Start out with your own home based internet business can be a very exciting time and a very frustrating time. Everyone knows that the only way to get sales is that you first need to get quality traffic to your website.
Lets face it, ability to make big money drives our excitement level over the top. In addition, our desire to get money start rolling in the door today or tomorrow, and we have the basic formula for failure. In this mindset, is the advertising campaigns are not normally performed in a business of fashion. Our emotions cloud our judgments.
What you should never do is to advertise blindly, without a clear plan for what you want to achieve with advertising. Let us say that John is the owner of a small pet gate business just starting out. He signs up with Google Adwords and establish a campaign to advertise its business.
For this example case, we will assume that John is not a very good job with his ad. His ad clearly the benefits of his pet gates and his choice of keywords are all very relevant to his product. The first thing John meetings is that his ad is not displayed on the first page of paid advertisers. Google tells him that he needs to raise his bid to get higher in the paid placements. John doubles its bid.
The higher bid seemed to have done the trick. But after several days, $ 250 worth of clicks, and 200 visitors to his website, John has zero sales.
After a week and no success, what seems obvious on John's first advertising campaign?
a) his expectations were unrealistic
b) He had no advertising plan
c) he had no clear advertising budget
d) He had no form of measurement
e) He had absolutely no idea why he was not getting any sales
The first lesson of advertising is that you should never start any campaign, unless you are fully aware of your expectations. You must have a benchmark to measure your success against. If you want to use the money you need to get value from this investment. Although the sale is always the ultimate goal in the early days for any business, your advertising dollars go to test market, test your advertising messages and keywords, and testing the resultant activity on your site.
How John should out if there really is an online market for his pet doors? One of the simplest ways to do this is to do a search using your keywords and check to see if there are any paid advertisers in the results. The more paid advertisers are, the more likely there is a viable market. The next thing John should do is to check whether the same advertisers appear at the top of the list each day over a few weeks. If they do, then this would indicate that these advertisers are making a profit with their ads.
When John has held that there is a market, he should review the ads that appear on top of this list. How are they selling the product benefits and how they will encourage consumers to act?
To differentiate them in this market, should John visit landing pages for its competitor’s ads and ask you what makes his website different.
With this intelligence in the pocket, is John ready to prepare a detailed marketing plan including specific ad testing, keyword testing and website landing page testing.
John should then create an advertising plan with a maximum budget and identify the results that he wanted to test (CTR, landing page bounce rate, which keywords are most effective, and finally, what combinations that result in sales).
Most marketers will tell you that you must have at least 1,000 clicks to make a test campaign worth. The first results of all tests are not always accurate. You have to acquire a fairly broad market view before coming to any conclusions.
Unfortunately, we spend money to earn money. But every dollar you use to have a purpose, or you are you one to throw money out the window.
If you are nervous about spending this kind of money without really knowing what you do, then we would suggest that you join an online marketing company to help you through the first few months. Getting your marketing program aligned to your website is no easy task, but once you get it right, it can be very profitable.
