Look, I get it…
You hate making reports. You find it boring. And you feel much more comfortable counting the amount of money deposited to your bank account.
So you may feel hesitant to set up your own spreadsheet. Maybe you even feel it’s not necessary.
But you should do it anyway.
Because tracking your affiliate income can pay major dividends for you, your blog, and your business.
Yes, even if you are a seasoned affiliate marketer, you should take the time to look through the products you are actively promoting (and earning from).
It will help you figure out what is working and what is not working.
It might seem like a boring task but you’ll see a huge return on investment that will make it all worth it.
When I started to keep track of my earnings for each affiliate product I was able to use that data to increase my monthly income.
I was able to see how much money each affiliate partner brought in for my business.
From time to time, I also find some affiliate partners who are not offering their affiliate services anymore. This is crucial especially if you are running paid ads on your blog to promote them.
Organize your current inventory of products
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.
Make a simple list of the products. Whenever I join a new affiliate program, I like to keep track of all the important details in one place.
- Name of the Product
- 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. - Category – This is also a good thing to include from the beginning because it will help you know who this should be marketing to
- Problem Solved – Another helpful label to help yourself remember – and it could actually 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.
- Login Details – One thing you’ll realize as you start promoting as an affiliate is that you have a lot of different accounts to sign into and because of this it can seem like a lot of work to check each of your accounts on a regular basis.
- Commissions rate
- Payout Schedule – This will give you an idea when they usually pay.
Track Monthly Income & Expenses
When you just lump all your inventory and income together, it’s hard to know what is producing it.
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.
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.
Earnings
From the information above, you can extrapolate the net earnings you’ve made from each individual product and link that you promote.
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.
I love to keep track of my monthly income and expenses for each individual affiliate program.
Having a simple affiliate marketing spreadsheet helps me be efficient and effective with what I need to do every month.
This is something i need to be mindful of and create a system, or better yet hire someone to do it for me 🙂
Great resource and tips.
Maggie