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Are you wasting your time and money when you advertise?

September 2, 2007 by John Dilbeck
Filed under: Advertising and Marketing, Affiliate Marketing 

There are two approaches to advertising:

1. Put your ads everywhere you can and hope for the best.

2. Carefully plan where you will advertise, track all clicks each ad produces, and test each ad to make it even more effective.

There are several ad tracking services available, and each has its strengths and weaknesses.

I’ve been unsatisfied with what was available until recently, when Dan Moses introduced ProTrackerPlus, which offers full tracking features at an excellent price, starting at free.

Dan Moses offers other quality services, including PageSwirl, which I use to control the advertising I put on dozens of traffic exchanges.

Without PageSwirl, when I wanted to promote something new or discontinue promoting something, I had to go to every traffic exchange and change the websites I wanted to show. This could take hours of work.

With PageSwirl, I simply login, go to a page showing all the websites I’m promoting and add or delete from the list. This takes only a few minutes and automatically updates all the sites I promote on all the traffic exchanges where I’m a member. Yes, it took some time to set it all up, but now I save hours of work every month and it only costs me $10 per month to upgrade to Pro membership in PageSwirl.

But, that’s only part of managing my advertising. I promote products and services on quite a few websites, blogs, Squidoo lenses, social networking sites, and advertisements. Without tracking those links, I have no way of knowing where my prospects and customers are coming from.

ProTrackerPlus provides the ability to track every link I place. I can see in a few minutes where my prospects are coming from and that allows me to more effectively advertise the products and services I choose to promote.

It even emails me a daily update, if I want.

By tracking your links, you can learn where your advertising is effective so you can invest more time and money advertising there. You can see in a short time where you are wasting your time and money and stop doing it.

As with PageSwirl, you can track up to 5 links with ProTrackerPlus with a free account. Learn to use the system and prove to yourself how valuable the service can be for you. Then, at your convenience, you can update to a pro membership and track the full range of your advertising and promotions.

I’m in the process of transferring most of my advertising to using ProTrackerPlus tracking. It will take some time, but, as with PageSwirl, I’m sure it will pay off over time. If I can identify just one ad that is working well and use it more effectively, ProTrackerPlus will more than pay for itself.

The same is true if I can find just one ad that isn’t paying its way.

Plus, if something happens and a product or service is discontinued, or if I choose to stop promoting it, I will no longer have to find everywhere I’m promoting it and change or delete the ad. With ProTrackerPlus, I’ll be able to change the destination for the ad to a similar product, or I can point it to a page that explains why the product is no longer available or why I no longer promote it. Then, I can recommend a substitute, if one is available.

All of this is much easier to do if you are just starting out with your online marketing. If you join PageSwirl as a free member, you can use the page rotator on the free traffic exchanges you join. Then, as your marketing efforts bear fruit, you can easily upgrade your membership in PageSwirl and a few of the traffic exchanges you like best. This will leverage your marketing efforts for only a few dollars every month.

If you use custom splash pages on the traffic exchanges, it would be worth your time and effort to use tracking links through ProTrackerPlus. Then, over time, you’ll be able to find the ads and traffic exchanges that are producing paying customers. Those are the ones to promote more heavily.

Or, if you want, you can continue to just throw up ads here and there and hope for the best.

The choice is yours.

Act on your dream!

JD

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2 Comments on Are you wasting your time and money when you advertise?

  1. Douglas - Promotional Products on Wed, 20th May 2009 8:45 am

    2. PageSwirl sounds like a great tool. Will make sure to check it out. Thanks for the information.

  2. John Dilbeck on Wed, 20th May 2009 6:08 pm

    3. Good evening, Douglas.

    Yes, PageSwirl is a good tool, especially if you use traffic exchanges a lot.

    While I took time off over the last month, I re-evaluated some things and realized that the results I was getting from traffic exchanges is not what I want, especially now that I’m moving away from downline building.

    I find that I get much better results from my own marketing efforts than I do when trying to build a downline in various businesses.

    As a result, I’ll be decreasing my activities on the traffic exchanges and no longer have the need for PageSwirl that I had over the last couple of years.

    I’m not totally abandoning traffic exchanges, just changing my emphasis to other things that have worked better for me over the last year.

    Act on your dream!

    JD

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