by John Henderson

Created on: August 10, 2009   Last Updated: August 11, 2009

I have always tried really hard not to laugh when I read the "average day" of an affiliate marketer at the beginning of a trumped up book. The goal of these stories is to entice you into diving into affiliate marketing feet first, without understanding what you really need to do in order to succeed.

My favorite story went something like this. I wake up around 9:00, grab some breakfast and a coffee and then get to work. I start by checking my stats for the previous day and smile when I find that I have made some more sales. But I want to push forward and make some more, so I will scam through my inbox and see if there are any new or interesting offers on the table. I don't find any that really attract my attention and so will move on. I spend the next few hours making some adjustments to my split-tests so that I can maximize my returns. With my last hour or so, I start looking for a new product or niche to expand to. Maybe jot down some ideas and plan to move this expansion a little farther over the next week. Finally, my day is done and it is still only 2:30. Time to relax.

Now let's get serious for a second. There is only one way for this to be even remotely close to an average day. This person outsources all of the busy work such as writing and submitting articles, creating backlinks, modifying website design, creating new products and probably even has someone to respond to his business emails and phone calls. They are probably also investing $1000's of dollars a month in a PPC campaign so that they can beat out the little people (the same ones they are trying to convince to start affiliate marketing).

To give you and idea of what you are in for, especially if you plan on doing most if not all of the work yourself. Here was my average day for the first 6-9 months of affiliate marketing.

I wake up whenever I wake up, because I was working late again (went to bed around 5 am), usually around 11 am. First, I make an over-sized pot of coffee because I am going to need it. I start by making sure that I haven't lost any subscribers to my list or rss feed, and I didn't (must be doing a decent job). Next, I get ready to write around 20 new articles and then rewrite these article 5 times. It is already way past lunch and almost time for dinner. Next, I spend about an hour submitting all of these articles manually to any and all article submission sites and then bookmarking all of these sites. Super, it is time for a 30 minute break for dinner,

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