It's often whom you know and what you know that can make you an affiliate marketing success. You need to know who your downline is and what they are doing when it comes to marketing affiliate products. This is where tracking the activities of your immediate downline comes into play. When you engage in tracking your efforts and theirs, you build a profitable affiliate business faster.

Tracking is important in affiliate marketing for three reasons. They are:

* Tracking allows you to see whether your own efforts as an affiliate team leader are working.

* Tracking allows you to identify weak links in your downline chain. You will more easily see who is performing and who needs additional help when you track activities.

* Tracking allows you to fine-tune specific promotional activities for success, or do away with them altogether.

Tracking Your Efforts as a Team Leader

When you build up a downline through your specific recruiting, you want them to be successful. Their success is your success too. You engage in training, mentoring, and coaching to develop an educated and producing downline network. You should keep track of all your training efforts to measure which ones bear the most fruit.

Your time as an affiliate leader is money. Why engage in affiliate training of your downline that does not make them better Internet marketers. Tracking of your training efforts means you will dispose of training methods that do not aid your downline in increasing affiliate sales. You will then focus you efforts on methods that inspire and teach your downline to perform efficiently. Without tracking your training methods, you will never know which ones are time-wasters.

Tracking to Identify Weak Links in Your Downline Chain

Let's face it, not all of your downline members are going to perform the same. You may train them all one evening on the benefits of article marketing to build their affiliate businesses. You may teach them how article writing and distribution through a good article distribution service can pay dividends. You have worked hard to teach them this marketing technique. You may train them on a host of other marketing techniques.

However, without tracking each member's sales you will never know who is or is not contributing to your business. You need to know who the weak links in your downline chain are. Tracking will show you this. A quality affiliate parent will provide you tracking systems so you can see how your sales network is performing.

Their may be the potential for greater sales for your entire affiliate business. You may be able to earn more tier two incomes than you currently are. You know someone in your downline is hampering this revenue. You know they need more training so they can increase theirs and yours incomes simultaneously. Tracking will show you who this "they" is clearly.

Tracking to Fine-Tune or Dispose of Promotional Activities

While you may find your downline is operating at peak efficiency, you may find your promotions themselves are at fault. You're training methods may be right, but the actual promotions are outdated or not relevant to your product. Without tracking every marketing initiative, you will not know which are working and which are not. Tracking shows you which promotions are the weak ones in your overall promotions portfolio. You can then decide to modify a promotional activity so it produces desired results. Tracking may show you that you have devoted enough time to an under-performing initiative and need to dispense of it.

Engage in tracking all of your major activities as an affiliate marketer. From article writing and article promotion campaigns, to e-mail, and advertising campaigns, let tracking show you what is working. You can then focus your affiliate activities on those ones that bring in the greatest revenue.