Advertising And Marketing, Finally, A Plan!!

By Author: jim Peters
Total Articles: 3
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First things first, let's define the two. Advertising is the act
of getting your message in front of an audience. There are any
number of ways to do this, that's really not the theme of this
message. Being able to track a sale backwards to the advertising
that produced it, is.

Second, Marketing is the over all process you use to promote
your products and/or services. This includes advertising, but is
in no way limited to advertising. Again the theme here is not to
talk about marketing techniques, but the method's you can use to
track their success.

The very nature of the Internet provides you with a variety of
unique tracking methods. At it's very simplest you can produce
10 separate web pages to advertise in 10 different forums.

EXAMPLE: You have a page selling widgets you want to do a banner
campaign with 10 different banners. You can create 10 mirror
pages i.e. Widgets.html, Widgets1.html, Widgets2.html etc, etc.

In this way a different URL is associated with each of the
different banners you send out and your able ...
... to track which
banner is producing the most traffic from 10 identical sites..

There is a much simpler and less time intensive way however, to
achieve that exact same result.

You have your index page and rather than mirroring it 10 times
you simply add ?Widgets1 , ?Widgets2, ?Widgets3, etc, etc, to
the URL.

TEST IT HERE:

http://NetServeInt.com

http://NetServeInt.com/?index1

http://NetServeInt.com/?index2

http://NetServeInt.com/?index3

Even though the same page is served up to your visitors, your
server logs treat it as 10 different pages!

You can use this method to track any type of campaign not just
banners. If you were to advertise in a publication such as this
one, (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED BY THE WAY) as well as others using the
same URL in all of them, you would have no way of knowing that
80% of the traffic produced from those ad's came from here. If
however you used a different URL ?index2, ?index3, etc, etc. You
would know which ad drew how much traffic.

Do you use (LEGAL) e-mail methods to advertise? This technique
will also work in that forum. Simply alter your URL as described
above in each of your different promo letters and your able to
track which ones produce the most traffic. Thereby allowing you
to discard the ones that don't produce. Just as you will the z-
ine, newsletter, or banner champaign that's not paying it's way.

As an added BONUS you can do exactly the same type of thing with
e-mail responses. Rather than having 10 different response
addresses.

You place an ad with an e-mail link or have an e-mail link
rather than a URL attached to a banner or any other response
link. As in the URL example you vary the link according to where
it will be seen.

EXAMPLE: Ad running in 4 E-Zines

1st one has e-mail link <A HREF="mailto:info@Widgets.com?subject=Widgets1">here:
2nd one has e-mail link <A HREF="mailto:info@Widgets.com?subject=Widgets2">here:
3rd one has e-mail link <A HREF="mailto:info@Widgets.com?subject=Widgets3">here:
4th one has e-mail link <A HREF="mailto:info@Widgets.com?subject=Widgets4">here:

As you can see the reply you receive has a different text
in the subject field. Allowing you to track were
your responses are originating from.

Those methods are all well and good, but if your truly
interested in tracking your marketing results there is,
in my opinion really only one tool you need.

Anyone that is trying to bring traffic to their site is using
some form of advertising or other. That is, you use a sig file,
newsletter, e-zines, reciprocal links, banner ads, classifieds,
e-books, giveaways, or some other method for getting your
message to potential customers. With ROIbot, you can set up
campaigns for every new traffic building idea you come up with
and track the effectiveness of each. Then, you do more of what
works and less of what doesn't. It's a simple concept, place
your energy in the direction that it's doing you the most good.
Get started right now Free. You'll be up and running in minutes.

No matter what way you choose to track your promotional efforts
it's important that do track them. You can waste countless hours
and dollars on a strategy that is actually producing no results.
You may well find that the less costly method works as well if
not better than the one that cost you an arm and a leg.

Again, it matters not which method you choose, it only matters
that you choose one and use it faithfully. You'll be surprised
how much information your begin to have at your disposal.

"Your Success Is Our Success"

jbp
About the Author [ jim Peters is Manager of NSI "SOLUTIONS". NSI
specializes in custom website design,promotion, maintenance, domain
registration ,site
hosting ,site and graphic design, as well as e-commerce
packages for small to medium sized companies. In other words
"SOLUTIONS".]