Track Your Advertising Or Perish...Written by Armand Melanson
Track Your Advertising Or Perish... Copyright 2002 lessworkmoremoney.com By Armand MelansonHave you ever tried to find a light switch in a darkened room? You grope around helplessly hoping to find switch. This is a good metaphor for way many businesses manage their e-marketing - they are groping around in dark... The key to advertising is having metrics on results your advertising campaigns produce. Here is a great adtracking tool I highly recommend: ADMINDER - http://www.adminder.com/c.cgi?itworks&adminder If you want to track your visitors from initial visit right through to sale, you will need to use ad & sales tracking software like Adminder. I recommend using full strength tracking because it gives you feedback you need to evaluate your marketing effectiveness. Using this software, you create a distinct ad campaign for each & every advertising effort. This allows you to precisely measure how many clicks/sales you are getting from each ad. Without this info, you cannot calculate ROI & determine whether or not a given ad is profitable or not. For $10-$15/MO, it is definitely worth it. If you are really trying to scrimp here's a way to track clickthrus on your ads ( you can't track sales without one of tools above ): Sign up for free website tracking at one of these: http://www.addfreestats.com/index.html http://www.extreme-dm.com racking/ http://www.webstat.com/ These are free services which allow you to embed a snippet of code in your webpages. This code gathers stats on your traffic in real-time & can be checked via your browser. You then create a webpage for each ad you want to track & place it in www folder of your website. Each ad you run will point back at a unique page you setup for it. Whenever someone clicks on an a link that points to this page, a "hit" is counted in your stats. Of course, this page doesn't have much on it as you want visitor to be redirected to your real website main page ASAP. That's what META-REFRESH tag does. Here is what ad tracking page should look like: you are being redirected - if not click here lessworkmoremoney.com you place code snippet as directed by webstat company here
| | Use Joint Ventures to Grow your BusinessWritten by Armand Melanson
Use Joint Ventures to Grow your Business Copyright 2002 lessworkmoremoney.com By Armand Melanson So let's talk about "joint venturing". The term sounds daunting like it is reserved to people who are already at top, but that isn't at all case: a joint venture is simply two companies working together to increase value they provide to their customers. Let me give you an example of a simple joint venture that I just setup which required about 1hr of my time. When I initially setup my lessworkmoremoney.com website, I did a pretty thorough review of webhosting companies. I went with a big company that advertised all of things that I knew I wanted in a webhost. After a few weeks of hassles, I realized that they were too big to deliver high quality service, so I revised my search criteria & starting looking at smaller companies. I fell upon a small webhosting company http://fastwebsites.com & really liked what I saw when I reviewed what they had to offer. So I setup an account with them & got lessworkmoremoney.com up & running. Over next few months & had to contact fastwebsites.com several times to request help on various issues. I always got prompt & very helpful service. So one day I was thinking about how others would benefit from my search for a great webhost & I decided to write up a recommendation for fastwebsites.com. I also started to do math on lifetime value of each customer who signs-up with fastwebsites thanks to my recommendation. I figured why not email them & ask them if they would be willing to give me an incentive for any subscriber who signs up. Here's what they had to say: "Ok we will offer you 1 months hosting fee for any clients you refer. We will add a referrer entry in referrer drop down menu on he order page. You must let your customers know to
|