If you're going to be serious about affiliate sales, you have to get serious about tracking them. If you're still just guessing, then you are missing a lot of opportunities to tweak your marketing and bring in more sales. If you are surprised at the amount of every check, then you need to find a way to track your sales instead of allowing them to surprise you month after month.

Many sites offer affiliate tracking so that the affiliates are aware at any time how much they are making in commissions. If you are missing this step, you will not know when a change you have made has helped or hurt sales. Sales can be affected by ad copy, website placement, fluctuations in the market, the competition, and any number of things that can change your numbers a little bit or drastically. If you want to stay on top of how the changes that you make are affecting the results, you need real time numbers, or as close to them as you can get.

If your products are not offered by someone who allows tracking, it might be time for new products if they are not selling well. Tweaking the marketing without tracking means you might not know for two months if the big change you just implemented has severely hurt your sales. That is one rude awakening that no affiliate needs.

It's also important to know how the sales are going to be tracked in the first place. Are all of your sales being tracked back to you, or just the unique visitors? Are all the sales being tracked for customers who come in through your site the first time and later go in through the main site? If you want to know how you can make your own marketing more effective, you have to know exactly which sales of yours are going to be tracked back to you. Otherwise, you may be concentrating on the wrong promotions. If you are not being credited with the subsequent sales, it might be pointless to market more products from the main site to the list of existing customers. Marketing should be concentrated where it is likely to actually bring in commissions, not just traffic.

If you are just guessing on any portion of your sales venture, you are not likely to make it as big a success as possible. If you are seeking easy third party sites that can help you provide tracking, there is always Clickbank. Going through Clickbank as an affiliate means not only having tons of products to choose from (probably more than you could even look at), but also means real time tracking that can help you make the most of your marketing. Striking the right balance between your ads, your websites, other paid ads, links on other sites, etc., should be working together to get your best numbers possible. But without tracking, the delay between your changes and seeing the results may just be the nail in your business? coffin.