Living the “super” affiliate lifestyle is great, actually it’s better than great, it’s awesome! You can do whatever you want, whenever you want. Many super affiliates can keep this lifestyle up with just a couple of hours of work per week. Granted, I wish I could, but I enjoy working so much that most of the time I end up working 12-14 hours per day. It’s just hard to keep up so many projects all by yourself since I don’t have any staff.
Anyway, first thing I do when I get up in the early morning (not!) after finishing my healthy breakfast (again not!) is updating my spreadsheet with stats of the previous day. It’s really just a simple spreadsheet and I’ll tell you how mine looks like.
I’ve given each campaign it’s own page so that it’s always clear how that particular campaign performed on any given day. Then on that page you will see the dates of the month in the first column. The next columns are the expenses made for that offer on, for example, Adwords, Yahoo and MSN and/or Facebook and media buys. Then the next columns are for the revenue that you’ve created with that campaign. And in the final column I have my profit (hopefully) for that particular day. Then you add all the profits up at the botom to have a grand total for the month so far. I also made some very easy calculations for things like “average profit per day” and “estimated profit by the end of the month”. Then I have one summary page where all the profits of all the campaigns so far this month are presented and it also tells me what the estimated profit for the month is at that moment. If you like you could also import your stats from last month in this page and see whether you campaigns are steady, growing or falling.
Very easy stuf. Anybody with very little Excel skills can create this, but it’s SO important that you keep track. Seriously! It does not take me more than 15 mins a day, but I always exactly know how my campaigns are performing.
Now why am I telling you this? Because I got lazy! At one time I decided that things were going steady and I figured I didn’t need to keep track of my stats anymore. So for about 2 months I forgot about the sats and then I made a horrible discovery. I was performing like 20-30% less than the months before. Why? Just because I wasn’t aware what was going on anymore. One campaign completely went down the drain to a point where I was losing money. One domain that I was actively promoting was not automatically renewed so it was offline while I was still pumping money it and another campaign got Google slapped.
See, when you keep track daily you immediately see when something is off. Those losses would never have happened if I did my 15 minute routine for those 2 months too.
So that’s one big lesson learned, and from now on, if you weren’t already doing it, I want you all to start a spreadsheet like me and put your stats into that sucker! One tip: You might want to check out Google docs for this. This way you can view and edit your stats from any location, very handy!
Why it’s important to keep track of your stats
7 CommentsPost by Gioom