Take Care of YOUR Advertising Budget and SAVE Big Money

A. Well, there a million things that one needs to keep in mind before starting any new project. But let's just keep it simple. The main thing I keep in mind is to find or create a product or service where a MARKET and a DEMAND for it already exists.

This reduces your risk tremendously ... and there is less effort and money spent.

For example, we recently launched an awesome marketing tool at www.adminder.com. It's VERY successful mainly because it's something that ANY and ALL businesses need. If your goal is to make even $1, AdMinder will help you do it.

We don't have to go looking for customers ... they come to US because they need AND want to use it to make more money online.

A. Once we've designed a new site, integrated the order processing system, etc. and everything is working properly, we prepare to start advertising (the marketing campaign).

No matter how we promote (free or paid sources), the MOST IMPORTANT factor is we make sure we have our tracking systems in place so we know what's going on once the promotions begin and the traffic hits.

We are spending valuable time and money on this and we aren't going to do any guess work. We want SCIENTIFIC numbers telling us what's going on, what's happened and what we need to do to increase sales and profits.

A. That's what most people do, but no, that's not what I mean at all. From a marketing standpoint, log file analysis is only half the battle. Analyzing your server logs will tell you how visitors are navigating your website, and what they do when they arrive, but it won't give you the rest of the information you need.

And generally speaking, for most people, it's very difficult to really make good sense out of your log files. I know for us, as our sites grow, the log files get more confusing and less accurate.

Like I said, you logs only give you a small fraction of the real information. For example, which of your ads and promotions are generating the most traffic, and even more importantly, the most sales (what's making you money - plain and simple).

These are just a few that come to mind, but without this information you're really just flying blind and wasting your time and money.

A. In order to maximize the "return on our investments" (ROI) in advertising, we carefully monitor a whole bunch of things.

Such as...

* Unique visitors generated by each ad or promotion

* Number of sales generated by each ad or promotion

* Which ads are generating the most traffic and sales

* Cost-per-click, cost-per-sale, and clicks-to-sales ratios for each ad or promotion

* Return on investment, or ROI, for each ad or promotion

Those are the most important bits of information that we monitor on a minute-by-minute basis. Aside from ROI, my favorite stat is the clicks-to-sales ratio because it gives a great indication of the "quality" of traffic that is being generated by each ad or promotion.

For example, just last week I ran the same ad in 2 different but supposedly "targeted" e-zines. One of the ads is resulting in an average of 1 sale per every 36 visitors, and the other ad is only generating 1 sale out of every 152 visitors. You tell me, which of these e-zines would you prefer to advertise in?

A. Right. EXACTLY! See, if you are only doing one or two ads, you can track everything manually. It's not that big of a deal. It's not that stressful. But as your ads grow and your "repeats" ads, you're going to go crazy trying to track everything. Before you know it, it becomes too much of a hassle and you stop.

A. Simplicity, that's the key! We are all too busy these days to be doing "monkey work".

A. Yes! Most definitely. Heck, we make just as much money off of our "free" promotion tactics as we do with our paid (maybe more). It's not just about saving money, it's about saving time as well.

That's why we track ever and any type of promotion.

For example, let's say you have a newsletter or e-zine and in it, you have links for various affiliate programs or articles at your own site that sell something indirectly. You can track to see which TYPE of article or promotion did the best.

If an article about e-zine advertising was 3 times more effective at bringing traffic BACK to your site then an article on banner advertising, you will know to spend the majority of your time posting and distributing the e-zine article.

Does this make sense?

A. Right. Well, live and learn. We all make these mistakes. But the problem is that someone reading this article will realize it, but WILL NOT DO ANYTHING about it.

That's not making a mistake. That's just being stupid. There are specific ways and reasons why people make money ... and others do not. Now that you know tracking is vital, DO IT!

A. Yup. Well said!

A. Oh yeah, that formula rocks! But I didn't come up with it. I'm probably the first to present it to the Internet world, but I learned something similar to it years ago when I did consulting for infomercials. I added my own twist to it. But no, I don't think I've ever invented anything (he chuckles).

A: Well, I've already presented the exact "formula" at our site - www.adminder.com. So, it's best for your readers to just go there since I don't like to repeat myself and bore those that already have read about my formula.

But I'll give you a simple explanation of it and a different "twist" for those that already use the formula.

Frank Bettger, a phenomenal salesman of the 1930s, shared the secret of his success in his classic "How I Raised Myself From Failure To Success In Selling". After analyzing his first year's sales, Bettger discovered that 70% were made on the FIRST interview, 23% on the second interview and only 7% on the third.

His greatest revelation was that he spent HALF of his time going after that last 7 percent! When he realized this, he began concentrating his efforts on those FIRST interviews and nearly DOUBLED his income overnight!

A: Yes, precisely! Heck, with all of the great technology that we have today, not many people track their promotion efforts. Just imagine if Bettger didn't track anything. YEARS would go by and he would continue to make the same mistakes ... wasting valuable time and money.

Yet, by analyzing his work, in only a few minutes he realized exactly what he needed to do to increase his sales, make more money and save time.

A: Right. Now, the hardest part is just doing it. Getting started seems to be a problem for most. They think it will take a lot of time and effort setting up a tracking system. But if you know where and what to look for, it's simple, fast and almost free.

A: Well, there are a million ways of doing something. Let me go over a few of the options and you can decide what's best for you.

You can buy special software that will do all the tracking for you. The problem is that they are VERY expensive and very difficult to use. Most people aren't "tech" smart and won't know how to use all the features of a program.

Your next option is to purchase a script. This is good. But the problem is that most are just glorified "hit" counters. They don't track the important stuff ... the specifics that you would need to know. I have found a couple that were pretty good, but they were also very expensive and the installation was crazy. Multiple scripts needed to be installed and your server had to have some special settings and so forth. The server had to be strong enough to also handle all the data being processed. Again, most people just don't have the "tech" knowledge or the time or the money to do it on their own.

Your last option is to use a web-based service. There are a few. As with everything, a few are horrible, a few are okay and a couple are good.

Because it costs you no setup time or hardware or programming knowledge or special servers or any of that stuff, I'd recommend for most to do a web-based service. At the very least, give it a try for a few months and just see how it goes. There are no contracts or anything like that. You get to test things out, risk free.

A: I'm not going to recommend anything to anyone. I'm biased and I'm not going give my opinion on any specific company. But all I can say is that whatever was out there, I did NOT like and am NOT using. That's why we designed our own custom system and that's why some of the much larger companies on the Net are now using our system.

It's precise, complete, proven and guaranteed. Let me ask you, what do YOU like that's out there?

A: What else do you like about it?

A: Sure, sounds good and thank you Harry, for the kind words.

A: My pleasure. Bye.

1. Every single online marketer needs it.
2. It's the best product of its kind, bar none.
3. AND it's also the least expensive.