In the never-ending search to make money online, all website owners want to drive traffic to their website quickly.
The main problem they face: finding traffic that converts to buyers without going broke.
In their rush to get the traffic they need, many website operators start spending money on the ad buying problem and drain their ad budget to no significant profit (unless you count the person they paid for the ad). advertising).
The following three rules should help any business, large or small, make money from its online advertising.
** Set an online advertising budget **
Most businesses, especially smaller ones with a few (or even one) people, don’t operate on an advertising budget.
Advertising money is spent when you pay for everything else, or worse yet, when you spend money on advertising without a plan, you are basically gambling with your money.
By setting an advertising budget, you can include it in the big picture of your business and give you a yardstick to measure results.
If you have a budget of $ 500 a month to advertise and look for ways to spend that money wisely, then your business will grow more predictably than if you advertise sporadically and then wonder why you are not operating with a predictable income stream.
** Follow the numbers **
Unlike offline advertising on billboards, magazines, or direct mail, you can track virtually every aspect of an online ad, including: how many people saw the ad; how many people clicked on the ad; how many sales and how much revenue the ad generated.
Since you can keep track of everything, you can try various phases of the advertising process.
Regardless of whether you operate a real estate agent website, sell an e-book, or sell your plumbing services online, you can and should measure every phase of the advertising process.
If your ad clicks fall below expectations, work on your ad until it generates a healthy click-through rate that turns viewers into website visitors.
If you don’t convert many of the website visitors you receive into buyers, then your site needs to improve to do a better job selling people.
By following the numbers, you can see where you need to focus in the online sales process.
Rule number one of online advertising: Use a unique tracking link for each and every one of your ads, preferably one that tracks not just uniques, but sales as well.
This can add an additional 5-10 minutes of work to each ad placement, but it will allow you to see which ads are making a profit (so you can run them again) and which are not (so you can change or cancel them). ).
** Go beyond pay per click **
Google AdWords and Overture, the web’s top pay-per-click advertising sources, have made people lazy.
Many website owners never go beyond buying advertising from these two. However, there is a whole world of advertising buying ads on websites that are targeted at specific niche audiences.
For more information, visit http://www.adbrite.com, a leading online text link and banner advertising broker.
Copyright 2005 Jim Edwards
