5 Things I Learned From My Boss (Affiliate Website Owner)

My boss is a good man. I’m not just saying that because he pays me on time. He’s more than that.

He hired me when I didn’t know much. I was hired through Fiverr. I worked on a small order for him. After a week, I followed up to ask about the success of the order. He said he wanted to hire me.

And that’s how I was hired. But this post isn’t about how I got hired. It’s about what I learned from my boss.

Let’s get started.

5 Things I Learned From My Boss

1. Always have a content calendar.
2. Focus on search intent before making a decision.
3. Affiliate Earnings are 100% better than Ads.
4. Get the work done.
5. Help other people grow.

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1. Always Have A Content Calendar

My boss trained me consistently for 3 months. I was paid for those 3 months as well. When my actual job started, he knew exactly what he had hired me for. He had a whole system that I had to go through.

There was not a single moment when I was worried about what I would have to do on the job. Because he had everything in a system. It was all planned.

My boss and I talk on Slack throughout the week. We have a meeting on Fridays where we talk about everything we did that week, the problems we faced, and the solutions we deployed.

We also plan the upcoming week. The meeting usually lasts for an hour. We talk about a lot of things. By the end of the call, we have dumped all of our thoughts in front of each other. We have nothing else to talk about, and that’s how we end the call. It’s kind of funny.

My boss works in EST (Eastern Time Zone) and I work in GMT+5 (Pakistan Standard Time). We have our meeting around 10:00 PM my time.

We have a lot to talk about, but creating our content calendar helps us to kick-start the upcoming week.

We don’t have to spend another minute at the beginning of the week thinking about what to write and publish. We have everything planned. So if you are just starting out or already working on some type of project, blog, or agency,

Always have a content calendar.

2. Focus On Search Intent

Search intent was not a thing in the early 2000s. Anyone with relevant content could easily get ranked and start getting plenty of traffic. But over time, search engines like Google have developed many algorithms to better understand user queries and return better results.

This has resulted in more work for publishers. Now, publishers have to do some thorough research before publishing anything online. Search intent is all about understanding what the user wants to do.

For example, you don’t leave your house without a purpose. You leave your house to do something specific, like:

• Go to work
• Buy groceries
• Go to the gym
• Meet friends

There is always a purpose behind leaving your house. Search intent is the same thing.

When a user searches for something on Google, they are either looking for information, reading reviews, or making a buying decision. As a marketer or SEO specialist, you need to understand and tailor your content to the user’s query.

This was the first thing my boss taught me. Now, everything that gets published on our blog has a very tight search intent. We are really hitting the right level of the funnel. Want to know more about funnels? Click here.

3. Affiliate Earnings Are 100% Better than Ads

This was my first question to my boss. His reply was not what I was expecting.

He said, “It’s more hard work in the beginning, but more rewards in the end.”

I didn’t fully understand what he meant at first. But month after month, when I saw our blog’s monthly income report, I was amazed.

I could see that with much less traffic, or rather, targeted traffic, you can earn much more than people who rely solely on ads.

A guy with an affiliate blog has the potential to earn $10,000 per month with a traffic of 5,000. On the other hand, a guy with a blog that makes money with ads needs more than 100,000 visitors to even make close to $5,000 per month.

As the saying goes, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

Affiliate articles are very difficult to rank. I know this firsthand, even though we run an affiliate blog.

I say this because we have written so many reviews and built so many silos around a ton of topics. And only a handful of our articles rank on SERP, and they generate all of our affiliate income.

There are many challenges involved in affiliate earnings. It varies from month to month, but most affiliate earnings are recurring.

4. Get the Work Done

No matter what happens, if you are running a blog, you need to keep it running. Make sure it runs fast enough and starts earning for you.

You need to work on it daily or weekly, depending on your niche. But if you want to be competitive, you need to nail it.

We publish something daily because it’s important. There might be someone else who’s working more than us and might beat us in SERP rankings. You never know. If you really treat your blog as something you have to feed daily, it will actually grow and pay you dividends.

Sometimes when we get a new keyword or any new phrase that just entered the market, we think too much about it and don’t take action at the right time.

But let me tell you, whenever you see a good keyword, just write on it. Don’t wait on it, because there will be someone out there who has already started writing on it.

Don’t sleep on your keywords. You can sleep on your content you wrote so you can come back to it later and edit it again.

In the end, my boss always emphasizes on getting the job done. Because that’s what will make you more money. Just thinking about something will never make you money. Take action!

5. Help Other People Grow

When I got hired, I made a lot of mistakes. As it’s more of a content business, I made grammar mistakes, structure mistakes, and SEO mistakes. But my boss never got angry.

Now, I’m at a stage where I oversee the operations of our blog. I have to train new people, ask for revisions, and even edit content a lot. When other people make mistakes, I get angry very quickly.

But then I remember how my boss treated me all the time. I left a lot of things for him to fix, but he never got angry with me. He never did, and that’s what I learned from him. Working with my boss has made me a lot more humble and gentle with other people.

This was my second job professionally. Before this, I had worked as an intern at a software company.

Whenever I get into any issue, I turn to my boss. He always replies with good suggestions on how to deal with these types of issues. My job is now considered more of a marketing job. And I love it.

Why? Because it makes me better every day. We make people’s lives easier by providing them with reviews, which makes their decision-making process a lot smoother.

I ask myself this question a lot, and it fixes my vision every time: “What would I do if I had all the money in the world?”

And everytime I answer it like this, “I’d still be doing this job”.