This weekend I sat down and wrote a blog article about the concepts behind affiliate marketing accounting. On its face, the article is about the general process and theory behind how to manage the relationship between a user, an offer/product/service and an affiliate network. What it describes is the right kind of data to record and hand off to an affiliate so that you can use the reporting data you get back to marry your activity tracking with its financial results and make better marketing decisions. It contains no free scripts, no technology specific how-to guides, just a lot of information about the initial building blocks for a system that can start to track some of your most crucial data. Frankly, I'm not sure how useful anyone will find it since it targets the online marketer who is interested in getting out of the world of spreadhseets and mish-mashed reports and is interested in starting to build systems to manage their data correctly. In any case, I see enough questions about the basic concepts that are mentioned or mirrored in the article that I thought I'd link to it. It even has pictures for the easily bored and contains no offers for eBooks or any other get-poor-quick schemes nor any other items for sale. Here's a link: Basic Rube Goldberg Affiliate Marketing Accounting And here's an excerpt: I hope someone finds it useful.
No problem, hope it helps. if there's anything you disagree with, liked or have questions about I'd be interested to hear - the unexamined article not being worth writing and all.