How To Effectively Track Your Earnings

Tracking your results is what will allow you to increase your earnings with an almost unlimited potential…

I hope you learned the “three R’s” back when you were in grade school. Why? Because those are the three skills necessary to master this program. If you’re reading this page then we know you already know how to read. If you’ve gotten this far, then we know that you know how to write. You’ve already written some ads and created campaigns in Part 4 and Part 5.

We called this program “The Writing Cash Program” because writing is really the most important ingredient, and people who are writers are generally the most successful at it. But there’s also an element of mathematics. Fortunately, you don’t have to be a “math-magician” to be a whiz at our program because we’re going to show you all the math you need…

It’s a numbers game…

Making money with The Writing Cash Program is a simple numbers game. Let’s say for example that you’re paying 5 cents per click for one of the ads that you’ve written. That means it would cost you $5.00 for 100 clicks. Now let’s assume that out of that 100 clicks, one person purchased the product. Lastly we’ll assume that you earn a $15 commission each time someone purchases the product after clicking your ad.

Here’s how that would look…

100 clicks X $0.05 = $5.00
1 sale at $20.00 commission per 100 clicks

$20.00 commission (revenue)
– 5.00 expense
$15.00 profit

TrackingIn this case you have quadrupled your money (turned $5 into $20), and made a 300% return on investment (ROI).

Most of your campaigns probably won’t have a 300% ROI, but it’s likely that some of them will. In this business, as long as you’re making money then the campaign is successful, but in general you should shoot for a 50% ROI or better. A 100% ROI is very common for writers who follow all the instructions and write effective ads.

Think about that. If I were to hand you a machine that could double your money, wouldn’t you be excited? Of course you would. You could put in a dollar and out comes two dollars. You would continue to double the amount each time, and pretty soon it would be spitting out thousands and then millions.

In a way, that’s exactly what The Writing Cash Program is. It’s a system that takes a little effort (finding products and writing ads), and uses that effort to multiply your financial investment. The financial investment of course is the money that you spend with Google AdWords (or other sources, which we will discuss later). As you’ve probably heard before, “it takes money to make money”.

The awesome thing about this program compared to most opportunities, is that the starting costs are about as minimal as they could possibly be. If you only have $5.00, you can start with that. Perhaps you will earn a $15 commission as a result of that $5.00 initial investment. You can then take that $15.00 and invest it back into the program, for a greater return, and so on.

Please understand, we do not work for Google or any of the other companies we are recommending. We’re not asking you to invest more money into our program itself. You paid a one-time membership fee, and that’s all we’ll ever charge you. Sources such as Google AdWords are simply the vehicles that we leverage to multiply our money.

There’s that word again: leverage. If you read the introduction to this program, then you might remember it. Leveraging is virtually the only way to make money without continuing to work for it.

The key to this leveraging system is in the numbers…

You need to track your numbers so that you know exactly how much profit you’re making, and so you can know how much to bid on the clicks for your ads.

The nice thing is that this is about a easy as it gets, in terms of accounting. It’s a simple matter of comparing your revenues and expenses. One of the best ways to do this is to set up a spreadsheet in a program such as MS Excel. If you don’t have Excel, you could use any spreadsheet, or you could even do it on a piece of paper.

Take the time to set up a tracking spreadsheet RIGHT NOW.

Your tracking spreadsheet can be something as simple as this…

Whenever you launch a new ad campaign, you should track it on a DAILY basis, as in the example above. This is so that you can make any necessary adjustments to the campaign to make sure it is profitable, and then to optimize its profitability.

If you ever took any business classes in school, you probably already know the equation:

Revenue – Expenses = Profit

Each day, track how much you’re spending on AdWords for EACH product or campaign. Those are your expenses. Then see how much commission you received for each of those products. That’s your revenue. Subtract the expenses from your revenue, and the result is your profit or loss.

If you take a loss, then you probably want to make some changes. However, it’s hard to judge the profitability of a campaign until you’ve had at least 100 clicks, or in some cases more. In general, if your campaign goes through 100 clicks and you don’t make any commissions, then it’s time to make an adjustment.

There are basically three things that you can adjust on your campaign:

  • Your ad text
  • Your keywords
  • Your bid amount

If you take a loss, or if your profit margin is low, you can often improve a campaign by improving your ad text. Don’t be afraid to try different things with your ad writing strategy. We’ll talk more about this in the “Improve” section of the program. If you’re trying to improve your profit, the best way to improve your ad is to make sure that it is targeted for the correct audience. For example, if you’re promoting The Writing Cash Program and your headline is “Learn How To Write”, your ad will probably be reaching the wrong kind of people. It would be reaching people who want to learn how to write, rather than people interested in making money by writing. A better headline would be “Writers Make Money Daily!”.

Another thing that can help is improving your keywords to better target your audience. For example, if you’re promoting The Writing Cash Program and one of your keywords is “marine biologist career”, then the clicks from that keyword are probably not very targeted. The people who search for “marine biologist career” are not looking for writing opportunities. They might see your ad and click on it out of curiosity, but they probably won’t join the program and so you won’t make any commission.

The last thing you can do is lower your bid. For example, if you’re currently bidding 10 cents, you could lower it to 5 cents.

If you’ve improved your ad, targeted your keywords, and your bid is already 5 cents or lower, then it’s usually best to completely stop the campaign. Delete it, and find a different product to promote. The majority of your campaigns should be profitable by following these guidelines, but occasionally you will hit a bad one, and when that happens simply delete it and move on.

If your daily tracking shows a profit, you might wish to make some changes to further increase that profit. Here are two things that you can do:

  • Increase your bid
  • Add more targeted keywords

Now don’t over overboard and bid too high just because your campaign is profitable. You will want to gradually increase the bid, a little each day until it reaches an optimum level. It’s important that you continue to track your results each day. If you continue to increase your bid, it will reach a point where the ROI actually begins to drop. If that happens, you know you’ve reached the max, and you should lower your bid just a little.

Once your campaign is “optimized” and earning a steady profits on a daily basis, leave them alone. Continue to track your daily results, and if you see any major changes over a period of several days, then you can go back and tweak the campaign some more. But don’t freak out if there’s a couple bad days here and there. That’s normal, and it will average out over the course of a month. Don’t react too quickly if a good campaign suddenly has a bad day. Give it a couple days and see if it normalizes.

Your ability to track your results is critical!

This is the one area that causes some people to fail at being successful with our program. If you do not track your results, the chances of your success are slim. If you DO track your results, then your chances of success are almost guaranteed if you stick with the program and adjust your campaigns according to your results.

There are some advanced tracking methods which we will discuss in the “Improve” section (Part 10), but for now just start tracking your revenue and expenses. Do it diligently, and do it daily. After you’ve been following the program for a few months, and you’ve become accustomed to optimizing your campaigns, you can actually switch to tracking most campaigns on a monthly basis to save yourself some time. But for now, do it daily!

Dino Vedo

My passion has been online advertising and building companies. As a successful entrepreneur, I have built a large number of multi-million dollar brands and I'm always looking for other opportunities to grow, network, and make a difference in the world.

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