It’s a little like motor racing. The easiest way to make a small fortune in Internet Marketing is to start with a large one.

It doesn’t have to be the case. There are certainly methodologies out there that will help you make a little scratch in Internet Marketing.

I’ll highlight a couple of methods I’ve used successfully to generate sales as an Affiliate Marketer over the last 5 years.

What I really want to discuss today however, is what then? How do you make sure that you are actually making a profit?

The formula is pretty simple Income – Expenses = Profit.

With three main players in the PPC field, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo (Formerly Overture) and 74,000,000 + hits on the search term “Affiliate Site” there can be a lot of data flying around that you need to keep up with.

I always suggest start small; pick one PPC provider, usually Google Adwords and one Affiliate Site, usually ClickBank. ClickBank is a good place to start as it’s accessible and deals mainly with eBooks/ Software products.

Way back in the mists of time I started with Chris Carpenters “Google Cash” method. I’d only just heard of Google Adwords and that was it. A few days of research and digging, turned up some good review and I figured for $30 or so it was worth a shot.

It took me a few days to get things together, but I jumped in and gave it a shot and was lucky enough to make sales quickly. It is certainly easy to get discouraged if you don’t see any sales, but hang in there, it will happen. Well … it can and should happen, but there are things you could be doing better. Better product, better articles, better Ads etc. That’s for another day.

Within a few months, I had cheques and direct deposits coming in from 4 or 5 affiliate sites and money going out to pay Google, Microsoft and Yahoo for my clicks.

I then found a spreadsheet that would tally the incomings and outgoings for me so I could see which campaigns were profitable, and which ones were sucking the life blood out of my new venture.

In a previous life I used to cut code for a living and this spreadsheet nonsense seemed like an awful lot of work. So I did what any self respecting IT guy would do, I wrote a computer program to do the work for me.

I decided against screen scraping as it breaks as soon as the host company changes their website in anyway. I did find however that each site had a report I could run that would give me sales data in a form I could use for the program.

This made things a lot easier as I could see what was happening with each campaign and could spend just a little time each week importing the previous weeks data. Of course if you wanted to you could import data daily, but I find that isn’t usually necessary and creates more work that takes away from making new campaigns.

At the time I was writing Internet Marketers Companion, I met Matt Levenhagen who had taken and refined a few systems into his own, called the Blast Method. There was a lot to like about it, especially the way he had of ordering Campaigns so they were easy to track. I used that myself and then leveraged IMC to use it also. Of course IMC will work without using the Blast Method numbering, but I like and endorse anything that makes my life easier.

While Google Cash is now a little long in the tooth, the Blast Method is about to be updated to Version 7 and I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn’t read it yet. Whether you are new to Affiliate Marketing or a seasoned veteran. Coupled with the great community Matt has pulled together there is a wealth of knowledge to get you up and running.

What you need when starting out is a simple method to follow and a way to check that it’s working for you.

Try the Blast Method combined with the free IMC Lite for tracking and you’ll be well on your way to building a business that will virtually run itself.

Next up I’ll break down how to become a Super Affiliate.

Ooroo,

Shane

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