Leaving The Day Job

A day in the life of a fulltime affiliate

Well, it’s going to be a long time until I can go fulltime as an affiliate but I took the day off from my “proper” job today to try to get a good chunk of affiliate work done. I started out the way I always imagined working from home would be like by sleeping through the alarm and getting up an hour and a half later than intended.

I moved on to reviewing stats, reading blogs and answering emails over a cup of freshly brewed coffee then settled down to have a long, bitter and swearword-infested fight with PHP and XML. I was trying to convert the XML from Amazon’s web service into a nice CSV file to use with Affilistore. I quickly learned that Amazon provide you with easily enough XML rope to hang yourself with. There’s far more data in their feed than I could ever need and so I spent ages trying just to figure out which bits of it were which. Then my rustiness with PHP paid me a visit and I spent a similar number of ages referring to the manual trying to work out how to manipulate said XML.

In the end I got something not entirely dissimilar to what I was trying to create but was not at all pleased that I’d wasted half the day trying to get it. It’s my intention to create a more general Amazon to CSV tool to put on this website but it’ll have to go sit on the backburner where so many of my other bright ideas are waiting. As much as I love Linux my years spent coding .NET at the day job mean development would be a heck of a lot quicker if I just bit the bullet and switched to hosting my sites on Windows.

By this point it was lunchtime already. In the day job, lunch usually marks the point at which my productivity takes a serious downturn but working at home I’ve actually got more done in the afternoon than the morning. This is a good sign as it kind of suggests that working for myself suits me.

I’ve discovered that one of my old, neglected sites is still seeing a fair bit of traffic and that most of it comes from the US. So I’ve installed openAds to rotate the banners on the site and geo-target them to the visitors. I’m thinking of revitalising and relaunching the whole site since people seem to still like visiting it.

I’ve also set up a PC at home with Fedora Linux so I can do development work, launched some PPC campaigns and done some tweaks to another one of my sites. All in all I feel I’ve been quite productive and I’ve certainly got more done in one day than I would have done in a week of just doing affiliate work in the evenings. Unfortunately you don’t get quick results in affiliate marketing (at least I don’t) so it’ll be a while before I see if my hard work pays off. In the meantime it’s back to the day job tomorrow – only four days until the weekend

Similar posts

• None Found