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Ad Content

Ad Size

When to change your headline

Ad Tracking and Hit Counters

 

          "Marketing is not a battle of products, but of perceptions."

 

 

Your AD Content:   writing riveting advertising content is an art form and requires time, creativity  imagination, empathy, experience and emotional insight. I suggest you have a quality Dictionary and Thesaurus at hand, you will find them extremely useful if you want to avoid using repetitive, uninspiring words and phrases. Scrutinize ads posted to you - do they "grab" you? Yes? well don't copy them exactly but work around the writer's theme and concept. Glean as much information from the people who are successful, creative ad writers.

 

Start your ad copy and content with an emotion-packed opening statement that will get the attention of your reader. Your opening statement may be: 

 

a headline

 

an opening sentence

 

a subject line on an email

 

a header on a web page

 

What's important is that you understand - your first words count for everything, because you must captivate people's imagination in those words in order to keep their attention. You must endeavor to paint a picture in your reader's mind of how your offer will satisfy their needs and wants. ( remember - "what's in it for me?")

 

Then, after your emotion-packed opening statement, you just:

 

make a promise or guarantee - be secure in the fact your product/service can deliver the goods

 

Back it up with convincing proof - testimonials and case studies  are living proof for example, guarantee your product or service! Promote your success and credibility

 

Ask for action - always ask for action in the most positive way possible. Spell out what you want the reader to do - mail me, join now, read this, etc.

 

It is a well known fact the ability to write successful ads is the ultimate  wealth-producing skill.

 

The following suggestions overcome many issues that many would-be marketers see as obstacles or negatives:

 

no selling!

no sponsoring!

no meetings!

no phone calls!

no group volumes or recruiting level required!

automated sponsoring system!

down-line built for you!

online support!

no presentations!

no face to face selling!

no inventory!

no sales reports to submit!

no time required!

no cost, no obligation!

money-back guarantee!

no work no pay! (sorry! just my sense of humor!)

 

At times it can be useful to quote statistics such as: "230,000 new affiliates have joined in the last 6 months" or "230,000 people can't be wrong", however, it may also be a negative as some people may feel that they may have "missed the boat" by not getting in at an early recruiting stage. To some it may act as a deterrent. I don't believe this is so, your success is totally dependant on your own individual efforts, if you have the capabilities to stand out with your own unique marketing strategies you won't just be one of a large group competing against one another with the same offer. 

 

Others may see large recruitment numbers as a substantial benefit as it reinforces a successful image and adds to the credibility of the offer. 

 

The same resistance may apply if you use the following: "your downline built for you!" the question arises that "if they can build downlines, why do they need me? By the same token, many cyberspace marketing beginners find it difficult initially to generate substantial downlines and may perceive a positive aspect to a pre-built downline.

 

What works for some people doesn't work for others, stick to the basic guide-lines, trial and track your ads, analyze the results and refine them when and if necessary.

Advertisement Size:  There are numerous schools of thought as to what the size of successful ads should be, I have seen many varying recommendations and here are some examples:

 

" 10 lines is perfect!" -

" keep your ads short!" -

" don't use more than 6 lines!" -

" use as many lines as you like!" - 

" Ad size doesn't matter - it's the product that counts!" -

" Long content works on the web." - 

" If you can't get your message across in a few lines...." - 

" Most people won't get past your first four lines, but the ones that do want to know more about your business."  

 

Holy Mackerel!     Which is "Right" and which is "Wrong"?

 

The above examples illustrate only some of the many varying opinions regarding the size of ads. Bear in mind that ad sizes will also differ greatly depending on where they are going to be placed. The advertising mediums you are going to place them in will dictate to some extent the ad size, so the above or any other recommendations for ad size that you use still becomes a matter of refinement, trial and error.

 

As an example, your first ad response on your responder should be up to 10 lines, your second response message/ad would be longer with more detail, your third autoresponse - even more detail and perhaps with more inducements or limitations (bonus, freebies, time limitations etc.) The remainder?- short, forceful reminders that you haven't heard from the prospect yet (time is running out, bonus offer ends soon.get in before the rest, and so on).    

 

You will  encounter restrictions on ad-placement sites which always set a size limit for ads placed. Size limitations can be restricted to one-liners, URL only, the number of characters, or in some instances - the number of lines allowed-  generally paid advertising.) 

 

So, problem number one! you have spent a lot of time creating a text-book killer ad only to find that you can't fit it in to your ad submission box because of  the ad submission service's size limitations. It would be soooo easy to tailor your ad to suit them all, if only they all stipulated the same size limitation for ads. Some submission services allow 50 characters - some 100, 150, 200 or 250 characters and so on! - it's a real pain! So you see that you may have to modify your ads numerous times if only just to suit your ad submitter's requirements. 

 

My suggestion is to utilize good old Notepad or a similar utility to create your ad text with. One page for your headers, another page for one-liners, another for short ads, and another for medium-size or long ads. Or select headers to match short, medium and long ad content and have them on the same page. Pre-count the number of lines or characters for each and group them on your page as to the number of lines or characters  in each ad. When you're submitting an ad, open Notepad and select an appropriately-sized ad to submit.

