How to Evaluate the Effectiveness of Your Internet Marketing Plans
Author: David Rodriguez
As an internet marketer, you need to know how your marketing plans are working. Many experts in the industry recommend having some detailed marketing plans to follow. Some of the problems among marketers are that they lack the discipline to follow such plans.
In any profession, discipline plays an important role. The ability to follow a marketing plan in our industry is critical, since that's what's differentiates the top earners from the dreamers.
Here comes the important question:
How do I evaluate my marketing plans?
First of all, I'm assuming you have such plans already in place, and all you need to do is follow them every single day. In case you don't, you need to start working on them by putting them on paper, just like if you are setting goals. In this case you are not focused on accomplishing your goals. You are focused on following your marketing plans the best possible way. When that's done, you'll simply evaluate such plans along with the results you obtained from your marketing plans.
To create such marketing plans, you need to know exactly what you want. It's complicated to know exactly what you want since every marketer might want something different from other marketers.
You might want to concentrate on your blog, and if you do, you might want to make a priority to build a list, or perhaps generate sales through affiliate links. Whatever the case might be, once you have a clear list of your priorities, you need to know exactly how to get them, and that's when your marketing plans come into the picture.
In other words, your marketing plans must have the activities you must do in a daily basis. The problem with most people is that they don't follow such plans seriously. To build a successful internet marketing career takes time. I've never heard of an overnight success in this industry, to be quite honest with you. If you ever hear one, be sure that such story was fabricated with the idea to sell you something.
Don't get me wrong, there are people who do incredible things and there's always the possibility that one of those stories might be real, but they are very uncommon.
As a marketer, your marketing plans must include activities that generate revenue, and activities that cause the conditions to facilitate such activities. What I mean is the following:
To generate sales, you need targeted traffic
To generate traffic you need high quality content
To generate high quality content you need to work hard at it
To simplify these activities, I would put them in paper in the following order:
- Create SEO content (for an article directory or your blog)
- Work on socializing with the top bloggers, so eventually once they trust you they can help you redirect some of their traffic (through placing a banner on their blog for a period of time, by inviting them as a guest on your blog, or perhaps by doing an interview)
- Syndicate your blog posts using social media or creating articles exclusively for certain high traffic sites.
These activities are only examples, your actual marketing plans might be different.
Now, after a certain time of following your plans, you need to evaluate and see the progress of your work.
I recommend evaluating your work only once a month. That will give you the ability to work without any stress, focusing on your daily activities only.
Your best indicator for traffic is Google Analytics, there is no other way to see how well your traffic is improving.
If you are using a tracker link, that will tell you exactly how well your marketing is working.
So, here's an example of what I'm talking about:
Month: January
Traffic: 357 unique visitors
Sources: Facebook, Twitter, Stumble Upon, Pinterest, YouTube
Activity: Sharing content via social media through client apps.
Solo ads: 100 clicks
Leads Purchased: 100
Email Marketing: 15 emails
Ads: 50
Traffic Exchange: 3000 credits
Results: 15 new reps
Month: February
Traffic: 232 unique visitors
Sources: Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, YouTube
Activity: Sharing content via social media through client apps.
Solo ads: 100 clicks
Leads Purchased: 100
Email Marketing: 20 emails
Ads: 50
Traffic Exchange: 3000 credits
Results: 7 new reps
In these two examples you clearly see that practically the marketer did the same activities, but the results were not the same. The number of new reps dropped more than 50 The important question in this case is: Why?
The activities were the same, but perhaps the quality of work was probably not. The next step is to find out if the activity really works, if not, replace it with other one that gets you better results.
The idea is to pin point what doesn't work, so you use your time on what works only.
Record the result of every session and do an evaluation based on the numbers. When you see that your marketing improves, you just need to do more of that, that's it.
In most cases, it's not how many hours you work, but how effectively you work.
To Your Success
David Rodriguez
Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/marketing-tips-articles/how-to-evaluate-the-effectiveness-of-your-marketing-plans-6907703.html
About the Author
David Rodriguez is an expert internet marketer and a trainer. He shares his expertise with many people in this industry. Visit his blog http://www.onlinemarketingtrainingnow.com to find a variety of free articles in the internet and network marketing arena.