Are You Investing In Your Business or Gambling on 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 marketing 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.

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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:
http://www.netbreakthroughs.com