Notepad can also make it easier to mix and match different ads to different headers to keep your advertising "fresh" and not repetitive. (note and other text editors included in Software -)

 

If, as suggested, you have several web sites, email  and autoresponder addresses you will need a substantial arsenal of prepared ad material ready when submitting, It definitely pays to be organized to save yourself unnecessarily wasted time when ad-placing.

 

Multiple gateway or portal pages are one of the best ways to get mass traffic to your website. Programs are available that allow you to create multiple gateway pages in a few seconds. What this means is that you can constantly resubmit your website to the search engines without being accused of spamming them as they will all have different URLS. This in effect will enhance your search engine ranking.

 

Be very careful when using autoresponder addresses with your ads, your real email address (or one of) will be required when you use a submission service - you can only show your responder address within the body or at the end of your ad, otherwise you will create a loop, (autoresponders responding to an autoresponder.) if this happens then it will be viewed pretty harshly by your submission service as it can create a major problem for them - tread carefully.

When should you change your Ads or Headers?

 

when you have a low or zero response rate

 

when you see identical headers on foreign ads

 

when your response rate is good, but sign-ups are few (low conversion rate)

 

when your response rates are good, but you want to increase them, - e.g. add a bonus offer

 

when you have designed a more creative and innovative ad and header

 

when you feel your ads and headers have become "stale"

 

when your product or service has  changed or improved with add-on value products etc.

 

Ad Tracking:   You should also track your advertising efforts. Why? because ad tracking will assist you in determining whether specific ads and submission services  are working for you.

 

Why waste your most valuable asset - your time,  on submitting ads that don't work or are not working in certain locations? 

 

Some affiliate programs give you the flexibility for you to add coding at the end of your URL - e.g. you could use two digit numbers after the URL  e.g. (from 01, to 99) If your URL ends with /352936 for example,  you would add .01  to track the success of a specific ad, your URL then is  /352936.01

 

Here's a little trick with a question mark? http://www.gateway.esmartbiz.com/index.html? whatever1 and  http://www.gateway.esmartbiz.com/index.html? whatever2, will both bring you to my site's homepage (try it!), but in my logs they will show up as 2 separate entry pages. So if you give each ad a unique link (like http://yourdomain.com/index.html?ad1), you will know exactly how many people clicked on that ad. A nice and easy way to track a specific ad's performance!

 

You can also add your own codes to your email address to track responses( e.g. add  "A"  to the end of your email address for your first ad, "B" for the second, and so on. Keep a record of your advertising codes and ad placements (write them down or use a small spread sheet,- no matter which method you use, just make sure you record them)  and refer to it, say at month-end, log the number of hits, affiliates or members that have been attracted by each code/ad. If an ad is not working for you, give it a couple of weeks and then change your ad/advertiser, especially if using paid advertising. Ad-tracking programs and software are also available, however there is generally a cost attached. (there are some free ones listed on my site)

 

below is a basic example of ad-tracking, you could expand this to show $cost per sign-up or other fields you may think to be useful.

date

time

frequency

program

email/URL/code

hits

signups

conversion rate

cost

6/10/00

9:00 AM

20 mins

Linkscout.com

"A"

120

10

8%

$25

6/10/00

10.00 AM

24 hrs

addme

352936.01

200

14

7%

0

6/10/00

10.15 AM

1 week

 

352936.02

240

24

10%

0

 

Another method of recording activity at your site/s is to add a hit counter or site meter/ tracker. (while  hit counters, meters and trackers do record activity at your site, they  don't reflect true success rates i.e. new customers, affiliates, members etc. You can get all the hits you want, but if it doesn't translate into customers and sales, then you have hits and
that's it! Counters and trackers do, however, provide useful statistics that can be applied to improve your Web presentation and strike rate. Yes! they  are available free and some are included in this site. Site meters for both Java and HTML versions  are available, however, HTML will not track URL's. 

 

Tracking indicators supply a web page statistics service that serves up all the information about your visitors you could ask for. They allow you to see how many people have visited your site; total and unique visits; browser types; visiting domains; referral listings (how visitors found your site); what time of day they visited; traffic patterns and much more. They give you five (or more) full days' worth of stats, and you can track as many pages as you wish. Setup is easy: just copy some lines of HTML to your page and you're all set. The information supplied varies slightly from one tracker to the other but they all provide the basics.

 

Ideally you would be looking for a site tracker that records where your visitor came from, where they went from your site, how long they stayed, which pages they browsed and for how long. This detailed information can give you an idea of what your visitor is interested in or what they are looking for. Which pages are working for you and which may need more content or may be non-topical or boring?

Email versus URL - the advantage of using your email address in your ad is that it gives you the opportunity to send a powerful sales letter to the ad respondent. This is where an autoresponder can really be effective - your autoresponder can send numerous follow-up messages to reinforce your offer  (and also capture the respondents email address.) Manually tracking ads is also much easier using an email address.

 

Keep your ads short? whenever possible, even if it means not using all the characters allowed. Short ads are more likely to be read. Keep your sentences short also; they pack much more punch. Use the word "you." Don't detail your product but focus on telling the reader what your product can do for them.

 

Short ad - long ad!   whatever, the basic principals still apply: use strong emotive words with impact to  "GRAB"  the reader's attention, stick to your point - tell your reader what to do next, and tell them what's in it for them!

 

"Nothing remains static in Internet Marketing, new ideas and concepts are being created every day!"     

           

         

                                                 

 

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