Are You Investing In Your Business or Gambling on Your Business
- 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 techniques, they may just magically come upon the technique that will make them a
millionaire.
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
http://www.fxweb.com/tracker/index.shtml
SuperStats
http://v2.superstats.com/
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:
http://cgi.resourceindex.com/Programs_and_Scripts/Perl/Access_Counters
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:
http://www.virtualis.com/vr/tdean2/index.html
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 selling
what your market really wants and is it better than the competition?
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 is the webmaster at
http://www.bizpromo.com Visit today for turn-key web site solutions, turn-key products you can sell, and answers to all of your Internet marketing questions. For "115 Internet marketing tips" please send an email to..
115tips@aweber.com
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