How Much Actual Profit Are You Making?

One tricky thing about affiliate marketing is that at times it can be deceptive on your pocketbook.

What I mean is that many affiliate marketers (newbies especially) often judge success on gross daily sales. For me this doesn’t matter as much as it used to.

When I was first starting affiliate marketing, I’d almost judge the success of a particular day by the amount of gross sales! Now it may seem like a silly thing to do but quite a lot of people seem to do it.

Next, a lot of affiliates also do not remember to include other expenses in their mindset. Buying domains, servers, software, conferences, etc really add up after a while.

And lastly, Taxes. Remember to think about taxes. It’s never fun to have to owe uncle sam a huge chunk of change every quarter, but taxes are one of those things you just can’t (legally) avoid.

So, what I recommend doing to begin to realize your actual profit each month is to use a financial program. For me, quickbooks was a daunting and scary software. I had to have my CPA set it up.

For a while to help me track, I was using an excel spreadsheet and it works really well for those who are just starting out.

To download the Excel spreadsheet, click here.

It never ceases to amaze me how much profit I THINK I would have made and what I actually made after all the expenses are laid out.