For as long as I have been online, I keep reading how tracking is mandatory if you want to make money online.
Maybe if you pay for ads and want to see your ROI (Return On Investment) for a campaign, that might be true. But for hobby money makers like me that thrive on low grade free exposure, it's shooting yourself in the foot (just my opinion).
I have links lying around that might not get seen for YEARS, then all of a sudden get a spurt of attention. If I relied on tracking, I might miss those completely. Take APSense for example, I maybe get a hot contact every week or so, but if I tracked that and decided my time would be better spent somewhere more promising, I could miss out. Besides, I have fun here anyway.
That's why recently I quit sending prospects directly to sign up or sales pages and instead, I set up a $1 a month hosting account just for splash pages to send them to. Then I installed a special file that takes anyone trying to visit a page that no longer exists and gives them a list of current ones that do. With the huge spider web of contact points I have out there, I could never go back and change all the possible links when something changes, so now I don't worry about it. They will see something good no matter what they actually came for.
This is easy to do and makes a very valuable contribution to my overall marketing plan, so if you want to set one up I would be glad to help you. Then maybe you won't need to track stuff either.
See you at the BANK!