Spring Cleaning Your Promotions

Home > Promote > Marketing > Articles

by Eva Almeida

Once a year we all get the urge to "Spring Clean" our homes and yards. I was thinking that it may also be a good idea to "Clean" out our promotional efforts as well!

Have you changed the way you advertise your business? Or are you doing the same thing day after day, yet not seeing any results? Why not find a way to track your sales or visitors to your site and stop using those methods that aren't working for you. I think many of us get in the rut of doing repetitive advertising say in classifieds or FFA's without even knowing if they are effective. Make sure to test them out with different headlines etc. to see what works and what doesn't.

How do you know which headlines and advertising mediums are effective? There are many ways to track your sites or sales. The simplest way is to tag on a ? plus any code you choose to your email address after the subject line or even after your own website address.

For example, when I advertise the Ezine Advertising Network with my email address, I use admin@healthandmoneytips.com?subject=EANart. Then my subject line in the email from a prospect would indicate they are interested in EAN from my article (art) so I would know exactly where the interest was generated from.

This is also a powerful way to find out where your visitors are coming from when advertising your own domain. For example, if I were to advertise in a particular web-based forum, I could list my url as http://www.healthandmoneytips.com?pt where pt could stand for the forum at http://www.profitalk.com. Note that this would only work if you had some form of statistics program for your domain (such as Wusage 6.0). When you view your stats, you would see how many came from the page listed with the ?pt ending.

If you are with an affiliate program then altering your url may not work, since you can't access their stats. Although there a few affiliate programs that allow you to do this such as the Internet Marketing Warriors site: http://www.privatesites.com/warriors.cgi?EA4291xxart. The xx + art shows that this url would be from my article.

Enough about how to set up tracking, now use your specially coded email addresses and urls to post to:

1. Ezines: This is a highly effective and targeted way to advertise your business through buying ads or submitting articles including your resource box with your coded URL There are numerous places to look for ezines such as:

a. www.lifestylespub.com
b. www.bestezines.com
c. www.ezineseek.com

The last URL is for a newsletter advertising network where members can place ads for only $8 for each ezine (regardless of subscriber base).

2. Web-based forums:

For for some top web-based forums to place helpful posts see the URL below and don't forget to include your signature file!

a. www.forumone.com

3. Email discussion forums:

Look for forums that match your business at:

a. www.onelist.com
b. www.egroups.com
c. www.topica.com
d. www.listbot.com

Some of my favorites are i-sales (for e-commerce) or epub@onelist.com (for ezine publishers).

4. Newsgroups: Be careful with these but some are worth trying out. Don't post your ad - just answer someone's cry for help or offer a free report including your brief signature file. I am no expert on newsgroups but I have been recommended to try the following newsgroups: alt.business, alt.internet.commerce, biz.entreprenuers, biz.marketplace, alt.business.home, market.internet.free to name a few.

5. Classifieds: There are thousands of classifieds sites out there and many are not worth posting to due to low traffic. According to a recent test by the founder of Becanada, the top free classifieds were (including affiliated sites):

a. classifieds.yahoo.com

b. go.citynews.com/dir.html/elmeida

The founder of Becanada mentioned in his newsletter that the top paid classifieds are at:

a. ep.com
b. www.worldprofit.com

6. Other ideas include press releases and submission services such as:

a. netcreations.com/postmaster
b. www.netpromote.com

I hope this give you some ideas about how to track your ads and where to place them. If you receive only a few responses, you can test out new headlines, ads, or drop them altogether! The idea is to test and test again until you find out what works for your business and "clean out" the other methods from your daily schedule. This will give you more time to promote your business more effectively!