"Scientific" Game Plan for An Advertising System

"Scientific" Game Plan for An Advertising System

Rolling Out Your Product Scientifically

When you are introducing a new product or service to the market, the steps you take are called a roll out. Specifically, a roll out is the process of scientifically and progressively increasing your sales by exposing your offer to the greatest number of prospects in the shortest amount of time at the lowest cost with the least amount of risk.

How you go about presenting your product or service to the public will, in large part, determine how successful you will be in marketing it over the long term. Often roll outs are performed with a low cost lead product, to quickly build up a large customer base, which can then be coddled and coaxed over time until a strong enough relationship exists to solicit back-end sales.

When you are considering rolling out (or promoting) any new product, you need to make sure of two things before you do anything else:

1. You have a killer sales letter. Your sales letter is the key element of any successful promotion. It MUST BE POLISHED and PROFESSIONAL and it must be tested and proven to sell. No use spending money and effort driving targeted prospects to a site only to have them lose interest once they get there. If writing ad copy isn't your strong suit then either pick up one of the many courses available that will teach you how, or hire someone to do it for you. Don't pinch pennies when it comes to this crucial task!

2. The second thing that you must be sure of before you proceed with a roll out concerns the product or service itself that you are bringing to the market. It must be the real thing - top quality - the best you can offer. If you anticipate having problems with it you are only asking for headaches, along with plenty of complaints and refund requests. Rushing a low quality or unfinished product to market will only serve to undermine your reputation and hinder your ability to make sales or create new business down the road.

Assuming that you have what you consider to be a terrific sales letter (website) all set up and ready to go, and that your product is indeed the greatest thing since sliced-bread, you can go ahead and use the pay-per-click technique we discussed in the Converting Visitors Into Buyers to determine your website's metrics - CR and visitor value.

If you are on a really tight budget - and are not in much of a rush - you might want to begin your rollout campaign with some of the free advertising venues the Net offers (rather than paying per click). Bear in mind, however, that while there's still a lot of free advertising to be had online, it is not a very effective or efficient way to grow your business over the long haul. What it doesn't cost you in money it more than costs you in man hours, and, unless you come up with a viral strategy to rival that of Hotmail, you're not likely to see much of a return for your time and effort expended.

As for the actual business of promoting your site, the good news is that you have a slew of options available to you, all of which are less expensive and less time-consuming (as many can be automated) than their real world promotional counterparts. The not so good news is, you actually have to put them into practice and you have to do so on a consistent basis if you want to keep sales generating traffic flowing to your Website.

Checklist of Ways to Generate Targeted Traffic

In promoting your Website it's important to use a mix of short and long-term marketing strategies. The former - search engine, classified and ezine ads and articles and press releases - will garner you a temporary boost in traffic, while the latter - building an opt-in list, publishing an ezine or ebook, offering impressive value at a bargain price and supplying compelling content - will bring you a steady stream of targeted traffic over time and continue to draw in customers down the road. The strategies outlined below are a good mix of both.

1. Send out Press Releases announcing your new business.

2. Use your email signature or sig file, a 3 - 5 line description of your business and website URL, on all your mailings and responses.

3. Purchase keywords by the click with Overture, Find What and the other Pay Per Click Engines. Make sure you do your homework before you begin bidding.

4. Advertise in newsletters/ezines to access your target market - a real bargain compared to the cost of other forms of advertising and you'll get instant results. While search engines take weeks - or even months - to pay off, ezines can bring you sales within 24 hours of your ads running.

5. Write ezine articles, including a bit of promotion in the resource box at the end. Fill the articles with pertinent information about your business and submit it to at least 100 relevant publications for review.

6. Build your site's link popularity. Concentrate on building themed reciprocal links with similar, non-competitive sites. Form relationships with business associates.

7. Submit your site to Free Directories and, if it merits it, apply to Web Guides and Award Services. (If you don't think your site is worthy, who will?)

8. Ante up some big bucks for listings in Google's Adwords and/or Yahoo: I'm not so sure about Looksmart anymore. Having incoming links from these prestigious directories will boost your link popularity with the other search services to say nothing of the tremendous traffic boost they will give you.

9. Optimize you site and apply to the major Search Engines manually (or have it done for you). Use a submission service or submission software to apply to the other search engines and directories.

10. Offer something for free at your site and promote it. People love getting somethin' for nothin'. The best things to giveaway are information or digital products like e-books or software tools as they can be downloaded instantly from your website.

11. Build your opt-in e-mail list. Your opt-in list is the life blood of your online marketing activities.

12. Start Your Own Ezine. Once you've built up a fairly good sized opt-in list, start your own email newsletter. Ezines are a great way to keep in touch with visitors to your site, as well as being a great promotional tool.

13. Swap ads with other Ezine publishers. Look for ezines that are related to yours and approach their owners with the suggestion of an ad swap. You'll post their ads on your ezine if they'll post yours on theirs.

14. Consider Joint Venturing with sites that complement yours, when you've build up a sizeable opt-in list. Again, you'll be essentially swapping lists. But endorsements are powerful big sellers.

15. Start an Affiliate Program and recruit others to promote your product or service for you. Having your own affiliate program is an extremely cost effective way to multiply your promotional efforts, build traffic to your site, accelerate your sales and boost your all-important link popularity. Nowadays, it's easier than ever to do with all the tracking software and services available to you.

16. Use Viral Marketing strategies to encourage others to spread your promotional message around for you. You can do this with free articles and reports that contain links back to your site in a resource box, but the most popular method of viral marketing is through e-books. You write one about whatever it is you are marketing and then give it away for free to as many people as you can reach, encouraging them to offer it for free to as many people as they can reach, and so on and so forth.

