affiliate_marketing_income_reviewsThe first few months of a new website are by far the most challenging. It’s usually when your work-level is the highest but your results have yet to materialize.

After the initial enthusiasm of setting out to build your own business wanes, it’s easy to become discouraged and give up. Do NOT let this happen. Getting out of the sandbox is one of the most important things you can do that will shape your business and change your life.

In this post I’ll try to provide some motivation of how you can see potential in early affiliate results through affiliate marketing income reviews. This post is not about examples of success. If you’re looking for affiliate success stories, click here.

What Are Affiliate Marketing Income Reviews?

Firstly, I want to be clear about what I mean by an income review.

I’m not talking simply about looking at a dollar sum on your affiliate tracking page or dashboard. I know it’s tempting to click back to that number every five minutes to see if it’s changed, but try not to do that. It will only depress you during the first few months. Trust me, I know.

To me, an affiliate marketing income review really has nothing at all to do with your actual income. It has to do with the metrics of how users are behaving on your site.

When you’re first starting out, I know that getting that first income traction is what you’re really after, but you have to understand that in order to get there you’re going to need to start optimizing your site, and this means evaluating how users behave and trying to tweak your site layout or link placements.

Income reviews, then, are the process of analyzing your site metrics to extrapolate on a conversion percentage or revenue per thousand number.

What Early Income Reviews Can Mean

The interesting thing about this process is that you don’t actually need to have any sales yet. Most affiliate tracking software looks at clicks as well as sales, so you can look at how successful you are at driving traffic to a partner page.

This means that you can then extrapolate the data, using a conversion rate provided by your affiliate partner.

For example, if you have 100 views to a page promoting Product A, 10 clicks to Product A’s, and Product A has a 5% conversion rate with a $50 commission, how much income potential do you have from this page?

$250 revenue per thousand! That’s a pretty good rate, so even though you haven’t made any actual sales, you have strong early performance.

How did I get that number?

If it helps, think about what would happen if instead of 100 page views you’d had 1,000. Of those 1,000, 10% clicked to the partner page (around 100), and of those that clicked to the partner page, on average 5% will convert, leaving you with 5 total sales. 5 sales * $50 commission = $250 for 1,000 page views. Not too shabby!

I know what you’re thinking: but I don’t have any sales yet!

That’s ok. The point here is to get an early idea of your potential, which to me helps keep motivation high and get you through the tough early days.

What Early Income Reviews Don’t Mean

I do want to point out, however, that just because your early data shows signs of success, it’s no guarantee of future performance.

Working with small numbers (say…under 5-10,000) means that your data is statistically insignificant, which in turn means it could change easily based on actions of a small number of users.

Don’t worry, over time you’ll get more reliable data, which becomes accurate as you extrapolate out according to volume.

Further Info

If you want to learn more about the early days of affiliate marketing, or if the prospect of affiliate marketing income reviews was “Greek to you” and you need a little more clarification on the basic principles of getting started, I suggest you try out an affiliate training course.

There are a bunch of good options, but my personal favorite is Wealthy Affiliate, which you can start for free!