A Day In The Life Of

I was going to write a “proper” blog post for you today, it was going to be the best blog post ever, it would have loads of colourful pictures, loads of funny words, some political satire and a sprinkling of information, but as I sat down to write the post my accountant called and arranged a meeting for the afternoon so I had to put the blog post on hold.

It’s now 6.45pm and I’ve just finished my Tea (it’s what us strange people from up ‘t north call our evening meal) and I know I need to write a blog post, but in all honesty I’m very tired and don’t have the energy to create a full post, so I’ve decided to put together a little tongue in cheek “a day in the life of..” type post.

Being a full time Internet marketer is no easy task let me tell you! So let me take you back to the futur…back to the beginning of the day, and show you what I did.

I woke up at around 8am and went downstairs for some breakfast; I fancied a laugh so I turned on the TV and navigated my way to Sky Channel 509 – Fox News. It was the morning after the final presidential debate and I fancied some “fair and balanced” coverage of the debate, I was actually in luck, they were re-showing the debate in full so I watched “The Maverick” and “The Yes We Can” trading insults until around 9.30am.

At 9.30 I decided I’d better get off my ass and do some work, so I powered up the PC for the day. I always spend the first 1 – 2 hours of the day approving affiliate commissions for the Boomerang List Builder, and answering support tickets and approving new orders for my hosting company, D9 Hosting. The D9 Hosting tickets are an ongoing task throughout the day, but so far today has been a good ticket day!

All new orders were also genuine which is always good! With hosting orders you have to be very careful when processing them, a lot of spammers like signing up with false details and then using our servers to send spam, but going through each new order manually means we have a very good track record for keeping spam away from our hosting. This improves our email deliverability rate, and keeps the servers running as stable as possible.

After the normal morning tasks were complete, I started to set up the payment processor for a new offline service that me and Paula will be launching in the next couple of weeks, it will be something else under the “D9” brand and without wanting to blow my own trumpet I think it will be really cool.

We actually got a call to our D9 Hosting UK phone number yesterday, I answered and it was a nice chap enquiring about the new service, he’d actually stumbled across our “beta” site on Google (I didn’t even realise they had indexed it!) and then wanted the service so much he tracked down our D9 Hosting phone number, so that gave me a kick up the backside to get on and finish the website.

During setting up the processor, I needed to get our “SWIFT” code from our bank, so payments can go into our account. I called up the bank but I don’t think the code the lady on the phone gave me was correct, so I’m going to call back tomorrow and hopefully I’ll get a different person on the other end of the phone.

So with that out of the way, I moved onto another new project, a live chat/help solution for D9 Hosting. I managed to get it going quite quickly, and existing clients should be able to see the live chat button if they log into their client area.

I did have 1 question about the software though, so I went over to the live chat providers help desk and opened up a live chat session. Usually with live chat services, you have a generic picture of a helpdesk agent to look at, but I was taken by surprise when I saw what looked like “The girl next door” looking back at me.

I’m realistic enough to know the actual person on the other end of the chat was probably nothing like the picture…and was probably not even female, but it was nice to see something different from the generic “stock man/woman with headset”. So if you ever request a live chat over at D9 Hosting and the operator looks like Brad Pitt, suspend logical thinking and go with the flow. 🙂

By the time I’d finished playing with the live chat system, it was around 1pm and time for some food.

I had a prawn cocktail pasta salad type thing, 8/10 – it was nice and tasty.

After dinner I set off to the accountants.

He’d just about finished doing my 2007 accounts, but needed some clarification on a few things. Including my incredibly complex/stupid PayPal income and expense details. Apparently it doesn’t help when some things are in British Pounds and others are in US Dollars, oh well, I’m sure he’ll get there in the end.

After an hour and a half with the accountant I drove home and got back to work. Just as a side point, if your car has an AUX input and you have an I-Pod, buy an I-Pod AUX cable on eBay for £1.99 – best purchase I’ve made in a long time!

I got back to the PC at about 3.30 and had a chat with Paula about a few business plans for the future, answered more tickets and actually took part in our first live chat session – it was with Paula but who cares!

It was coming to the end of the day so I started to wind down; I went on Facebook and posted on a few forums.

I then went downstairs at about 4.45pm and watched some TV and did some farm jobs. I then had the evening meal at about 6.00pm, and then came back onto the PC to write this blog post.

Before I started the blog post I went onto iTunes and purchased a couple of new tunes to listen to on repeat whilst I wrote this blog post. I went for a couple of Cher songs, probably not the best choice in hindsight but we live and learn.

That pretty much takes us up to where we are now. The next thing I plan to do is post this on my blog, “Digg” the post. Then I’ll go downstairs and watch Bones and the last part of TNA Bound For Glory. I’ll then come back on here at around 10pm to do a final email/ticket/blog comment check for the day and then head off to bed at around 11.00pm.

So there you have it, a day in the life of a full time Internet Marketer – thrilling isn’t it!