Affiliate since: 03/15/2013, Power Rank: 1232 | Read John's 50 other Ask SC answers

You can use the Hit Tracking and Key Codes sections of SFI, and write your results in a text document or create an Excel file that allows you to understand which of your promotions/advertisements are getting the most hits and the most return for your dollar.

The system for tracking is actually already in place for you at SFI: https://www.sfimg.com/PowerTools/HitTracking

With the hit tracking and key codes sections, you can determine which of your Gateways is bringing better results and more hits.

Example:
http://www.sfimg4.com/xxxxx.56/FREE
http://www.sfimg4.com/xxxxx.36/FREE

The xxxxx should be your affiliate number, the 56 is an example you could use as a reminder for where you have your ad listed. (Say 56 is "X" advertiser). Then choose a different number for another place like 36. (Say 36 is "Y" advertiser)

Then in the hit tracking section, you can check your hits, specifically on a Saturday before they reset. You will see that "X" advertiser gets more hits and "Y" advertiser gets less, based on the numbers you have chosen for each advertiser. Then you would know to stick with advertiser "X" instead of "Y".

You can also use this exact same method with each Gateway. Choose a different key code for each Gateway, keep track of which ones get the best return for you, and you will know which Gateways have the biggest chance of bringing results.

Then once you have the results, write them down somewhere or use an Excel file to track which method/Gateway is working best for your advertising.

This may sound complicated, but take the time to try it and you will see it is not.

I hope this helps you in your journey.
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You can use the Hit Tracking and Key Codes sections of SFI, and write your results in a text document or create an Excel file that allows you to understand which of your promotions/advertisements are getting the most hits and the most return for your dollar.

The system for tracking is actually already in place for you at SFI: https://www.sfimg.com/PowerTools/HitTracking

With the hit tracking and key codes sections, you can determine which of your Gateways is bringing better
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Affiliate since: 04/13/2012, Power Rank: 784 | Read Andrew's 330 other Ask SC answers

SFI Keycodes will track traffic and conversions for you and I advise using a spreadsheet such as excel or Open Office's Spreadsheet to keep track of what codes you used on what sites. You can even learn to set up data fields to compare different types of advertising such as Paid PPC, Paid Classifieds, Offline, and Online etc.

It's always helpful when using paid advertising to track your return on investment, and, likewise, you don't wish to waste time on free ads that aren't converting.

I would also recommend that if you have your own Wwebsite and use landing pages or splash pages to promote SFI that you invest in a good split testing software to get the highest conversion possible from that free and paid traffic, and I recommend use of a bulk e-mail software or autoresponder, such as Mail Chimp or Aweber to capture leads of people who would like more information and are not ready to join yet. Both the split test software and the autoresponder will have their own tracking data to make your business smarter.

The last thing is vital in this social media driven, modern marketing system and that is using tools such as Klout, and Empire Avenue to track social influence and highlight social interactions on your major network profiles and pages. Basic stats for social media are all an affiliate marketer really needs to be a success online with social media.

The last piece of the puzzle is for managing your human assets, friends, and prospects. If you really want to be data driven, you can research open source CRM or customer relationship manager software. This is like using a personal planner to track contacts, meeting notes, and other details that will help you convert prospects into customers. This works especially well if you are recruiting and training local ECAs or matching a local business with an ECA supplier for a wholesale supply or maybe even things like The Natural brand cleaners.

I love a great question that explores the moderate to advanced end of our business. These are not beginners' tools, but they are vital tools for those ready to take their business to the next level.
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SFI Keycodes will track traffic and conversions for you and I advise using a spreadsheet such as excel or Open Office's Spreadsheet to keep track of what codes you used on what sites. You can even learn to set up data fields to compare different types of advertising such as Paid PPC, Paid Classifieds, Offline, and Online etc.

It's always helpful when using paid advertising to track your return on investment, and, likewise, you don't wish to waste time on free ads that aren't converting.

I
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Affiliate since: 12/31/1969, Power Rank: 99999999

This question touches on a vital aspect on how to grow one's SFI Business.

