Constant Change Is A Certainty In
Online Marketing
by: Kirk Bannerman
"If you don't like
the weather, just wait for 10 minutes"... This old
saying which addresses the variability of the
weather in Montana is also applicable to the market
dynamics for an online business. If there is one
thing that is certain about the future of online
marketing, it is that it will continue to change.
A generation in
Internet marketing seems to last 12 months or less
and therefore it is very important for online
marketers to reassess their marketing plan
frequently. It wasn't too long ago that popups and
banner ads were all the rage and now they're about
as welcome as a telemarketer or a lawyer.
In earlier times,
just getting traffic to your website could spell
success. That just is not the case today. In the
current environment, Internet marketers have many
tasks before them including increasing traffic,
maximizing traffic quality, and improving conversion
ratios. Much simpler said than done, but the key
element is to understand that we are dealing with a
dynamic marketing landscape where change is almost a
continuous process. A successful Internet marketing
campaign will always be a work in progress.
A dynamic internet
marketing campaign will be a continuous process of
monitoring & analyzing, followed by tweaking &
experimenting, followed by measuring the impact
(more monitoring & analyzing) of the changes made.
The first step in
analyzing your marketing campaign is pinpointing
precisely where the prospects are coming from.
Whether it's search engines, email, or from other
sources. All of this data can be found in your
server logs and there are some very good traffic
analysis tools (many of them free) that will provide
you with the information without requiring you to
become technically proficient at deciphering raw
server logs.
By analyzing the
information taken from the traffic analysis tools
you can track keywords and other parameters which
will tell you how visitors are getting to your site
which, in turn, will help you improve and target
traffic.
The goals for your
particular site will depend upon the nature of your
online business or endeavor. A good way to determine
how well your site attracts and converts visitors is
to analyze your traffic and then experiment or tweak
some of the different elements of your site such as
sales letter copy, special price promotions, limited
time offers, free offers, headlines, color schemes,
testimonials, etc., etc.
After making changes
in your program, once again analyze your traffic to
obtain a measure of the impact (good, bad, or none)
that your tweaking has produced. And then start the
process all over again, retaining the changes that
yielded a positive result and, of course, rejecting
those that did not.
Remember folks, it is
up to us to stay in touch with the fact that there
is one certainty about the future of online
marketing, and that is that it will continue to
change.
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About The Author
Kirk Bannerman
operates a successful home based business
and coaches others seeking to start their
own home based business.
Visit his
website at
http://www.business-at-home.us for more
details. |
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