Are You Investing In Your Business or Gambling on Your Business?

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. You have to test products. You have to test prices. You have to test advertising formats. You have to test headlines. You have to test ad copy. You have to test specific places to advertise. 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 in your business.Every marketing test is an investment in your business, 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.The problem in marketing presents itself when you start treating your advertising more like a gamble than an investment.

Most Internet businesses I have seen 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, most marketers have developed an idea that the Internet is somehow different than other advertising mediums. They think that if they just try enough differenttechniques, they may just magically come upon the technique that will make them a millionaire.You can't just throw your money into advertising. You need to have a plan behind everything you do. You need to know positively for sure 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 which I will show to you in a minute is the key to success in your marketing. You can't afford to gamble away your hard earned business income.I only have to ask you one question to determine whether you are treating advertising as a gamble or as an investment. How much does your web site 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 advertising you can use.If you don't know how much your web site makes per visitor on average, how can you determine how much to spend to obtain each visitor? If your web site brings in an average of a $1.00 per visitor, than you can afford to spend a lot more per visitor than a site which is bringing in only 5 cents per visitor.

What...you don't know how much your site makes per visitor? Well, then you have a problem. When you are using free advertising for your site, you may not consider this a very important number. Once you start spending some of your cash flow on marketing through, I can guarantee that if you don't know how much your site makes per visitor you are just working on a gamble.The simplest method of determining your profit per visitor is to just add up your web site income and all of your unique hits from the past month. Then, do a little math and divide the income by the number of hits you have received. That will give you a baseline number to get started with. As you start testing advertising more and more you are also going to want to determine how many hits and how much profit you get from each type of ads. All hits are not created equal. For example, through our own testing and the feedback we have received from other online marketers we have determined a few interesting things. Offline advertising will produce less hits than many types of online marketing, but usually they are of a much better quality than advertising types such as banner ads. They 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 20 cents 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 come in. We have to turn our advertising into a scientific investment instead of a haphazard gamble. We 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 advertising mediums are working for you...and which ones aren't.Step One: Set Up A Web Site Tracking System.The first thing you will have to do to start finding out what advertising works for you is to set up some kind of tracking system. If you aren't tracking your visitors, then you can just forget about making intelligent advertising decisions.Also note that you need to be tracking more than just the overall traffic of your site. You need to know where people are going to on your site and you need each of your web pages tracked as well. There are three simple ways to track your web site stats. 1. You Can Use a Free Counter for Each Page on Your Site.There are two popular counters I have used that I can recommend to you. Both Web Tracker and Superstats have free counters that you can use.

The advantage of this method is that it is pretty simple to set up. You sign up for their service and then you insert their code into your site.The disadvantage is that you will have a small link back to them on your site which may cost you a little traffic. An even bigger disadvantage is that you will need to sign up and insert a separate code on every one of your pages so that each page can be tracked separately. Having overall domain stats won't do you that much good if you don't know where they are coming from and who the buyers are.