Below is a brief summary of the five major components to planning, organizing, placing, and tracking an online ad campaigns.

1. Identifying the sites in which to place the ads: First, free sites or paying sites? This depends on the advertising budget. Many sites offer free advertising. The effective strategy, for placing free ads, is too long to discuss here. Please refer to the training modules. For paid ads, preliminary research is vital. Alexia, a site ranking tool, may be used to select the most frequented sites by opportunity seekers.

2. Choosing the type of advertising and marketing supports: Banner ads are now very popular, especially because SFI offers dynamic banners. Opportunity seekers can click on them and be taken to the appropriate Gateways. The banner pictures change frequently to offer variety.

3. Selecting the SFI Gateway/URL: There are over numerous URLs for sponsoring or for sales of the various SFI income streams along the SFI ID, with different messages.

4: Using the tracking codes: This is a vital part. There are codes specific to SFI Corporate. But there are enough available codes to choose from. The strategy of selecting and placing tracking codes is explained in detail in this training article: https://www.sfimg.com/PowerTools/KeyCodeTracking

5. Monitoring the results: This is where all parts of the strategy come together. The codes will provide data as to which sites are giving excellent results and which ones are performing poorly. Focus must be on the sites and the ads that are producing good results. The poorly performing ads and sites should be disregarded. The collected data will be used for the next ad campaigns. The wordings of the ads may help improve sign-up quality and avoid sleeping/inactive affiliates.

These are the strategies of the most successful marketers.
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This question touches on a vital aspect on how to grow one's SFI Business.

Below is a brief summary of the five major components to planning, organizing, placing, and tracking an online ad campaigns.

1. Identifying the sites in which to place the ads: First, free sites or paying sites? This depends on the advertising budget. Many sites offer free advertising. The effective strategy, for placing free ads, is too long to discuss here. Please refer to the training modules. For
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Affiliate since: 04/08/2013, Power Rank: 99999999 | Read Robert's 47 other Ask SC answers

Dear Marlene, since many people have written about the technical side of tracking here, I'd like to share the "know-how" of tracking here.

You use tracking basically for three purposes:
1. to see how (and if) your advertising sources provide hits to your Gateways,
2. to find out how effective your campaigns are, and
3. to optimize your advertising cost (also in terms of time and effort).

You also use tracking to compare performance of your advertising campaigns. In my opinion it is best to start with ONE Gateway spread over a few advertising sources to begin with.

So let's imagine that you use your main Gateway in 3 advertising sources (be it a traffic exchange, a safelist or some kind of paid advertising, does not matter).

For Advertising Source 11, you add 1 as your key-code to the URL leading to your main Gateway (many affiliates have described how to do it) and promote this URL on Advertising Source 1 (AS1), then you add 22 to your main gateway URL and promote it on Advertising Source 2 (AS2), and you and 33 to your main gateway URL and promote it on Advertising Source 3 (AS3).

With these columns:
Day, AS1, AS2, AS3 where "day" is the day of the month, AS1 - AS2 are the names of your advertising sources. Make AS1 - AS3 span two columns, and under each enter "Hits" and "PSA", e.g.

--------------------------------------------
DAY | AS1 | AS2 | AS 3 |
----------------------------------------
| Hits | PPSA| Hits | PSA | Hits | PSA |
---------------------------------------------

Every day, you go to your Power Tools > Hit Tracker and enter the numbers from there into the spreadsheet, so it is fine to make one for each month, and if you have PSAs on that day, you go to Genealogy and see the key code in the KC column for that PSA. You count the PSAs for each code and also enter them into the spreadsheet, e.g.

