6. Use guest books to improve your web site. Your visitors will leave good and bad comments. Review comments and use them to improve your site.

7. Regularly check and resubmit your web site's search engine rankings. They can drop very quickly because of all competition.

8. Increase number of visitors that revisit your web site by publishing a free course right on your site. Just release a new lesson once a week.

9. Make sure your graphics load correctly on your web site. Broken graphics will make your business look very unprofessional.

10. Update content on your web site regularly. You'll want to add new content and update old content.

Your industry may have other hot button offers that always get response. The only way to know is to test different ads. Also pay attention to what works for your competitors. If they have used same offer for years, it probably works like gangbusters.

Problem 4. You super charge your ad with a great offer, but still get only a trickle of response. Great ads don't always work first time they appear. In fact, first ad rarely gets an avalanche of results. Once you develop an ad that seems to be hitting home with customers, repeat it over and over.

During many years I worked in media, we figured it took a minimum of two weeks of heavy promotion to get an idea across to our audience. It often took six weeks to really do job right. Promoting for only a week virtually insured we wouldn't get much response (and that was with an exciting ad running EVERY hour of day).

So what if your ad budget is just a small monthly amount? Find a good ad, then repeat it week after week and month after month. Watch closely to see if sales gradually mount. The business world is full of examples where a small business put a tiny display ad in Sunday paper month after month. After a year or two, almost all their new business comes from ad.

Problem 5. Your ad pulls lots of interest, but nobody buys. We see this a lot with advertising on Internet. A site will run a great ad in an email newsletter and get plenty of clicks, but nobody buys. In this case, problem isn't with ad, but with web site. Frequently web copy fails to do its job. The ad gets customers through door, but copy is too flat, too short, or doesn't encourage customer confidence.

The same kind of thing happens in retail stores. We did a wildly successful promotion for an auto dealer. Hundreds of people came into dealership each hour of promotion. The store's sales people were completely unrepaired for that kind of response. They stood around grinning with their hands in their pockets. Not once did a sales person offer to help hordes streaming through door. At end of day, not a single car had been sold.

Solve this problem by making sure your sales or support staff know all details of your advertised offer. When a prospect sees your ad and calls, anyone who answers phone should immediately know what customer is asking about.

Most ads fall short because of one of these five problems. All have definent symptoms and easy solutions. Listen to what your marketing is telling you. Then fix problems and encourage your successes. You will quickly take mystery out of marketing and make it a reliable partner.