How much are you making?

Accountability is key in affiliate marketing. If you have started off and not done it yet, you are being stupid.

In Affiliate Marketing, it is easy to get excited to see conversions going up and money coming into your affiliate marketing account. But once you get serious about affiliate marketing, it can get pretty deceptive on your actual profits.

I used go insanely happy whenever I saw a conversion of $0.90 on email submits on my account, not any more. There is so much more involved to a successful affiliate marketer than conversions and money made. Money spent is a important factor too.

For me, money spent used to be on sales page designing, sales copywriting and then mainly in adwords. Is that it? No! I always to forget server expenses, domain name costs, softwares I buy for promoting sites and not to forget the bad habit of buying up half baked scripts from forums. 🙂

Over a period of time these expenses add up and boy! They EAT up into your profit margin. But with the help of the best accountant in town (who happens to be my dad too), I was able to get myself a small affiliate marketing excel sheet where my expenses for a site and income it generates are setup so that I know what eats up my margins and how I can reduce it.

If you have not started doing it yet, I suggest that you start with this template that I found online long time back to get organized. This should help you get an idea about how to proceed. Do let me know how you manage your affiliate stats on the comments!