--------------------------------------------
DAY | AS1 | AS2 | AS 3 |
----------------------------------------
| Hits | PPSA| Hits | PSA | Hits | PSA |
---------------------------------------------
1 150 0 1300 0 459 1
2 342 0 3732 0 700 3
3 670 0 4324 1 1245 1
4 1098 0 7214 0 1790 1
5 1476 0 11543 1 2216 0
--------------------------------------------

This way you can clearly see, what is going on with your advertising. In this example: Advertising Source 1 is absolutely bad, not only low number of hits, but also no PSAs, Advertising Source 2 provides lots of hits, but only a trickle of PSAs, while Advertising Source 3 provides less hits than AS2, but those hits produce PSAs. So this should be the advertising source you should stay with. Later on, you can do the reverse, i.e. take one advertising source and TWO Gateways to see which one is more effective, and so on until you find both the best advertising source and the best converting (giving the largest number of PSAs per 1000 hits) Gateway. Still later on, you can add other columns, e.g. to show what percentage of newly recruited PSAs remain EA2 at least, especially if you use paid advertising sources.
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Dear Marlene, since many people have written about the technical side of tracking here, I'd like to share the "know-how" of tracking here.

You use tracking basically for three purposes:
1. to see how (and if) your advertising sources provide hits to your Gateways,
2. to find out how effective your campaigns are, and
3. to optimize your advertising cost (also in terms of time and effort).

You also use tracking to compare performance of your advertising
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Affiliate since: 12/09/2013, Power Rank: 99999999

The best way to do this is to go to Power Tools on your Affiliate page and click on Key Codes. Read on Key Codes and determine the method that is best for you in keeping track of sites that you use. For example, placing various advertisement tools from the marketing tools(Marketing-->Marketing Tools) and my gateways(My Acct-->My Gateways) for free traffic exchange (key code 1), social networking (Key Code 2), paid advertisement ads (key code 3), and personal web page (key code 4). Keep these in a spreadsheet, such as Excel, or whatever works best for you. Then once you choose the key codes for the sites, you pick the method of advertisement, such as attracting E-Commerce Associates (ECA), TripleClicks shoppers (PRM), or SFI affiliates (AFF)and choose these from your gateways. I suggest with the free ones to advertise all as much as possible, but for the paid ones see which ones will work one by one if you have to, in order to save money.

So, back to our example:

Location: Free exchange site (key code 1)
Advertisement: Attracting ECA
URL created using Advertisement Gateway and Key Code: http://www.tripleclicks.com/xxxxxxxx.1/ECA (xxxxxxxx is your affiliate ID)

Then after this is set up, try to check daily or weekly on the number of hits (if checking weekly make sure to check by the latest Saturday since SFI resets the count on Sunday). You will be able to see hits and from that if anyone signed up using this advertisement. Take note of that in your spreadsheet each day/week. This takes time to see which ones work best. You will be able to see if a site is getting a hit based on the key code and also which ad is working best on that site based on your advertisement that you have noted.

Keep columns in the spreadsheet such as site name, site key code, advertisement used, hits column, signup columns, Executive Affiliate (EA) column (for those that reach EA that came from this site/advertisement), Team Leader (TL)column (for those that reach TL status from this site/advertisement), EA2, TL2, etc. Whatever you want to keep track of from each site/advertisement. You are able to filter these in the spreadsheet by clicking on Sort&Filter, which will create an arrow at the top of each column. Click on this arrow and you can filter based on A-Z, Z-A, highest to lowest, lowest to highest, and many other ways to filter that will allow you to see the top advertising sites and advertisements. As I said, this takes time in order to see what works and what doesn't but as long as you keep track of what you have out there for your business and continue to monitor it, you will find your best methods and locations and use them accordingly. You will also be able to share this with your team in order for them to benefit from it.

Good luck to you!

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The best way to do this is to go to Power Tools on your Affiliate page and click on Key Codes. Read on Key Codes and determine the method that is best for you in keeping track of sites that you use. For example, placing various advertisement tools from the marketing tools(Marketing-->Marketing Tools) and my gateways(My Acct-->My Gateways) for free traffic exchange (key code 1), social networking (Key Code 2), paid advertisement ads (key code 3), and personal web page (key code 4). Keep these
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Affiliate since: 08/06/2012, Power Rank: 254 | Read Ronilo's 408 other Ask SC answers

I am glad that this question is asked because this is one activity that we should not neglect as SFI affiliates. Advertising is still the most effective way of finding affiliates.

