This is the final post discussing the biggest, hardest pill to swallow in affiliate marketing.
It's Going to Take Money
The 4 products/services that you absolutely need are
Autoresponder ✔️
Training Hub ✔️
Tracking Service
Hosting Service
We finished autoresponders and training hub discussion. So far, the budget totals $47/month. That amount is very conservative (high) and over half of it is not needed the first month. Now let's talk about tracking and hosting services.
Tracking Service
Why do I need a tracking service you ask? You need a tracking service to help you determine which advertising is working and which is not. Whether you are earning your advertising by reading emails and surfing at traffic exchanges or you are lucky enough to have some additional cash to buy advertising, you want to get the most for your efforts/ money. Using a tracking service will help you do that.
A tracking service works by taking the link you want to track and converting it to one of their links. This link can keep a count of every time your link is clicked. It also knows where the link came from. You can look at the statistics for each link and see how many times it was clicked from a specific source. Most, if not all, tracking services allow you to add a tracking ID to the end of their link. This is especially useful for links in emails. You can tell the specific email that is getting the most clicks.
Also, some tracking services provide tracking pixels so you can track how successful the page that is being tracked is. For example, if the link being tracked goes to a sales page, the tracking pixel can be used to tell you if the "BUY" button was clicked. To use tracking pixels you need edit access to the sales page. Frequently, that access isn't available if you didn't create the sales page.
As you would suspect, there are many tracking services available at a wide variation in price from free to over $100/month. This is one of those rare cases where you may very well be able to get away with a free service at least to start. ClickTrackProfit recommends HitsConnect. I use LeadsLeap.
You can join HitsConnect for free and use it to track your links. There is a limit to how many links you can track as a free member. I don't know the exact number. When you reach the limit for a free account, I believe the upgrade price is around $60/year or $5/month. I used Hits Connect for over a year and was very satisfied with its tracking functionality. I quit using HC because quite a few Traffic Exchanges and Safelists don't display sites using HC's tracking URLs even though the site verifies fine.
The tracking in LeadsLeap not only provides the basic tracking service but several other features as well. There probably is a limit to the links tracked in LeadsLeap as a free member but I can't find it stated anywhere. I know I am biased, but I highly recommend LeadsLeap for tracking.
(A word of caution about tracking services. If you are using a tracking service and you decide to switch services, there is no easy way to get all the links being checked to the new service.)
Hosting
Website hosting is another one of those costs that you don't need right from the start unless you want your own website/blog that you can monetize. There are plenty of quality hosting services that are free you can use for a website/blog. But you will not have total control over free sites. They may put ads on your site but I don't know of any that will let you monetize your site. For our budget, let's add $10/month which you may not need to spend depending on what you are doing.
The one thing you may want to do right up front is to purchase a domain name. There are times you can use your own domain name without having to have your own website. But, if you buy it now, you will have it when you need it. I have a friend who purchased his name as a domain just so he would have it if he ever wanted to have a website. Domain names can range in price from $0.99 to around $15/year.
OK, that's it let's look at the final budget'.
| Product | Cost/Month | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Autoresponder | $20 | Need right away |
| Training Hup | $27 | Start for free, upgrade later |
| Tracking Service | $10 | Start for free, may never need to upgrade |
| Hosting Service | $10 | May never need |
| Miscellaneous | $8 | Maybe for advertising or domain name, just in case $$ |
| Total | $75 |
You need to figure out your own budget with amounts specific to you. This is just to get you thinking.
Tomorrow, I promise we will talk about Content,
See You At The Bank,
Bob Caine