The affiliate industry is an incredibly fast-paced environment where time-management is everything. Here we provide an in-depth look at our Affiliate Accelerator Daily Planner, and how it can launch you into the top 1% of successful affiliate managers.

Top 1% Affiliate Manager Blueprint

To become an elite affiliate manager, you must organize your business thoroughly so there is nothing that will cause you to fall behind and catch you by surprise. Using our planner just requires fifteen minutes every week to organize your schedule to manage your business efficiently:

• Increase sales by 300%.
• Do what the 1-3% of affiliate managers do.
• Track what you are doing everyday.
• Build relationship funnels.
• Bring value to your everyday work.
• Turn your reactive days into proactive days.

Instead of focusing on results, we focus on actions, providing a tool that can help you proactively plan your day so you can track your efforts and keep organized. Our planner is designed to change mindsets and bad habits so you can stay in your gifts, focus on money-producing results, and keep you growing. What you need to remember is that the biggest thing that separates a whale from a tadpole is their time-management and efficient routines.

Weekly Activity Goals

The best place to start is with weekly goals. We have provided you with eight activities that you should do every week to succeed.

• Partner calls – any kind of verbal communication (phone calls, zoom): This will provide significantly higher results than written communication due to the personal nature of speaking directly to the person. You must decide how many calls you are going to try to make everyday.
• Partner emails – anything that is written outreach (emails, skype messages, bulk outreach): Keep in mind that this is the easiest form of communication but the least valuable.
• Quality Conversations: How many quality conversations are you going to have? We define quality conversations by how much effort you put into knowing your partners: are you learning something new about your partner? So you give them value? Are you asking for something, or are you promoting and getting clarity?
  • These quality conversations build your rapport with your partners so that in the future, they will remember the respect and effort you placed into understanding them, so they answer your calls. You do not want to become known as someone who only reaches out when you need something. Potential partners should know you for taking the time to get to know them, so they want to help you when you reach out.
  • This activity is not about how many calls you are going to make, it is about how many relationships you are willing to maintain through continuous effort.
• New Partners: How many new partners are you trying to get that week, regardless of whether it’s from referrals or cold outreach?
• Number of Whales Confirmed: Whales will be your biggest partners; they are the ones that will have lists of 150,000 or more active subscribers.
• Number of Dolphins Confirmed: Dolphins will be between 25-150,000 active subscribers.
• Number of Minnows Confirmed: Minnows are under 25,000 active subscribers.
• Number of Tadpoles Confirmed: 5,000 and under active subscribers.

Remember, it is essential to your success to build valuable relationship funnels with all your affiliates regardless of their level. It is good to have diversity within your partnerships, as a minnow can turn into a dolphin within a year’s time, so you should never turn down a smaller fish.

Weekly Results Goals

Leads, sales, and clicks are the universal language of our industry. It is the easiest way for you to control the outcome of your business, so if you are focusing on clicks, especially quality clicks, the sales will follow.

• Time Goals: You will not complete all your weekly activities without giving yourself time to recharge and build up your energy. Setting time aside for exercise and sleep is essential in preparing yourself for all the work you have scheduled. The working till dawn mindset is harmful and comes from poor time management, so make sure you have all your ducks in a row, so you can fulfill your goals with 100% efficiency.
• Projects: You must set up the projects that you are going to be finishing that week. Most companies will have weekly, monthly, and quarterly projects for you to accomplish to better your department (building a new system, automating something, hiring third parties, etc.) No matter what your projects are, you must list them out:
  • What do they look like now?
  • What are the next steps that you will be taking care of this week?

• Offer Tracking Overview Manager: We have provided a chart to help organize all your offers. Most affiliate managers represent more than one offer, so make sure you are paying attention to all of yours. Here you are deciding how much bandwidth you will spend on each offer in advance. Remember not to go into autopilot with booking offers to the point of not diversifying.
  • It becomes very easy to get excited about a new offer, and every company has different objectives.
  • You may only want to promote one, but sometimes it becomes a habit to go into autopilot and only promote the most current offer.
  • If you want all your offers or specific ones to have the most attention, make sure to specify which ones need the promotion and which ones can have less or none. It is a great tool to help prioritize how you want to organize your offers.

• Week Ahead Notes: This is a small notes section to keep any important thoughts organized that you have for yourself:
  • Remembering to message a specific partner.
  • Recording a specific stat that surprised you.
  • Changing in plans.

Week Ahead: Important Time Blocks

Now that you have established exactly what you need to do in your week, it is time to start looking at your schedule realistically. You must allocate what daily goals you need to finish, especially before noon, which should be your most proactive time of the day:

• Get your most important calls done.
• Make sure you attend all your meetings.
• Your messages must be sent out before noon.

This is the time to move your projects forward and to get the most important things done, while the afternoon is when you can help other people move their projects forward. Post-noon is the time to be more reactive and start answering all the emails that have been rolling in all morning and checking your backlog of to-dos. Before noon is the time to make things more concrete, while the afternoon is when you can be a bit more relaxed and deal with everything that is thrown at you.

Day-to-Day Planning

The next step is to finally solidify everything that you have been organizing into an hourly plan. This should be simple, as you already know everything that needs finishing to meet your goals for the week. We have provided you with a top three activities list to accomplish in your day, for example:

• A certain number of follow-ups.
• Quality conversations.
• Referrals.

These are just base goals to try to reach that day, and every day will differ depending on what you need to complete. We have added this small feature to make it easy for you to check your blueprint and remember exactly what the most important activity is to finish that day. The next tool we have added is — top three things you are grateful for – yes, we are aware this is a sales planner, but this is essential to your own success. Creating a healthy morning ritual will be something that can make difficult days much easier. Starting your day on a positive note by recalling three things you are grateful for, for example:

• Your very supportive team.
• Your accountability partner.
• It could be your life partner (whether this be your spouse, cat, dog, etc.)

