleagues, a load of outsourced work and some custom CMS systems), all of our sites ran exactly as normal during the fortnight I was away, and the ten days I’ve been back that it’s taken me to catch up.

I love the fact that I can schedule stuff to go live at any time in the future (Shame you can’t do it in the past, would help solve any Google sandbox issues), as it means I can sit here and write loads of content in the middle of the night, or whenever I’ve got a spare ten minutes, and it can go live at the optimum time for the respective audience - We’ve started doing it with email newsletters now too, and it’s a fantastic way of working - Gone are the days when I had to be physically sat at my desk if I wanted something going live at 7am, or a week on Wednesday. Now I can do it all on the rainy days and schedule it to go live on the Sunny days whilst I’m at the beach - or that’s the plan anyway!

Giving up on email - The first thing I did on getting back from my holidays was download my emails from the previous 14 days - A grand total of 6,439 emails. Of those 6,439, approx 2,900 were instantly trashed by my junk filter, and of tyhe remaining 3,500 ish emails I had to sift through to try and weed out a) the junk that was missed by my crap junk filter and b) the crap (which is different from junk - it’s still useless, but at least it’s not unsolicited) to be left with 61 emails that I actually needed to read or take some action on - 61 out of nearly 6,500!

That’s less than 1% - Basically 4 useful emails per day out of an average 460. It took me more than three hours just to sort through the emails, and I’m not even the main contact for the networks! So I reckon it’s about time I took a leaf out of John Cauldwell’s book, and ban email. Anyone who’s actually got something useful to say can catch me on MSN Messenger, or PM me via Affiliates4u or Facebook. I’ll still download the emails once a day so I don’t miss anything urgent, but it’s been fired as my main communication tool in the ten days since I’ve been back, and I’ve got so much more done now I’m not spending 20 minutes per hour sorting emails!

Muppets on a Grand scale - Sorting through the emails I discovered a promotional email from the Affiliate Team at Ladbrokes, encouraging me to give them a push for the Grand National which was “only days away”… Well it was around 359 days away as it was sent six days AFTER the Grand National, a feat that is surely worthy of a rare Muppet-of-the-Week award.

Especially as the email contained the phrase “what better time to promote betting on the Grand National with Ladbrokes?” Should I tell them?

Loving The Apprentice - I reckon this is the best series so far.. Thanks to sky+ I didn’t miss any episodes during my hols either, so I’m fully up to date. The best bit has to be the way they’ve all been asked to big themselves up to camera before failing miserably. I think they’ve also got some great characters in there - After thinking Raef was an arse the first week, he’s really grown on me, and of course there’s still a couple left who you just love to hate (Jenny and Jennifer).

It was great to see Lucinda turn it around last week - Without a doubt, she’s been the dippy, clueless one who’s let the side down every week so far, so when she was made team-leader they seemed doomed. But she proved to be a great manager, and did everything correctly (Market Research, Supply, Booked sales appointments, put the right people in the right jobs, etc). Of course it wasn’t enough as the other team (who did no market research, booked 0 appointments and spent the whole sales day arguing) somehow wandered into a huge sale off the streets and won! I think “SrAlan” made the right choice in firing Lindi, but should have let “The best salesperson in Europe” go with her..

Game Over - So, Plymouth Argyle’s season is over, having failed to make the end of season Play Offs, after hitting the self-destruct button in recent weeks giving away goals left right and centre to fall out of contention. We’re still on course for our best finish in 20 years (and our eighth consecutive year of finishing higher in the league - carry this on, and by by the year 2038 we’ll be Premiership champions!).

And of course there’s still something to cheer for - Every member of the Green Army will be a member of the (former Argyle manager) Tony Pulis fan club on Saturday as he faces Ian HolloWords’ Liecester City knowing a win will propel his Stoke side into the Premier League. It’s not that we want to see Pulis there, it’s just that he will relegate the Lying Little Media Whore if they beat them (And Southampton don’t lose to Sheffield United), and nothing would be better karma than that!

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