www.narvinta.com

Whether you are a full time affiliate marketer or running a business, online or off. Your success is going to depend on the advertising you do.

All successful business owners will tell you a huge amount of their time and/or budget goes into advertising. So to keep from wasting your valued time or your hard earned money, it only makes sense to make wise choices when you advertise.

Fortunately for those advertising online there is a huge market of widely varied free promotion. Giving you much freedom to test which types, of ads as well as ad sites, work the best, before you have to pay anything out of pocket. Once you know what is working then you can make better choices in what you spend your money and time on to advertise your business.

By using the free options wisely you will find out very valuable data to help you with future promotions. Such as:

What type of free ad site works best - i.e. Safelists, Classified Ads, Free For All - FFA sites, Banner Exchanges, etc.

What ad titles and ad copy, or banners do best for each type of ad site.

What day of the week and the time of that day gets you the most traffic for your effort.

By comparing sign ups or sales on a particular day or per month, you will even be able to tell the conversion ratio per clicks.

To find out the above data you will need a good tracking program or software. Choose one that allows you to make separate campaigns which will create a unique URL for each. So you can have the freedom to create a campaign for specific ads such as an ad with a certain title, or for example where you are promoting, such as classifieds, ffa, safelists, etc. Then also at the very minimum you will need to be able to track unique hits, IP address, days/months/hours and of course Referral URL’s - where your hits are coming from. I also highly recommend using a tracking system that does not put a ? in the tracking URL, it gives you to use, as this will cause problems with many of the free ad sites on-line. Many times everything you have after the ? will get cut off, rendering the URL useless as it will not take the person reading the ad to the right URL you set up in your tracking system.

Once you have the ability to track your ads you are ready to create some titles and copy. After creating them, then go to your tracking and create campaigns based on them. How you do this depends on what is easiest for you. You might simply create campaigns named ad1, ad2, and so on or as mentioned above you can base them on the type of ad site and possibly name them ffa, classads or sl for safelists. Save your ads in .txt files and put the unique tracking URL with each ad, for future comparison while analyzing the tracking results.

After you master how to track your ads you will then know what to spend your money on if you decide to pay for advertising. There are many options out there from safelist and ezine solo ads to whole packages which include multiple methods all in one. But for an example if you see that regular safelist promotions are working well for your ad, then that will tell you more then likely a paid solo ad will do even better. Or say you find a particular headline that does really well in the classifieds, this might be a good candidate for some paid text ads in ezines, safelists or on web sites that sell them. The same goes for banner ads. Try different ones out in the many free exchanges out there, tied to a tracking URL to let you know where, when and how you get clicks. If a certain banner does well, it will probably be worth putting it on some paid banner sites. And so on…

If you are like most of us out here, budgets are tight and time is even more limited, so don’t waste another minute… Get started gathering the information you need to make wise advertising choices for your business promotions.

Sincerely, Debbie Ducker

———— About the Author ————
Debbie Ducker is the owner of: DuckerPromotion.com
And editor of the “Ducker Promotion Free Internet Marketing Ezine”.
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Are you a business owner representing a product or service? What’s your point of differentiation? What separates you from your competitors? Is it quality? Is it the price? Is it the packaging? Is it placement or promotion? The bottom line is are you selling? If not, why not? The answer may lie in advertising.

They say nothing happens unless you advertise. No advertising = no sales. But many business people are leery of paid advertising because it just doesn’t seem to return the investment. There are many reasons for thisthrowing out spotty advertisements, whether online or offline doesn’t work well most often and who can afford to advertise en masse regularly? People are desensitized by hyper advertising on TV, radio, Internet, junk mail, magazines, etc. People are getting smarter and tuning advertising outpeople are getting tired of the Wall Street advertising mentality that has spurred so many books and college courses. As a result, big business advertising focuses on higher and higher volumes of repetitive mass advertising to beat their message into the fewer and fewer minds still receptive to this kind of junk noise. Don’t believe me? How do you REALLY feel about advertising you see or hear? Are you sick of it? So are 300 million other people. But what are the alternatives for communicating your offer?

Advertisers are very creative little sneaks who try all kinds of angles to fool you into not realizing you are being advertised atthey cloak advertisements into “infomercials” and now they cloak infomercials into looking like some PBS interview. Buzz words like “info-ads” which are designed to highlight the problems you didn’t know you had (like Ezine articles) and set forth-easy solutions to complicated problems if you only “buy now”. And you can read article after article, book after book and the bottom line remains the samethe only people making money advertising are the ones selling advertising.

And do you realize the product or service you offer really doesn’t matter when you advertise? You can take all products and services in the world and put them into two big piles: The GOOD products and the BAD products. Keep in mind that a good marketing team can sell bad products but a bad marketing team cannot sell good products. And what is the definition of a “bad product” anyway? The definition for a bad product is when people send it back because it sucks and they want their money back. If your product sells and you don’t get a return or a compliant then, for all practical purposes you have a good product. Why isn’t it selling then?

People have a tendency to blame the product if the advertising doesn’t sell it. But if you have a good product and run an ad and nothing happens how can you blame the product? The product is inert. It’s just sitting there waiting to be sold. It’s not the product fault. It’s the ADS fault. So you can simplify your life by eliminating the “product problem” mentality and wrap your mind around the fact you have an advertising problem instead. Which takes us back to the beginning of this article.

Point of differentiationwhat’s the point of differentiation of a paper clip? Keep in mind that paperclips are a competitive billion-dollar industry.

Okay, here’s the bottom line to this articleif you are not having any luck advertising your product online and can’t afford mass advertising then a really SIMPLE solution is to use Off-line classified ads in newspapers. These ads are cheap ranging from $10.00 to $50.00 depending on the location of the newspaper and readerships/subscriptions. But there is no better place to spend advertising dollars if you are on a small budget. You are going to make mistakes when you advertise as you hone up your headline and hook to get people to take action and you can do very specific tests in various markets to gauge classified advertising response. Do you have a website? Take a cue from Travelocity.com, PriceLine.com and other big players on the Internetthey all advertise conventionallyon TV! Why? Internet advertising sucks. We have a business kit called “Advertising Works” which is a very carefully constructed manual on writing effective classified ads to drive people to your website. It shows you how to write ads but more importantly it shows the entire U.S. market and how classifieds can be used to drive the market to your website cheaply by reducing the amount of type in the classified advertisement so they only cost a few dollars. For example a classified ad could read as follows: ADVERTISING WORKS! www.smart67.com and that’s it! CHEAP AD! No phone, no hype, just a headline and a website address. The goal is to test headlines. Test, test, test! Check it out

Copyright © 2006
James W. Hart, IV
All Rights reserved

SBS is an online information resource for people. Our focus is real estate and business and we have a number of important books, kits and Ebooks including free downloads and high quality link categories to help you get information fast. SBS has an aggressive link exchange program for anyone with a websitevisit us now by clicking this link http://www.smart67.com.

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