By Terry Dean
[April 26th, 2000]

See Also   Email Marketing Primer   How to Increase Your Online Sales   Take Advantage of Google's AdWords   Using Foreign Search Engines to Boost Your Sales   Getting Sure Profits Through Google, Goto.com and DirectHit   Ten Places You Must Submit Your Site   Clever Profit Growth Software   The Power Of Personalized Email   How To Go Long With Your Web Marketing   How NOT to Promote Your E-business   Winning the Search Engine Wars   Latest Tips on Search Engine Marketing   Are You Wasting Your Money Online?   Should I Hire Another Salesperson or Invest in an Affiliate Program?   The Death of Positioning?   Links: Why You Need Them and How to Get Them   Your #1 Overlooked Business Asset

Most webmasters are...and they don't even know about it.

When businesses start having to make budget cutbacks, the first thing they cancel is their advertising. Why? Most of the CEO's will tell you it is because they aren't sure if their advertising is effective or not. They spend millions of dollars in advertising without knowing whether it is working for them or not.

Most of my readers don't have millions to waste on ineffective advertising.

But even if you aren't spending a penny on advertising, you may be wasting 10 hours or more a week using ineffective "free" advertising (all marketing costs you either money or time).

Top copywriters will tell you that just changing the headline on your sales letter can increase or decrease your results by 1800% or more!

If you're not currently testing every ad you place or every free marketing effort you spend your time on, you could be wasting thousands of dollars in additional profits. One ad may have brought in $1,000 in orders...But if you kept testing, you may have been able to generate $18,000!

Testing is one of the major keys to business success... online, by mail order, or in a retail environment.

There aren't any web gurus no matter what anyone tells you or whoever claims to be one. There are just real people who have tested every ad they have placed, every site they have designed, and every moment they have spent online. After doing this for years, you begin to know what works... and what just doesn't work.

If you are going to spend 20 hours marketing your web site this month, don't you want to know that it is working for you?

If you are going to be paying $100 for an ezine ad, don't you want to make sure it is effective?

The only way to know for sure is to test and track everything you do online.

One way to do this is to use a CGI script to track all of your campaigns and to set up separate web pages for each of your ads.

Both of these methods are very effective, but they are also a lot of work...more work than most people are willing to do.

I even get a little lazy sometimes and haven't always used my OWN methods for tracking just because it took a few extra minutes to set them up. Yes, I know that sounds bad, but it is true.

Sometimes I have allowed myself to get so busy that I didn't have "time" to track my ads. This was a stupid thing to do, but I am sure you have made mistakes from time to time just like I have.

Well, I have found a solution for lazy tracking.

Mark Joyner, of Aesop Marketing Corporation, has come up with a tool called the ROIbot.

It is an ingenious, but simple solution to the online tracking problem. I wish I would have thought of it first, but I didn't.

Basically it works like this.

1. You sign up for a free account by going to: http://www.roibot.com/r.cgi?R249_WG

2. You create a campaign.

Say for example, you will be advertising in an upcoming ezine. So, you create a campaign for this. You may give it the code "WG317" to stand for the Web Gold issue coming out on 3/17. Then, you enter the URL you want people to click to. Press "submit" and your campaign is created.

The ROIbot then gives you a simple web address that looks like this: http://www.roibot.com/w.cgi?R249_WG317

If you click on the link above, it will take you to my main site at http://www.bizpromo.com

3. Then, you use that link in your ad and check on the results once your ad has been run.

By logging into your account you will find out how many clickthroughs occurred through your ad. If you receive hundreds, you know to keep advertising. If you get two, then you probably need to find a new advertising source.

I once advertised in an ezine that has 275,000 subscribers, but I only received less than 10 click throughs on my ad. Compare this to another ezine I advertised in which had 16,000 subscribers and actually had over a hundred clickthroughs and 21 sales of my product.

If I wasn't tracking my results, I wouldn't have known which ezine was effective for me.

What type of advertising Should You Be Tracking?

You should track all of your ads, but here are a few examples of how you could use the ROIbot to track your results.

1. Create a different campaign for each ezine you advertise in.

This way you can find out exactly how many clickthroughs you get from each ezine you are using to advertise your products (you will find even ezines which have good response rates don't pull well for certain offers).

2. Create two different headlines for a classified ad and run it two different weeks in an ezine which has proved responsive to your offer.

This will help you find out what is the best headline for your classified ads and even for your web site itself.

3. Create a different campaign for each discussion group that you participate in.

Find out which discussion boards are helping you build your traffic...and which ones don't help you at all. Where should you be spending your time most effectively?

4. When you send out articles to publishers, include a campaign ID in your signature/resource section.

Whenever someone online receives permission to publish one of your articles, you should be having them also list your resource box at the bottom. In it, advertise your site or product and include a campaign ID to find out how much traffic comes from article submissions.

Here is an interesting fact you will find out. When an ezine runs your article, place a classified ad the next week and notice the difference in results by using your ROIbot campaigns. You will find the article usually outproduces the ad by three times or more.

5. If you create a free electronic book, use different campaigns to track results for affiliate programs you mention inside of the ebook links.

That's right. You can track the traffic you send to affiliate links. You can find out how effective your freebie ebook is at producing traffic and sales for your multiple streams of income.

You should be Tracking Everything You Do.

The ideas above are just examples of the kinds of things you should be tracking. Forget the notion of a "Guru" of online marketing who is going to instantly wave his/her magic wand over you to make you an instant success.

Successful Internet businesses are not created on a whim. They are created by finding the most effective tools and strategies for your specific product or service. This can only be done by using different methods and finding out exactly which ones work for you and your business.

No "Guru" has all the answers. Only tracking has the answers!

Terry Dean is the author of Scientific Internet Advertising which will show you an incredible new Internet marketing system that makes you money even while you sleep. Click here now for more information.