Thanks to Amee with Madame Deals for this weeks post.
How do you stay on top of all those affiliate companies. The answer is that in itself is a full-time job. The other answer is to not use more than four or five on a regular basis. I place my earnings in an excel spreadsheet each month. The company that I make the least with gets checked once or twice a week. The ones that I have been successful with I will check daily.
How do you define successful. I believe if you are running an offer you have to look at the time it takes to post an offer usually about 30 minutes once you have looked, written, and scheduled multiple postings for that offer. Then you need to determine what you make per hour to determine if an offer is useful to your audience. You can determine the usefulness using three factors. 1) Did they buy anything? 2) Did your customers click through to your post? 3) Did they leave a comment on your post.
If you want to make money blogging you need to not blog in the dark. That means if this is a business it needs to be treated as such. You should study your efforts against your earnings. There are three areas that I look at to determine my earnings. 1) The actual dollar amount an offer brings. 2) The number of clicks on the post which translates to pageviews. We get paid on ad page views so the more people that come to our sites translates into a higher revenue share. 3) The SEO that will bring future visitors that translates into future revenue.
This is my dashboard from the morning. I can tell that my readers were interested in a deal on pillow. They like my contests and the are interested my Ask A Nurse series. I also have a lot of readers that wish to know if they won my contests.
If I went on to evaluate this. I can tell you that people did purchase the pillows so that was worth my time. The contests are posted once and bring traffic daily so that is worth my time. The Nurse post brought traffic and will bring traffic in the future so it is valuable for SEO and content. The rest of the posts that I ran this morning of were previously published coupon printing ideas and reminders. I just rescheduled them. It is 12:00 noon and I have 1,880 page views and 569 are from search engines. I worked for 1 hour today not including the time to type this and I made money. I spent time with my family and even went to a birthday party. The purpose of this article is to think about your future. How will you bring traffic to your site for the long-term. How can you get paid with the least amount of effort and build a business that maximizes your time. The key is observation, documentation, evaluation, and action!
You can view all out posts by searching Ask a Blogger.
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