8:17am
Ding Dong. A delivery is here They always come across early. Is it something cool from China or the US? One week was great, everyday something arrived. every morning. It was like Christmas everyday. I jump out of bed and find its… groceries.
I put the shopping away and put some coffee on. I log into computer to look at sales figures over night. A new split test looks promising but not stat sig yet. Conversions up 200%+! I quickly do the maths on what that could mean at the end of the month 
(That’s Payday)
While that’s loading I check my iPhone to see the sales on another site. I load up Google Adwords to see there are no surprises (eg converison optimiser has just gone crazy).
I get another coffee.
I load up market samurai and start reviewing any changes in rankings. Nothing exciting.
With a Joint Venture Partner we currently have 2 sites up for sale using Flippa. One should be finished now – it is. The other is running for another 4 weeks.
Check emails. Nothing urgent which is good. At the moment the customer service emails are outsourced and there would be an email so I would have an email if there is any problems. Nonetheless I perform a quick review of customer support emails to see if there any re-occurring problems or marketing opportunities over the last few days.
Next task is to load a new landing page on one of the sites. The designs been done (its from another site) but it needs linking put in place. Its time-consuming, occurs regularly and probably better to outsource. While I do it I’ll write a guide to make handover easier.
I’ll do this one as a slideshow in PowerPoint. PowerPoint is good for longer processes which require some thinking by the person doing it. In this case configuring a landing page which will be different every time.
The other option I like is Jing. Jing does short videos, up to 5 minutes. Jing is good for short explanations or how to perform routine tasks. For example an overview for what to look for in a report or simply how to process a refund.
While I write this, I make a late breakfast (brunch?) and catch up on news. I don’t go near twitter yet as its too easy to get off track!, I notice a possible angle for an email blast. Actually two angles. One that may increase customer satisfaction and a new reason to buy. I make a mental calculation of what the possible ROI and switch tasks.
Email blasts on this site are time-consuming. I made an early (poor) decision to not link with a tool like aweber.com or getresponse.com. This really slows things down now. The decision to save $40/month in the early days means that sending an email blast now requires working with 4 different applications.
This is another process to outsource. Its also an opportunity to put the Business Analyst Cap on and draft up some requirements to link everything together. Well to be fair, the powerpoint slides for sending an email also document the workflow. Thus the job’s already underway.
My next tasks is to set up the mailing, this is somewhat time consuming and is followed by writing the email to send out. It takes me a while to write the email but finally I’m happy with it. I should be split testing my mailing but the current system is so cumbersome to do this. I could use manually tracking ID’s in the links but this will mean testing across a range of email clients. No time for that at the moment – if I want this out today. I get it all together and press send. time for some lunch.
I have lunch at the beach (…and a quick swim). When I get back, I go through my emails in more depth and load up tweet deck. I take a note of interesting links and comments for later. The emails are still be processed. So I clear up some open things on my desktop and close tweet deck!
Rory Ford 