It is always important to remember how lucky you are and that you have support, regardless of where it comes from.

After you have filled out your top three’s, you must fill out your hourly schedule. The most important thing to understand is how to break up your day. Your hours before noon are an integral part of your day, as this is where you are proactive and complete everything that is of high importance. This is the time slot to tackle those top three activities that must be completed. You must get into the habit of being proactive in the morning and becoming reactive post-noon to be in that 1 to 3%!

The next tool is the activity tracker, which will help you calculate exactly how many of your important activities you have finished. This is where your results generate, which will help you realize exactly where you need to improve. Bear in mind that if you have more than 20 conversations (preferably verbal communications), you will become one of the top affiliate managers. But not everyone can start off as a major rockstar affiliate manager. This is why our Affiliate Accelerator coaching program is so important. It can help you find the exact methods, based on your own strengths and weaknesses, to succeed within the affiliate marketing industry.

Within the activity tracker, there is a scoreboard for you to rank yourself on how well you did within each activity from 1-10:

• Did you build rapport?
• Did you learn something new about them, something you can add to your CRM?
• Did you provide value?
• Were you able to communicate what you needed?
• Were you able to set up a follow-up?

All these questions will help you realize how well you did when attending quality conversations. If you didn’t achieve any of these, then your score will be on the lower end, and you will need to work on your relationship building. What you must realize for all activities that are listed within this blueprint is that you need to have quality conversations to successfully achieve any of your goals. Every affiliate manager is sending out emails when they want something! You need to call your partners and create those connections to separate yourself from every other affiliate.

Once you have completed all your proactive work in the morning and your post-noon schedule kicks in, you need to pivot to a different kind of productive mindset. For example, something that will help grow your relationships outside of quality conversations is giving referrals. This is an incredibly great way to spend your post-noon time.

Second-tier introductions not only bring revenue into the company but you also bring value into the community. This is a reciprocity game in which you provide someone with an introduction, and they are obligated to give you one. The more you give, the more you receive, so you should build a name as the best second-tier referral giver, because more people will be inclined to work with you. However, please be cautious and always ask to introduce people because it might cause problems if you pass off information without consent.

By following our blueprint, you can establish a healthy routine to build your business around. Having impeccable time-management skills is the only way that you will be able to become one of the 1-3% of the top affiliate managers. These are proven strategies that work, once you begin not only keeping track of your time, but also all your important activities completed in your day. If you start ranking up your daily activity, and daily result totals, you will see that your goal in sales will begin to rise.

You will never progress if you are not tracking how well you are doing every day and throughout the week. You must always know where you are going and never punish yourself because you are not perfect. Always do the best you can, because if you want to succeed, you will forever grow and learn from your successes and failures.

Thoughts and Plans

We have provided a daily to-do list and notes so that you don’t need multiple notebooks. Here we want you to record your end-of-day wins and the highlight of the day. You should always celebrate your work, even the smallest successes. You should start your day with gratitude and end your day congratulating yourself. Although staying positive is hard, with these prompts, it makes it easier to self-reflect and achieve your goals.

Weekly Review

What makes this blueprint a roadmap to becoming a successful affiliate manager is that it provides the opportunity to reflect on your progress throughout the week. You start the week with a plan, and you end the week with a review. There is an entire page dedicated to recording how you did the previous week, and you can look back to see where you need to improve and where to continue succeeding. It is not just enough to succeed at one thing within this industry — it is a career with many hats, so you must be well-rounded. This weekly reflection will help you see where you potentially need to develop your skills. Once you finish off your end-of-week review, you can learn from the previous week and begin planning your next week so you can continue developing into the best affiliate manager in the industry.

Download a Free digital copy of your Affiliate Manager Planner here.

Buy a physical copy of Affiliate Manager Planner here.

Why Are Accountability Reports Important?

Accountability is a very important part of success within your business. If you have an accountability partner – which we highly recommend having – they are someone you send your numbers to. It is essential to send your numbers to your partner every week so they can help you hold yourself accountable for your entire business. This partner is there to make sure you are only accountable to yourself; they will remind you to submit your numbers, and they are always there if you need someone. This is a reciprocal relationship as you will receive the exact same from them.

You and your partner create accountability reports to track your business. These are important because they track your progress:

• Measure KPI’s
• Track progress and ROI
• Identify areas of improvement

These reports are for your benefit to gain feedback which you can fill out in bar graphs to help map your progress visually. Not all areas within these reports will associate with your business, such as second-tier, so you do not need to worry about mapping them. When you begin preparing your reports, there are many things to pay attention to including:

• Biggest takeaways
• Biggest wins
• Struggles
• Where you need additional support
• Plan for next week
• Outreach plans – partners and affiliates
• Number of bookings
• Number of mailings
• Traffic (clicks and leads)
• Sales and revenue, including second-tier(if applicable)

If you do not have an accountability partner, our exceptional coaches at East 5th Avenue are more than happy to be that for you. Accountability reports are a standard weekly task within our Affiliate Accelerator course, and we will provide you with in-depth feedback so that you continue progressing toward a successful future. You should continue charting your progress after the program is over to keep within this good habit. It is integral to keep on track of your development within the industry and help pinpoint where you need to improve and where you are succeeding.

Need Support Creating And Scaling Your Affiliate Program?

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You’ll get 15 lessons and 7 actionable tools designed to meet you at any level (beginner, intermediate and advanced) and help you build a steady affiliate revenue coming month after month, year after year!

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Sources
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