You’ll no doubt try many promotional techniques before you find the ones that work for you. Many of the best promotional strategies are completely free while you may pay for others. You may find that some of them work best for some websites and that others work best for other websites. In order to discover what works best, you’ll need to do some testing.
Split Test for Success
Split testing various aspects of your promotional strategies can net you valuable information that you can use to boost your profits. Say you have a salespage or sales letter. Regardless of how well it is or isn’t converting, create another one exactly like it with one major difference. Change the headline. That’s all you need to do to perform this test. Of course, you might want to change other aspects of your ads or sales letters through separate tests. It can be as simple as including or deleting a “Buy Now” button or modifying part of your offer.
You can split test almost any promotional techniques you use. Change your signature line in forum posts to see which one gets you more clicks. Offer a free bonus with your product in one ad and don’t offer it in another to see which one makes the sale. You can also play around with colors, fonts, and graphics to see how those changes affect your sales.
Test and Retest AdSense Ads
Split testing is popular with AdSense sites because the placement, size, and color of the ads can make a huge difference. If you’re running AdSense ads on any of your sites, you can find a wealth of information about promoting your AdSense sites and everything to do with AdSense online. Unfortunately, though, it may be hard to separate the wheat from the chaff because the success meter of AdSense sites varies greatly. What doesn’t work for one marketer may work very well for another one and vice versa. You will probably have to experiment quite a bit to find what works best for you. A word of caution: When experimenting with AdSense, always make sure you follow the Terms and Conditions to the letter or you may risk having your AdSense sites banned altogether.
PPC
While there are many Internet marketers that run successful Pay Per Click campaigns, don’t jump into paid advertising of any kind until you know exactly what you are doing. There are very specific strategies and techniques when it comes to bidding on keywords and having to pay every time those targeted ads are clicked. If you don’t know what you are doing, you could begin your Internet marketing career in the red. Before you spend a lot of money on any of the fee based promotional strategies, get your feet wet with the free ones first. That way, when you do pay for advertising, you’ll have a much better idea of what you can expect and you’ll know much more about ad placement and a variety of advertising and promotional techniques.
Some Internet marketers have the mistaken idea that the articles they use for promotional purposes don’t need to be quality articles. They think that they can slap a few keyword stuffed articles up at an article directory and expect hordes of traffic to follow. This isn’t exactly true. Look at it this way: if your articles offer little value, what will your readers think about your website? They’ll likely believe that it offers little or no value also and they’ll click on the next article in the directory and they’ll follow that link back to someone else’s website.
Keywords aren’t Everything
Keyword count but they’re not everything. You do want to use your keyword or keyword phrase in your article title and of course, you want to use it a few times in your article but you also want clear and concise information throughout your article. If your article sounds like nothing more than a promotional sales pitch, then all the keywords in the world won’t turn your readers into customers. Spend some time on your title, too. Think about the titles that make you click on the articles, ads, or emails that you click on. Think about what information people are really looking for when you add your titles and look at the other titles in your niche in the same directory to see how they compare.
Spelling, Grammar, and Flow
It should go without saying that you need to proofread your articles for spelling, grammar, and flow but it’s obvious that not everyone does by the looks of most article directories. Think of these articles as your storefront display window, like many of those in the brick and mortar world. Displaying articles full of typos and mistakes is like having dirty windows in your storefront display. It stands to reason that if your promotional materials are littered with mistakes that your products or website might be also. Articles like these are just invitations for readers to move along and that is exactly what they will do.
That’s not to say that you have to be a prolific author to profit from article marketing. On the contrary. Your articles can be simple informational pieces that highlight the subject of your niche. Remember, solve a problem and you’ll gain a customer. While you’re ensuring that your articles are error free, run your computer’s spell checker but don’t rely on it. Run it first and then read the article over and you’ll see what I mean. Computer spell checkers are notorious for confusing words like your and you’re and to and too so play it safe and read over your articles after you spell check just to make sure.