If you don't like the weather, just wait for 10 minutes"...
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, special 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.
