Affiliate Marketing is all about the numbers game — and nothing manipulates numbers like Microsoft Excel. It’s a match made in heaven. Here are several excellent and not necessarily obvious ways to use Excel when you’re marketing someone else’s products for them.
Keyword Research
Getting organic traffic to your affiliate site is all about the right keywords. With Excel, putting in the details of each keyword — searches per day, pages in competition, Adwords cost per click, and more — creates an easily-searchable database that helps you narrow down to the best keywords quickly.
Speaking of Adwords
Adwords is all about massive quantities of long-tail keywords at a low cost-per-click each. With Excel and Mail Merge, you can take common word-sets and combine them into a gigantic list of long-tail variations for your Adwords campaigns.
Master Of Your Domain
Similarly, creating a list of keywords and their variations can be great inspiration for domain-hunting. SEO rules say it’s always best to have your main keyword in your domain name, and Excel can make it easy to find a domain worth basing your marketing efforts on.
Scoring the SERPS
Once you’ve nailed your domain name, the next step (assuming you have a quick site template and you’ve put it up) is to make sure that you’re turning up high in the SERPS for your keyword of choice. Tracking backlinks in Excel — which ones have stayed around, which ones fail, what PR each are, and how often you get visitors from them — is an easy way to optimize your future linkbuilding efforts.
Offer Tracking
Various affiliate offers check in at various levels of profitability, from Amazon’s horrible single-digit profit percentages up to Clickbank’s high-seventies. By organizing a simple spreadsheet showing conversions vs. profit percentages, you can estimate which affiliate offers are going to be the most profitable for you.
Conversions Tracking
Not the conversions on the main sales site — that’s part of the previous item — but the conversions on your pre-sale. Set up some simple A/B tests on your presale site, and record the results over several sites into Excel. The graphing function can then show you some potentially-startling trends in conversions based on various elements of your presale sites.
Email Marketing
Whether you’ve gathered your own list via a squeeze page or your renting a list from someone else, recording the successful blasts vs. the failures and, more importantly, what elements and tactics you used in each can allow Excel to give you a projection of potential profit based on the past data.
Affiliate marketing isn’t necessarily the easy money that some ‘gurus’ make it out to be –but with a lot of due diligence and careful tracking of every effort you make, you can optimize your results. A little training in a tracking tool like Microsoft Excel can go a long way.