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Are You Investing In
Your Business By Terry Dean
Any good marketer
knows that testing is the key to building profits in absolutely any
business. You can never determine that one idea will or will not work in
any specific business until you put it to the test. Don't think that the
Internet is any different.
You have to test
products. You have to test prices. You have to test advertising formats.
You have to test headlines. You have to test ad copy. You have to test
specific places to advertise. The testing process never ends. If you don't put your
entire marketing plan to the test, you will never truly know what can or
cannot work in your business. Every marketing test
is an investment in your business, whether it produces results for you or
not. It shows either a marketing method to keep working with or a method
to avoid in your specific type of business. Take every single test you use
as another lesson in your marketing education. The problem in
marketing presents itself when you start treating your advertising more
like a gamble than an investment. Most Internet businesses I have seen are
just haphazardly wasting their money on every advertising opportunity that
comes up. They don't key their ads and they don't take notes about what is
working and why it is working. For some reason, most
marketers have developed an idea that the Internet is somehow different
than other advertising mediums. They think that if they just try enough
different You can't just throw
your money into advertising. You need to have a plan behind everything you
do. You need to know positively for sure when a technique is working so
that you can run with it. You need to know what isn't working. Setting up
the right testing mechanisms which I will show to you in a minute is the
key to success in your marketing. You can't afford to gamble away your
hard earned business income. I only have to ask you
one question to determine whether you are treating advertising as a gamble
or as an investment. How much does your web site make per visitor? If you
don't know the answer to this question, then it isn't even possible for
you to make informed decisions about what types of advertising you can
use. If you don't know how
much your web site makes per visitor on average, how can you determine how
much to spend to obtain each visitor? If your web site brings in an
average of a $1.00 per visitor, than you can afford to spend a lot more
per visitor than a site which is bringing in only 5 cents per visitor.
What...you don't know
how much your site makes per visitor? Well, then you have a problem. When
you are using free advertising for your site, you may not consider this a
very important number. Once you start spending some of your cash flow on
marketing through, I can guarantee that if you don't know how much your
site makes per visitor you are just working on a gamble. The simplest method of
determining your profit per visitor is to just add up your web site income
and all of your unique hits from the past month. Then, do a little math
and divide the income by the number of hits you have received. That will
give you a baseline number to get started with.
As you start testing
advertising more and more you are also going to want to determine how many
hits and how much profit you get from each type of ads. All hits are not
created equal. For example, through our own testing and the feedback we
have received from other online marketers we have determined a few
interesting things. Offline advertising will produce less hits than many
types of online marketing, but usually they are of a much better quality
than advertising types such as banner ads. They end up buying more stuff
and having a much higher profit per visitor.
Your site could be
making $2.00 per visitor from offline advertising and only 20 cents per
visitor from banner ads. Getting those two types of visitors mixed up
could cause you to make some very bad decisions about your advertising.
That is where keying your ads and testing come in.
We have to turn our
advertising into a scientific investment instead of a haphazard gamble. We
can do this most effectively by following a simple three step system like
the one I will show you below. It is the key to knowing which advertising
mediums are working for you...and which ones aren't. Step One: Set Up A
Web Site Tracking System. The first thing you
will have to do to start finding out what advertising works for you is to
set up some kind of tracking system. If you aren't tracking your visitors,
then you can just forget about making intelligent advertising decisions. Also note that you
need to be tracking more than just the overall traffic of your site. You
need to know where people are going to on your site and you need each of
your web pages tracked as well. There are three simple ways to track your
web site stats.
1. You Can Use a Free
Counter for Each Page on Your Site. There are two popular
counters I have used that I can recommend to you. Both Web Tracker and
Superstats have free counters that you can use. The advantage of this
method is that it is pretty simple to set up. You sign up for their
service and then you insert their code into your site. The disadvantage is
that you will have a small link back to them on your site which may cost
you a little traffic. An even bigger disadvantage is that you will need to
sign up and insert a separate code on every one of your pages so that each
page can be tracked separately. Having overall domain stats won't do you
that much good if you don't know where they are coming from and who the
buyers are.
Web Tracker SuperStats 2. You Can Install a
CGI Program to track Your Stats.
There are over 70 CGI
programs out there which will track your stats for you. Make sure that you
choose a program that tracks your stats on each page of your site. You
don't want to have to use a separate CGI program for each page and you
don't want all of your pages put together. The advantage of using
a CGI program is that you won't have to lose any traffic to outside
sources and that some of the CGI programs can track all of your pages
separately for you in one file. The disadvantage of this method is that it
requires some programming knowledge and is often quite difficult to set
up. For a List of Web Site
Counter Programs, visit: 3. You Can Purchase
Your Domain Where Stats are Part of the Package. On my current web
host, stats for every single page of my site are included. Top Pages are
listed. Error messages that people receive are listed. Unique hits and
page impressions for every single page are listed separately in one easy
to use system. The advantage of this
is that this is the most advanced tracking system I have seen and it is
very easy to use. The disadvantage is that it is only available to people
on that web host. If your site is somewhere else and you are currently
happy with your service, you would be better off using one of the other
methods. If you are looking for a new web host or currently don't have a
domain hosted, make sure to take this into account. Virtualis Web Hosting
and All of It's Features are available at: Step Two: Key All
Of Your Ads. You need to key all of
your ads separately. The easiest way to do this is to make a copy of your
sales letter on your site and create another site out of it. If your sales
letter is on sales.htm, you could also make a sales1.htm, sales2.htm,
sales3.htm, and so on. Then, use a different page as your web site address
for each ad you put out.
If you really want to
track your advertising results effectively, you will also want to make
copies of your order form. Then, you can know which ad is actually
producing the sales and exactly how much money is coming in from every
penny you spend. There are some other
methods you could use to key your ads. For example, you could also set up
an affiliate program on your site and each a different affiliate number
for each ad you place. This would automatically track all the sales for
you. You could use different autoresponders for the responses. If you are
doing a major offline advertising campaign, you could even set up a
complete duplicate domain that you don't advertise any other way. No matter which method
you choose to use, the important thing is that you key and track every
single one of your ads. Step Three: Judge
Your Results and Expand Your Advertising. After you have placed
each ad, judge how it does. Did it produce a profit for you? If not, do
you know why it didn't work. Try changing the headline, the body copy, or
the advertising medium. Make only one of these changes at a time. If you
change everything at once, you will never know which aspect it was that
created the change in results. If your ad did produce
a profit, how can you expand on it. Try changing the headline or the ad
slightly and see what the results are. Find other similar places that you
could use to expand your advertising. Do this in a slow methodical way so
you can track and keep increasing your profits with every ad you place. If every ad you place
is losing money, then you are going to need to step back and re-examine
your product, your market, your USP, and your overall concepts. Are you Advertising never has
to be a gamble. It can be an intelligent investment that will produce
results for you time and time again. Look at the mutual fund manager. They
may have 20 or more different stocks in their portfolio. While some of the
stocks may lose money, the idea is to keep most of them making a profit.
By combining all of the different stocks in one portfolio, they can reduce
the risks and increase their chances of profit. By tracking all of
your ads and using different forms of advertising, you can reduce your
overall risk and then expand on whichever advertising pulls in the most
profits. Don't ever look at your business as a get rich quick scheme or
you will end up gambling away all of your advertising budget. Look at
yourself as the mutual fund manager who intelligently picks and chooses
the right sources for his portfolio. Invest wisely in your
business. Terry Dean, a 5 year
veteran of Internet marketing, will Take You By The Hand and Show You
Exact Results of All the Internet Marketing Techniques he tests and Uses
Every Single Month" Click here to Find Out More: |
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