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Sometimes I hear comments which disturb me.

I was at a seminar recently, and there were about 200 people in the room, excited about the income-earning potential of affiliate marketing.

In one of the question sessions, a person got up to the microphone and said “I am not a technical person. I don’t want to have to be watching all these numbers all the time [Adwords campaign metrics and conversions]. Can’t I just do this without all that hassle?”

The first worrying point for me was that this person knew so little about computers that they thought of looking at numbers on the screen as “technical”. The second point of concern was that this person wanted to operate a business without monitoring the performance numbers. This is the equivalent of wanting to fly a jumbo jet at night without looking at the instrument panel!

As a business owner, you live and die by your profitability. You can work incredibly hard in your own business and still lose money. If you don’t know which activities are making you money and which ones for costing more than they bring in, then you have no way to improve your business performance.

Paying for traffic, using Pay-Per-Click advertising, is a great way to go broke fast of you don’t know what you are doing. Google will gouge you on click prices until you can’t possibly make a profit, and it is only by watching the numbers and adjusting your sales process to improve the numbers that you can ever hope to get clicks at a low enough price to sell affiliate products profitably.

Every business has its “dashboard” - the numbers you watch to monitor the performance of the business.

For an online business, the dashboard will include Google Analytics, or an equivalent tool, to tell you how many visitors you are getting to each page of your site, where they come from, and what they do while they are there.

It will also include your Adsense or other PPC advertising reports, if you are a PPC publisher; your Clickbank and/or other affiliate program earnings reports; your shopping cart reports, if you sell your own products on your site; and your bank account - after all, those earnings aren’t real money until they show up in your bank account!