If You Don't Like The Weather…Just Wait Ten Minutes

By Kirk Bannerman
Posted Wednesday, September 1, 2004

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, 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.

About The Author
Kirk Bannerman operates a successful home based business and resides in California. For more details, visit his website at (http://business-at-home.us)