Having been in the affiliate marketing game for quite some time now, I've had my fair share of freak-out sessions where I think life is over when a campaign fails for a day. Although logic tells me that the market (people, competition, demand, etc.) fluctuates on a daily basis and is even evident if you do a Google Trend on most any keyword, emotion rules over on days when you are in the red $500 and it seems like there's no where to go but down.

Now, if you track your profits at all using Microsoft Excel, Google Spreadsheets or some other contraption, chances are that you like to track your profits and losses on a daily basis. And if that's the case, your charts (if you were to render them) would probably look something like this-

There isn't much wrong with a chart like this except that, if you'll notice, it's pretty uninspiring to look at when you notice your spend overshadowing your revenue. Also, it's hard to accurately gauge where you are in terms of net profits over the course of the month.

That's why I recommend tracking your profits and losses over the span of the month. This way, you can tell how much you are in the green, black or red. It gives you a solid number to base further action on so you don't go shutting your campaigns down because of a hiccup day. If you were to organize your data this way, the chart would look something like this-

You'll notice right away that it's more inspiring to see the dark blue line above the light blue line (you're in profits, baby). What this will allow you to do is see the bigger picture and therefore, make better decisions about whether or not to keep campaigns running or shutting them down. Typically if I chart my profits and losses this way, I will see the overall worth of a campaign and keep it running.

However, I am in no way saying that you shouldn't monitor the daily, weekly and even monthly trends of your campaigns and schedule them accordingly. What I am saying is that you can tell much more easily this way whether you should shut a campaign completely down or keep it going strong.

As obvious as all this might sound, it might help to absorb this philosophy into your own affiliate marketing strategy to add to your overall profit margin. Simple, yet effective.

Good luck,

Scott

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at 5:24 pm and is filed under Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.