Start with an Inventory – What Affiliate Products Are You Actively Promoting?
Let’s begin with something very basic. Let’s do inventory. Yes, even if you are an affiliate marketer, you should take the time to look through the products you are actively promoting (and earning from) to begin getting organized.
Once you get organized, identify goals, and get the technology in order, you’ll be able to finally start figuring out what is working and what is not working. Then you’ll be able to tweak everything to improve it. When you start improving what you’re doing and throwing out what isn’t working, you’ll see a huge return on investment that will make it all worth it.
Oh, and if you are just starting your affiliate marketing journey don’t leave yet. Setting up this spreadsheet now will help you stay organized and more easily know where adjustments need to be made in the future.
Set Up a Spreadsheet
The first thing you want to do is set up a spreadsheet so that you can organize your current inventory of products that you’re promoting. First, just make a simple list of the products. Next, grab your main affiliate links for the products, list your average net earnings for the product per promotion, and total earnings year to date. Let’s look at how this might look.
- Name of the Product – This label is obviously for the name of the product, but you may also want to include the name of the creator, especially if you promote many products from them to remind yourself whose product it is.
- Affiliate Link – Include the affiliate link to the product just so that you can use this spreadsheet for other things such as posting the link as part of the answer to a question when that product is the solution for the question. Don’t forget to include the redirect link info.
- Segment – This is also a good thing to include from the beginning because it will help you know who this should be marketing to and who you are marketing it to during your campaigns.
- Problem Solved – Another helpful label to help yourself remember – and it could be part of the segment label if you want it to – but being able to print out a list of products to solve a particular product is also a good way to differentiate this spreadsheet.
- Expenses – How much are you spending on promoting that product? If you don’t know, it’ll be hard to know whether your work was productive or not. You don’t have to include anything that isn’t solely related to that one product, but you can also divide general expenses, like software, among the products too if you want to be even more accurate.
- Earnings – Include how much you’ve brought indirectly for each of the links to each of the affiliate products. So, if you have links to the same product but they are on different platforms, you may also want to separate that drill down even more.
- Net Earnings – From the information above, you can extrapolate the net earnings you’ve made from each product and link you promote.
- Lifetime Earnings – You can also add up the net earnings from each product to find out how much you’ve earned over the lifetime of promoting the product.
This spreadsheet can help you keep the products you’re promoting organized. Plus, it can help you see clearly whether some of the products don’t need to be promoted anymore due to low or no earnings. When you just lump all your inventory and income together, it’s hard to know what is producing it. Additionally, this can help you identify additional products you need by finding solutions to other problems your ideal customer has.
