One of the major drawbacks about getting started in affiliate marketing is that you can almost guarantee to make a loss before you get things right. There are the odd few that stumble across something that works from the beginning which takes a great weight off your shoulders as you’re not losing money. Luckily I was one of those few that managed to grab a few good keywords that seem to be solid performers.

This post isn’t to brag that I did this because I believe it was simply down to luck of having those keywords – to put it into perspective I had a campaign with about 100 ad groups & around 7,000-8,000 keywords. About 2-3 weeks later I decided to pause everything bar 4 ad groups that seemed to be pulling the campaign through and concentrate on them first to build it backwards so to speak.

This month, although I have been constantly making a good amount of revenue my ad spend has also shot up forcing me to make a loss, until yesterday. Basically I have found out my campaign does really bad on Friday’s/Saturday’s – I spend the usual $150-$200/day but only make about $30-$50 in revenue so I have decided I’m going to pause on those days increasing my ROI which is the most important figure at the end of the day.

At one point I would say I was about $400 in the red this month but after constant tweaking I managed to pull myself back on track and went into the green this month which is a great feeling. The best thing is that it’s only half way through so if I can keep up the average $100 profit/day I will be making some good figures and hit new records this month.

This picture is of the last 3 days revenue, the one highlighted was the first day one using 1 offer, I have been split testing offers to see which the best converter is and I believe I have found it – along with a nice bump in payout I’m looking forward to the results after more tweaking to bring the costs down and hopefully break the $500/day revenue barrier.

What I’m basically saying is that although you’re losing money, don’t give up. The ‘loss’ you are making is not a waste of money – you are buying priceless data which you can use to turn the whole campaign around. If my averages were to continue this month, in theory I should be able to hit just under $1,500 profit this month. If things were to continue next month on auto pilot it would go to make over $2,500 in profit – does that initial $400 loss seem so bad now? This is all in theory of course but I just wanted to explain that if you are losing money at first – it doesn’t matter and you can still come out on top.