Increase Your Income with an Organized Marketing Plan
By Albin Dittli
Posted Monday, December 20, 2004
Are your marketing efforts hit and miss? Do you do some marketing every day?
Regardless of whether you are marketing your own program or someone else’s program, there are many different ways to market your chosen program or web site. Just a few are safe lists, ezine advertising, classified ads, your own ezine, writing articles, link exchanges, pay per click, posting ads to sites, traffic exchanges, and search engine submissions.
Consistency is a key ingredient to success. The person who does some marketing every day is much more likely to be successful then the person that just occasionally does some marketing. Doing something on an on going basis will keep you focused on your marketing. It should also start producing a steadily increasing flow of traffic to your site.
The Internet is not a place to do half hearted marketing. Half hearted marketing will soon become seldom marketing, which in turn will soon become no marketing. To be successful a person must marketing consistently.
Two many people try some marketing once or twice, and then give up because they saw little or no results. Then they try a different program and start the pattern over.
A successful marketer knows that people seldom buy on the first visit to a site. Often they must see a program six or seven times before they buy. This is why half hearted marketer fails. The successful marketer keeps putting his site before people, which produces brand or name recognition and eventually sales.
There are so many ways available to market that it is hard to keep track and what has been done and what need to be done next. It is easy to become frustrated and confused by so many choices and end up doing nothing.
As an example, lets look at safe lists. There are thousands of safe lists you can join. Most you can join as a pro or for free. With some you can mail every day. With others you can mail every three days, or every five days, or every seven days. Free members can have a different schedule then pro members. Then there are your email boxes to check on a regular basis and clean out. If they get full you can loose your mailing privileges.
A fairly simple way to keep track of your safe list marketing efforts is to create a Microsoft word file to contain your safe list, and other marketing information. If you don’t have word then use Word Perfect or whatever your favorite word processor is. You could also use a spreadsheet or even a HTML page.
When you create the file put it where you can access it fast. I can get to mine from my desktop with just a few clicks on the “My Documents” Folder. The files in My Documents are displayed in alphabetical order, so name your file so that it will appear near or at the top of the list.
In the file put each safe list’s information on a separate line. Enter the login URL, the username, and your password. Also show the mailing schedule. Then show either the last time you mailed or the next time you should mail. You will need to change the date each time you mail. You may also want to write what was the title of the last ad you sent out. Other optional information might be the size of the list and whether you are a free or pro member.
I recommend that you use the next action date. With the next action date you only calculate the date once and it is easier to scan the file looking for a particular date. For those that you can do every day write ‘daily’ instead of the next action date.
Some search engines get upset if you submit too often. This could also be tracked in your file. Enter the search engine name and the URL to submit your site from. Display how often you can submit and the last or next action date.
You could also track your pay per clicks campaigns in the same file. Display program name and URL. You could also show keywords, current bid amounts, and dates. You might want to also record click through rates.
In a similar fashion you could also track where you have exchanged links and your ezine ad campaigns. There is a logical way to display and track all of your various marketing efforts.
The advantage of using one file for everything is the simplicity of having everything in one location. You can easily scan it each day to see what you should be doing that day.
Keep your file organized. Put all the safe lists in a group. Also group search engines, pay per click, and whatever other methods you are using.
As time passes your file will get longer. However, your daily marketing should continue smoothly because you are organized. This file can contain all of your marketing information, daily tasks, and recurring tasks. The convenience of having everything in one easy to access file can save you a tremendous amount of time. It will also help prevent missing or putting off some of your marketing efforts.
This file can also become a partial history of your marketing. For instance, as you enter your link exchange partners and dates you will be creating a history of your link exchanges.
As time goes on you may want to add other information to your files, such as web sites that you want to check out later. Keep non-marketing things like this grouped together and near the end of the file so that you do not scan them every day when you are doing your marketing.
Please remember to back up your file regularly. This could save you much grief in case of a computer virus or crash.
Most people will not take the time to set up and maintain a simple system like this. By doing so you will be ahead of the crowd. You will be taking a giant step toward being a successful Internet marketer.
About the Author
Albin Dittli has been writing software for the network marketing industry for 12 years and marketing on the Internet for over two years. Please visit his web site at (http://www.The-Home-Business-Center.com). You can subscribe to his free ezine, eBiz Marketing Tips, by sending an email to moneystrategies@listwarrior.com.