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. 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. Every marketing test is an investment in your venture 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.
Are You Investing Or Gambling In Your Online Marketing?
The core problem in marketing presents itself when you start treating your advertising more like a gamble than an investment. Most internet
businesses 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 or other, the majority of marketers have developed an idea that the internet is somehow different from other promotional mediums. They think that if they just try enough different techniques, they may just magically come upon the technique that will make lots of money.
You can’t just throw your money into promotion. You need to have a plan behind everything you do. You need to know 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 is the key to success in your marketing. You can’t afford to gamble away whatever you earn from promotion.
How Much Does Your Website 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 promotion you can use.
Establishing How Much To Spend On Website Visitors
If you don’t know how much your website makes per visitor on average, how can you determine how much to spend to obtain each visitor? If your website brings in an average of a £1.00 per visitor, then you can afford to spend a lot more per visitor than a site which is bringing in only 5p per visitor. When you are using free advertising for your site you may not consider this to be very important, but once you start spending some of your cash flow on marketing, I can guarantee that if you don’t know how much your site makes per visitor you are just working on a gamble.
Computing Your Income And Unique Visitors
The simplest method of determining your profit per visitor is to just add up your website income and all of your unique hits from the past month. Then divide the income by the number of visits you have received. That will give you a baseline number to get started with. As you start testing promotion more and more, you are also going to want to determine how many hits and how much profit you get from each type of ad. All visits are not created equal. Offline advertising will produce fewer visits than many types of online marketing, but usually they are of a much better quality than promotional formats such as banner ads. These offline visitors 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 20p 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 comes in. You must convert your promotion into a scientific investment instead of a haphazard gamble. You 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 mediums are working for you – and which ones aren’t.