At the risk of sounding sensational, if you understand the concepts introduced in this article it could literally mean the difference between miserable failure and insane online profits for your business. I'm not talking about a magical formula that will guarantee success, but it's something that all online marketers need to understand...
If you spend $50 on advertising and it generates more than $50 in net profits, that's a good investment.
Simple right? Well, through the use of proper testing and a "scientific" approach to advertising, there's no reason you can't turn your original $50 ad into millions of dollars in profits. It's just a matter of developing a system that creates a profit, and then reinvesting your initial profits back into your business in order to further expand your advertising.
Assume that through proper tracking of your website traffic you're able to determine that 1 out of every 100 visitors to your site buys "Product X". Let's also assume that on the sale of every Product X you make a $50 profit. Do you see that any ad you buy which delivers more than 100 visitors to your site per $50 spent is a profitable investment? Promoting a site should be approached with this type of a scientific or mathematical attitude. Any advertising you do is either profitable or not, and you need to know which it is so you don't waste time and money.
Here's a somewhat simplistic strategy that you could use to get started:
1. Use a combination of free or low-cost strategies to promote your web site, generating initial traffic which will serve as a starting point.
2. Through proper tracking of your site, determine the exact "value" of a visitor in terms of dollars and sense. This is absolutely critical.
3. Utilize paid advertising that proves to be profitable according to step 2, based on the value of a visitor and the number of visitors generated.
4. Through ongoing testing, tracking, and tweaking, try to increase the value of a web site visitor as well as response to your advertising.
5. Repeat steps 2-4 as necessary - or forever. The power of this scientific or mathematical approach to web site promotion is that once you have completed the steps you will have an almost automated advertising campaign that can literally send you all the traffic you need. Rather than spending hours and hours each day promoting your site, you simply buy more advertising.
The bottom line is that there are only 24 hours in a day and there's only so much you can do during that time. Free advertising strategies can be effective, but normally, anything that's "free" is going to "cost" you time.
On the other hand, if you could spend $1,000 a day on advertising to make $1,000 a day in profits, without spending hours doing it, why wouldn't you just do that? It's not hard at all. Consider Overture.com for example, where you can buy clickthroughs for as little as 1-25 cents.
That fits the formula quite nicely. Overture alone won't send you enough traffic to make you rich, but it's a good example of effectively promoting your site without spending much time doing it. And that's just one example of many! Give this 5-step scientific approach a try. If you find you just can't seem to make the formula work, there can only be a few reasons for it; either you're not advertising in the right places, your web site isn't doing its job, your profit margins are too low, or your product or service itself is the problem. Figure out which it is and you can't fail.
I hope this helps in your future marketing decisions.
David Bell
Advertising research and development center