I’m in the middle of my beach holiday writing this post, but I just read a sad post on another forum which moved me to get these thoughts down on paper (keyboard?).
The most important thing to do in this business is to have a clear set of goals and then come up with a plan of action to follow to achieve these goals. This involves more than just writing down ‘I want to make $1000 a month’. A goal without a plan is just a dream. Goals should be achievable and you should be able to see, at least, a realistic way of how you’re going to achieve it.
Once you have a goal, usually in IM this will be a monetary goal. The next step is to reverse engineer what you need to do in order to achieve this goal. This will be your plan. Using Clickbank Analytics (under the reporting tab) this step is very easy. Let me explain.
Once you’ve been promoting Clickbank products for awhile you will have compiled some very valuable information. My advice is, if you’re not doing it already, to keep a monthly spreadsheet of all of the main KPI’s (key performance indicators). The main ones to monitor are # of hops, net sales and total sales amount. Personally I also add in others like order form impressions and average sale value. This is a task I do myself at the end of every month. You simply change the date range to last month and download the CSV file.
I simply copy the bits I want from this file to my master spreadsheet and they will automatically be added to my overall stats. Monitoring in this way is essential to both my continued goal setting and also is a great motivational tool. The numbers don’t lie, statistics give you a lot of power!
Now here’s how to use this info. Firstly, you need to use these numbers to calculate your conversion rate as a percentage (# of sales / # of hops * 100). Next up, work out your average sale value (total $ sales / # of sales), and finally I also like to work out the earnings per hop (total $ sales / # of hops). Now I’m not gonna hold back here. Here’s a close indication of my own stats for use as an example;
Conversion rate: 1%
Average sale value:$25
Earnings per hop:0.23c
Now here’s how to use this data. A conversion rate of 1% means that I get one sale for every 100 hops I generate. So, if I want to make $100 a day I need to generate 400 hops per day. Yes, it’s this easy if you keep good stats! Working it out the other way 100 hops multiplied by 23c per hop gives me $23 per day (almost the same result worked out differently).
Can you see how easy goal setting can be if you use these stats? To make $1000 a day on Clickbank I’d need to generate 4000 hops.
The good thing about keeping these stats is that these numbers get more and more reliable the longer you track them. You can also keep stats for each product/offer you run, it’s really up to you.
Clickbank, Amazon and I’m sure most other sites offer these stats for free, so if you’re not using them yet, you’d better move your ass!