Advertising must be organized and tracked to effectively maximize our limited resources that we used for advertising. Here is what I am doing in running my paid and free ads. I use excel to do this (Note book and pen are also good to use).

1. In the first column I write the sites that I researched where I can possible put my ads. They are assigned with numbers from 1, 2, 3 and so on...

2. In the second column I write whether the site is free or paid ads. I assigned number 0 for free and 1 for paid.

3. In the third column I write the gateways and assign number of each gateway also 1 , 2, 3 and soon. This will have several rows per website.

4. in the forth column is the link with the Key Codes. My Key Codes has 4 numbers. The first three are number representing my first 3 columns and the fourth number represent the number of times I put the same link in same site.

Example: http://www.sfi4.com/xxxxxxxx.1011/FREE - The Key Code means:
The first number 1, I place my ads in the no.1 website in my list,
The second number 0, means its free ads website,
The third number 1 means I uses FREE gateway (because it's no. 1 in my list of gateways,
The last number 1 means this is my first time to place that link in this site.
The xxxxxxxx of course is my affiliate ID.

When I look at the Hit Tracking at SFI, I know exactly the website and the gateway I used for that was clicked. Then I put a tally in my list both the hits and the sign-ups. Through this I exactly know which link and which website give me the most conversion.

When my name is revealed you can contact me and I will tell you which gateway gave me the most conversion in the three paid website that I placed them.



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I am glad that this question is asked because this is one activity that we should not neglect as SFI affiliates. Advertising is still the most effective way of finding affiliates.

Advertising must be organized and tracked to effectively maximize our limited resources that we used for advertising. Here is what I am doing in running my paid and free ads. I use excel to do this (Note book and pen are also good to use).

1. In the first column I write the sites that I researched
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Affiliate since: 05/03/2002, Power Rank: 45 | Read Mar's 582 other Ask SC answers

You can make use of the Hit Tracking found under the SFI Power Tools. This tool has been designed to create cost effective, high performance marketing system to track your advertising. It is a powerful tool that you can use, when you are placing several advertisement using your available SFI Gateways.

How does it work?

Place an ad using one of your SFI Gateways. You can use a Splash page to direct visitors to your SFI Gateways or include links of your SFI Gateways in your personal website or blog.

Add to your SFI Gateways that you have selected a keycode, as you place an ad in a Classified Ad section. It looks like this: http://www.sfi4.com/SFIID/keycode. Use different keycodes when placing several ads using your SFI Gateways in business opportunities ads section, e-zines or to your local organization in your community.

You need to track your results to get the most out of your hard earned money invested. The Hit Tracking is very useful to both free and paid advertisement. Through Hit Tracking, you can find out which one works. You will need to be consistently implementing the Hit Tracking system to keep up with the constantly changing online world. A handy counter for viewing the amount of traffic coming to your SFI Gateway Websites is indeed very useful if you are to succeed in SFI. It is available to affiliates who have accumulated at least 1,000 VersaPoints and above.
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You can make use of the Hit Tracking found under the SFI Power Tools. This tool has been designed to create cost effective, high performance marketing system to track your advertising. It is a powerful tool that you can use, when you are placing several advertisement using your available SFI Gateways.

How does it work?

Place an ad using one of your SFI Gateways. You can use a Splash page to direct visitors to your SFI Gateways or include links of your SFI Gateways in your personal
...more

Affiliate since: 12/31/1969, Power Rank: 99999999

Depending on the magnitude of your advertising efforts, You can either organize your advertising tracking into a simple word processor such as Word, or Excel, or even a sheet of paper which you record your gateway hits daily before you log off for the day.

If you are just starting out, its good to get into the habit of developing your own tracking system as you go along; each person has their own approach and idea of how the best tracking system is set up, but in lament terms, you will set up and organize your advertising as it suites your needs and your personal abilities.

