If you’re planning on attempting to sell direct links on your sites and are successful at it at some point you’ll have to come up with a system to keep track of them all. Doing this sooner rather than later will save headaches and lost sales down the road. I thought it might be handy if I share with you what I do to get you thinking about how you might want to keep track of your own sales.
Set Up a Paypal Subscription
The easiest way to keep tracks of links is to not have to keep track at all. Paypal has a subscription option that completely removes the need to keep track of link expiry dates and chase people for payment. If you can get an advertiser to agree then this is the way to go but it’s not always possible either because companies want to pay by cheque or bank transfer, or because links are sold on a longer term basis and they’ll want to reassess before renewing.
Setting up a subscription is simple. Log in to Paypal and click on the ‘Merchant Services’ tab and then on the ‘Subscriptions and Recurring Payments’ link which is on the right hand side under the ‘Useful Links’ title. Click on ‘Get Started’ and then follow the instructions from there to create a subscription button. Upload the code to one of your sites, send the URL to your buyer and that’s that. I think there’s a way to email them the link too but I’ve never attempted it.
Links Tracking Spreadsheet
If you can’t convice your advertiser that Paypal subscriptions are the way forward then you’ll have to come up with a system to track the expiry dates yourself. When I only had a few links to keep track of I just kept the emails in a separate folder and checked it every month to see which ones would be expiring. It only took a second but often I would forget to put emails into that folder and managed to completely lose touch with some people, and therefore the sale.
Once I had more than a couple of links to keep track of, I needed to come up with a new system and whipped up this handy spreadsheet:
It’s a simple thing, but it’s a lifesaver to be able to glance at the spreadsheet and know exactly how many links I have due for renewal, what dates they expire, where on my sites they’re located, what sites they link to and the contact details of the person who bought it the first time around.
In the ‘Expiry and Duration’ column I’ve got things like ’11th – 6′. That means that the link was sold on the 6th of the month and is valid for six months. I put the price that was paid in the appropriate month’s column and then highlight the box for six months away so I know which months I need to collect renewal payments. Having the contact and link details on the spreadsheet means I don’t need to look for old emails. All the information I need to send a chaser email is right in front of my which is a huge time saver.
Most importantly, no more advertisers are lost in the abyss that is my Yahoo email account.
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