Building An Online Business Takes Commitment

I recently launched a new online business technical training site after a pre-launch period of about three weeks. During that period I did some promotion of the site and had a form on the landing page to collect names and email addresses of those interested in knowing when the site went live.

A total of 78 people opted in and when the site went live, of course, I emailed those folks to let them know. One of those people turned out to be a fellow marketer living about 40 minutes from me. She emailed me to let me know that a few days prior to the site launch.

Launch day came and I got another email from her saying how she was sorry, but she “couldn’t afford [my] prices” and she wouldn’t be signing up for the site. She then went into a long dissertation about how she had to be very careful how she spent her money and how there are lots of scam artists out there and that she had the perfect plan for making her fortune on the Internet.

You ready? Here’s the plan:

1. Put up a squeeze page and collect a bunch of names and emails
2. Get those people to trust her
3. Join an affiliate program and sell the product to her list

Here I’d been working my tail off for almost two years to get this Internet marketing thing figured out and she had it down to three simple steps! Who knew?!?

Obviously, she left out a few details in the master plan, like how she was going to get people to visit her squeeze page and leave their contact info so that she could then convince them she was trustworthy. I wrote back to her and told her that if she already knew how to put up a squeeze page and drive traffic to it she didn’t need my training anyway. I wondered what had prompted her to sign up for my prenotification list in the first place, but decided not to ask.

I had previously asked her what she felt was a reasonable price for online business technical training, but never got an answer. I felt (and still do) the charter membership rate was very reasonable, maybe even too reasonable, but it’s all in the eye of the beholder. I restrained myself from asking her how she expected to build an online business with a mindset that was afraid to spend a few dollars a month for training, but since she apparently doesn’t need training, the point is moot anyway.

The point of this is that I can recall when I first started out and the idea of committing to spending more than a few bucks a month was a little scary. The reason it was scary was that I didn’t know if I was going to generate enough revenue to cover it.

That can be a big hurdle for people to get over. It often entails being willing to go ahead and commit to the monthly expense and trusting that the investment will help the business generate the necessary revenue. It also requires some patience as the cash flow may not increase dramatically, but slowly over time.

The key is to make the commitment and put in the required effort. If it doesn’t pay off, you’ll have learned something and you can go on to the next thing. Chances are, however, if you give it sufficient time to work, the results will be well worth the investment.

John The Geek

Tracking Ad Results – Preliminary Case Study

I’m in the process of promoting a new membership site I’ve created. For the curious, it’s called Marketing Tech Secrets and you can get all the details about it here.

The purpose of this post is not to promote MTS (I did that already in an earlier post), but to demonstrate some of the things you can learn by tracking the results of your promotional efforts.

I currently use a total of 9 advertising sites each of which offers one or more of the following ad methods: text ads, banner ads, exit ads, or solo email ads. I have upgraded memberships in all but one of them.

I’ve been using these sites for months now to send out promotional emails and advertise affiliate products. I’ve been meaning to implement some kind of tracking mechanism and never got around to it. Now that I have my own product, it got pushed to the top of the priority list.

The system I’m using is very simple right now. Each link I use has a code appended to it which gets read by the landing page. The system simply counts the number of times a given code is seen and stores the counts in a database table.

Eventually, I’ll make it more sophisticated, but for now, it’s already giving me some interesting information. Primarily, it’s showing me how effective these ad sites are (or not) in terms of driving traffic to my site. Pretty important thing to know, right?

Here are the results from the past 12 days:

Text and Banner Ads

Solo Email Ads

* List Joe is a special case. The number looks really good compared to the other sites until you recall that List Joe is a credit-based safelist. That means that people click a link in the email they receive which displays my site for 20 seconds while the credit counter counts down to zero and the user gets credit for viewing my site. A very high percentage of those people probably never even look at the site, but the fact is that they’re at least opening it and it’s up to me to have something on there that grabs their attention.

Conclusions

Leads Leap is far and away the best deal for the money it costs me. I’m a Pro member of Leads Leap for which I pay them $27 per month. My text ads are seen in their newsletters and on their blog and they’re obviously effective as there were about two and a half times the number of hits on my page as the next most effective site.

Target Ads Depot was a distant second to Leads Leap, but still much better than most of the rest of the sites. I’m a lifetime Pro member of Target Ads Depot meaning that I paid once and I have a text ad, a banner ad, and an exit ad for life. The above results only reflect the text ad. So far, there haven’t been any hits on the banner or the exit ads.

Croc Ads did reasonably well in the text ads category. I’m a lifetime Pro member of Croc Ads which means I paid them once and I have two text ads free for life on their system. The results weren’t as impressive as Leads Leap, but only one of my two ads was for MTS.

Aside from List Joe, in the email category only ViralURL scored impressive results. I think that speaks volumes to the responsiveness of ViralURL members. Whereas List Joe‘s members are surfing for points, ViralURL members are actually opening up the emails and clicking on the links to visit the advertised site with no artificial incentive to do so.

I think this was the most interesting statistic of all of them. Where most of the email sites were pretty lame in terms of response, and List Joe‘s curve is skewed, it could be argued that my headlines or emails weren’t compelling enough to get people to open them. I think the ViralURL results refute that. The identical emails were sent to ViralURL as to the rest of the sites and obviously were interesting enough to get them to open them many times more often than the other sites. The only variable was the site and its members.

I hope the importance of doing at least minimal tracking of your promotional efforts is obvious. From these results I can see that only a few of the sites I use are giving me any kind of decent return on the effort I’m expending to use them. In most cases, I’m a paid up lifetime member so it’s not costing me additional money to use them. I’ll continue to use them, but the best performing sites will be the priority when I need to decide which sites I have time for in any given day.

John The Geek

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Marketing Tech Secrets – Coming Soon!

Yes, this is a blatant plug for my new training site called Marketing Tech Secrets. Hey, if I don’t think it’s worth promoting, who will, right?

Seriously, I’ve made every effort to make Marketing Tech Secrets a valuable resource for Internet business owners and others who want to learn the technical skills necessary to run a web site. There’s nothing secret about any of this stuff, of course, but if you don’t know something, it’s a secret to you!

I’ve noticed in my experience in Internet marketing that a large percentage of people have difficulty with the technical aspects of their web sites. That’s understandable because if you’re not used to dealing with computers and networks and servers and the various services needed to run a business on the Web, it can be daunting.

My intention is to bring my nearly 30 years of professional computer expertise to bear on this problem and help people learn what they need to know to run their web-based business effectively. Whether you’re starting from scratch, or you’ve put up a site or two and want to learn about autoresponders and other tools of the trade, or you’re ready to dive into dynamic pages written in PHP, Marketing Tech Secrets has something for you.

I’ve divided the course into three levels so that you may join at the level closest to your current skill level and not have to sit through all that stuff you already know. You’ll be able to join at Square One if you’re just starting out, Level Two if you’ve got the basics down already, or Advanced if you’re ready to write scripts and dynamic pages to take your sites to another level.

What makes Marketing Tech Secrets unique is that it’s not simply a weekly lesson emailed to you to figure out on your own. Each level of Marketing Tech Secrets will have its own private discussion group where members may ask questions and get the answers they need from their fellow members or me. In short, you have access to my professional experience as much as you want while you’re an active member of Marketing Tech Secrets.

Get all the details and subscribe to our pre-notification list here:

http://MarketingTechSecrets.com

John The Geek