Setting up different tracking codes, and logging them in your own system that your able to easily understand will assist you in determining which method is for you. Below is an example of my system that I started recently started, but worked my way up from no system, to simple paper tracking up to how i organize my tracking now.

For Area 1: http://www.sfi4.com/xxxxxxx.1212
Area 2: http://www.sfi4.com/xxxxxxx.1313

Source 1 http://www.sfi4.com/xxxxxxx.1414
Source 2 http://www.sfi4.com/xxxxxxx.1515

Area 1, Source 2: http://www.sfi4.com/xxxxxxx.1215
Area 2, Source 1: http://www.sfi4.com/xxxxxxx.1214

It looks confusing to some, but I understand it based on my notes about Area 1, and Source 2 etc, so my system set up for me as your should be set up for you to easily understand. I would suggest doing it on paper to start, logging your advertised keycodes, and recording the amount of hits each day. Try different approaches also, you can decide what tracking method you want to try after that, as there are many approaches that one can use to effectively do so.

For additional information on setting up a tracking system to suite your needs, please see: https://www.sfimg.com/PowerTools/KeyCodeTracking


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Depending on the magnitude of your advertising efforts, You can either organize your advertising tracking into a simple word processor such as Word, or Excel, or even a sheet of paper which you record your gateway hits daily before you log off for the day.

If you are just starting out, its good to get into the habit of developing your own tracking system as you go along; each person has their own approach and idea of how the best tracking system is set up, but in lament terms, you will
...more

Affiliate since: 12/31/1969, Power Rank: 99999999

Keycoding is a marketing strategy from way back. Back when people where busy with mail order a department number was used so they knew which ads were pulling the greatest number of orders or leads. SFI Keycodes work the same way. You add a dot with a number onto your ID in your links. For example: http://www.sfi4.com/XXXXXXXX.12

You can learn more here: https://www.sfimg.com/PowerTools/KeyCodeTracking

Simply keep a list with each key code, where it is used and any other information you think necessary. Then later you can use the Hit Tracking tool to see hits to the site.

More information is here: https://www.sfimg.com/PowerTools/HitTracking

Keep in mind that SFI has reserved three Key Codes for their own use. It's important that you do not use these numbers in your own link and banner ads.

1101 for affiliates from S-Builder.
1200 for affiliates who were not referred to SFI by anyone.
1300 for TripleClicks members via the TC Tell-A-Friend feature.
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Keycoding is a marketing strategy from way back. Back when people where busy with mail order a department number was used so they knew which ads were pulling the greatest number of orders or leads. SFI Keycodes work the same way. You add a dot with a number onto your ID in your links. For example: http://www.sfi4.com/XXXXXXXX.12

You can learn more here: https://www.sfimg.com/PowerTools/KeyCodeTracking

Simply keep a list with each key code, where it is used and any other information
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Affiliate since: 12/31/1969, Power Rank: 99999999

Sure you can set up a system to organize and tract your advertising. This is a professional way to keep a record of all your advertising activities to monitor which gateway or which advertising sites that brings you highest volume of traffic. Ofcourse SFI has already provided us with all essential tools and resources to make our life easier. We just have to search, explore and implement our tasks.

For this, you have to organize the following:
1. Keep a separate file for this record.
2. Use SFI tracking hits at http://www.sfimg.com/Power tool/Tracking.
3. Get your Gateways' URLs provided by SFI at http://www.sfimg.com/Accounts/Gateways.
4. Categorize your advertising sites:
- Offline/Online
- Paid/Free
5. Prepare different key codes for different categories mentioned above.Your key codes
can be set in 2-4 digits.Example:http://www.sfi4.com/SFI ID.12/Free

With all of above tasks, you will heading with your advertising in the right tract.
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Sure you can set up a system to organize and tract your advertising. This is a professional way to keep a record of all your advertising activities to monitor which gateway or which advertising sites that brings you highest volume of traffic. Ofcourse SFI has already provided us with all essential tools and resources to make our life easier. We just have to search, explore and implement our tasks.

For this, you have to organize the following:
1. Keep a separate file for this record.
2.
...more