Home > General > Affiliate Marketing Forum

---

How I went from working 40+ to less than 5 hours/week (13)

---

Almost as soon as I started making money from affiliate marketing, I started building systems around it.


1. Because I work better with frameworks and templates myself
2. It assures a consistent quality of output
3. It makes the entire operation more scaleable in the long run


Today, my entire business is built around systems and processes. Both through manual labor (done by others), but also through automation.


Apart form my partner, I currently have 1 media buyer and 1 VA on my team.


With every task that I do, I ask myself "How can I avoid doing this myself? Can I setup a system to get someone else to do this?"


By doing this, I've taken my workload from 40+ hours/week to less than 5 hours/week.


This gives me time to focus on strategy, scaling and continually "polishing the system". My main task now is paving the road for my employees, by making sure that they have everything that they need.


I'd love to share some of my tricks with you, to decrease your own workload. Even though we all work with different traffic sources and verticals, many of the concepts can be applied across the board.


These posts will go over:


- How I set up my tasks for the day, so I actually get stuff done (no shit, my productivity skyrocketed after I started doing this)
- How I easily get my employees introduced to, and started on new tasks (by making them create their own SOPs)
- Which questions I've asked when interviewing VA's to vet out bad hires (there's nothing worse than hiring someone, only to fire them again 3 days later... Been there)
- How I easily manage all my ad accounts (with a handful of neat Google Sheets tricks)


...And whatever else I come up with.

EDIT:

How I DESTROY My Todo-list Every Single Day

---

Very interested in this, as like you mention, many things will be applicable to any business, regardless of what they do.

Would be interested in tools /apps as well.

I set up a lot of small things via zapier, basecamp etc. But there is a real challenge in integrating systems that don't integrate well. Our accounting system comes to mind here...

My approach is automate, delegate or outsource.

But, still working 9 to 4 every weekday...

---

I'm a big fan and preacher of everything you mentioned my self, looking forward learn more in your upcoming posts!

---

Read "Work the System" a couple years ago after hearing about it for ages. Was a complete game changer for me and 10x'd my biz.

Systems and SOP's are the way to go. What software do you like to use for organizing your SOP's?

Looking forward to this thread!

---

Just to be clear, it's not like I'm just sipping cocktails by the beach, doing nothing now. I'm very strict about routines and still get up before 6am every day, and often aren't home before 5/6pm. I just now have the freedom to focus on higher level stuff, educating myself more, etc.

I think routines and mindset are a super undervalued aspect of productivity and systems. Everyone wants the hacks and tools, but they'll get you nowhere near as far with tools as you will with the proper mindset.

Once you start to automate and systematize your business more, you find out that there are 1000 tools and softwares to use. You can easily get swamped by tools, so I like to keep things simple and use as few platforms as possible.

So for SOP's, I just use Google Drive. A folder for the SOP's themselves, and an organized sheet that makes it easy to find the right SOP's, who's responsibility it is to do the task, etc.

---

The "still working 9 to 4" wasn't meant to suggest you do nothing. And even if you would do nothing, I'd consider that a win.

It was more meant that despite having employees, procedures, automation and more, for myself, I haven't been able to free up more time than going home at 4 PM and not be on my laptop in the evening.

---

Please share more tips just started reading Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World can highly recommend as well

---

Really eager to see the posts!

Thanks in advance for sharing - sounds like info that needs to be stickied.




Amy

Sent from my SM-G930W8 using STM Forums mobile app

---

Sounds a bit like the system Tim Francis recommends for SOPS's. I started out with the google docs setup but transitioned to Notion.so. I find it a lot cleaner for building an internal wiki. A lot easier to insert and move around images and videos ect.

---

For those interested, I just posted my first post in this series:

How I DESTROY My Todo-list Every Single Day

Hope you'll find it helpful!

---

But do you make a fuck ton of money?

---

Can wait to see the posts. Thanks for this bro

---

Notion.so is great, best discovery I've had this year. I'm just hoping they add more calculations on the tables and ways to connect tables together from different pages. Then I'd let it go of google sheets for sure lol

---

Home > General > Affiliate Marketing Forum