SIDEBAR: Of course, with our WebSuccessMastery Series of eBooks and eCourses, you have a whole series of top quality, ready-made, fully customizable, highly targeted and topical e-books at your disposal that you can use as viral front end offers and lead generators. If you are not already partaking in our one of a kind, win win business building program, you really owe it to yourself to take a look. I guarantee, you'll join us!

17. Use Automated Traffic Generator Services, paying pennies for thousands pop-up or pop-under exposures, rather than wasting your time earning ad exposures.

18. Place classified ads on Yahoo and AOL and other online classified ad sites. Provide a link to an autoresponder you have pre-programmed with your sales or information message. This might only serve to bring a trickle of traffic to your site, but every little bit helps!

19. Sign up with a reputable banner/link exchange service, another method of getting linked. If you're going to do this, make sure that your banner will only be displayed on sites that target the audience you want to reach, and that the banners you will be displaying on your site are consistent with the image you want to promote.

20. Rent addresses from "Permission Mailing" or Opt-in Email Safelists to blast your ad out to hundreds or thousands of targeted e-mail list subscribers, using a pre-programed sequential autoresponder technique. Just make sure that the lists are indeed safe and opt-in.

SIDEBAR: Some of these suggestions might not net you much traffic, but as Mark Joyner points out, it never hurts to set up "multiple streams of traffic." Certainly you shouldn't devote much time or money to classifieds, banners and safelists, but if you can automate these promotions - set them up once and let them run automatically, why not include them in your campaign. The more "streams of traffic" you can generate, the better. Mark does caution, however, "If you're paying for cheeseburger traffic, don't pay a steak-and-lobster price. Better to get your cheeseburger traffic for free from as many automated sources as you can."

I know, I know. With all these advertising techniques and strategies, it's hard to figure out where to begin. Exactly how should you go about using each so that you run an effective advertising campaign - one that not only gets the click but converts the click into the sale.

Well, unfortunately, there's no way anyone can guarantee that all your ads will produce a sale, but there is a way, a proven "scientific" game plan, if you will, that will at least guarantee that the money you spend on your ads will be money well spent.

If you really want to make it big on the Internet - especially if you're starting with a tight budget - it's absolutely critical that you understand one very simple concept: If you spend $50 on an ad and it returns over $50 in profits, that's a good investment.

Simple right? Well, through the use of proper testing and a scientific approach to advertising, there's no reason that you can't turn your original $50 investment into millions. You simply need to develop a system that creates a profit, and then reinvest a portion of the profits back into your business to further expand your advertising.

"Scientific" Advertising Approach

Okay, here's a simple 4 step system for how you should approach all paid advertising.

STEP 1: It doesn't really matter what you sell, so let's assume that you're selling widgets - and that for every widget sold you earn a net profit of $50. Let's also assume that you've determined that 1 out of every 50 unique visitors buys a widget. In this case the average visitor is worth about $1. (0.02 X 50.00). Now, can you see how any paid advertising you buy which delivers more than 50 visitors to your website for every $50 spent is a profitable investment?

If you're just using your website to generate leads in one way or another, you'll need to figure out the percentage of visitors who respond positively by requesting more info, filling out your survey etc. The bottom line is that a value can be placed on each visitor you get, whether they take the action you want them to take or not - and you need to figure out what that value is as soon as possible - preferably before you begin to spend serious money on any paid advertising.

Advertising isn't hit or miss. Anything you do is either profitable or it's not. The underlying concept of a scientific advertising system is a simple one: if it's profitable, keep doing it. If it's not, stop it.

STEP 2: Once you begin using paid advertising, keep those methods that prove profitable (based on your website metrics and tracking stats for the average visitor value and the number of visitors generated from your ad).

STEP 3: Through ongoing testing, tracking and tweaking of both your website and your paid ads, strive to increase both the value of a visitor and the response to your advertising. Repeat this process forever, always reinvesting a portion of your profits into more ads.

When you find a strategy that gives you good results, don't just stick with it, write it down for future reference. Eventually, you'll wind up with a handy list of proven effective promotion techniques and services that you can use over and over again.

The power of this scientific or mathematical approach to website promotion is that once you have completed the steps you will have an almost automated advertising campaign that can literally send you all the traffic you need. Rather than spending hours and hours each day promoting your site, you simply buy more advertising.

STEP 4: Once you've been in business for awhile you can even take this powerful concept one step further by determining the average "lifetime value" of a customer (see below). If you're able to determine that your average customer is worth $1,000 in net profits to your business over the life of your relationship with them, wouldn't you be more than willing to spend $200 - if necessary - to get their business?

Once you have developed a proven system for squeezing maximum profit from every prospect you attract to your Website, then your job as an internet marketer becomes relatively easy: generate targeted leads and funnel them into your profit-making system.

Determining the Lifetime Value of Your Customers

1. Compute your average profit per sale (total sales revenue minus advertising, marketing and product fulfillment expenses, divided by number of sales).

2. Determine how many times the average customer will purchase from you over a certain period, say two years.

3. Calculate the amount of profit you make from that customer in two years.

Actually, the number you come up with will be high, since it includes all the advertising expenses necessary to stimulate sales from new and existing customers - and getting the first purchase is the most expensive. After that your customers are more inclined to purchase from you, and once you have an email address you can target market to them much less expensively than to the general public. Also, existing customers may generate new customers with referrals.

Why is determining lifetime value of your customers so important?

Because if you know that each customer will bring you say, $100 profit over a two-year period, then you can afford to break even or even lose money on the first sale in order to acquire the customer, since you know that on average you'll make it up later.

Once you know your CLV, you'll know how much you can afford to spend - or lose - to get that crucial first sale. And this knowledge is priceless. Without this knowledge you're shooting from the hip. With it, you'll be able to confidently take the short-term risks necessary in order to achieve long term gain.

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