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It's time for planning for the New Year, for planning both our business and personal lives, but are we just going to do what we did last year?
Making a plan for the new year is particularly essential in business, but unless we have been especially successful, copying last year's plan and doing the same again is a fruitless exercise.
Now is the time to assess whether last year's plan actually achieved what we wanted it to. Did we have the number of website visitors or make the income that we intended to? Were our sales or click-throughs as anticipated? Did we build the affiliate teams that we promised ourselves? The only way to find out is to check the statistics and there are a number of ways to do this.
I like to start with my favourite link tracker, which is Hits Connect. I use this to track clicks in newsletters and emails, clicks on links on my website and links in articles, which I submit to article directories as well as checking visits and signups or sales received through traffic exchanges.
Starting with newsletters and emails, if the click through rate is poor, it may be because they weren't opened at all, in which case the headline may not be interesting enough. If the mail is opened, but the links aren't clicked, perhaps the text is dull, perhaps it looks too much like an advertisement or maybe the list members haven't yet built up sufficient trust in the list owner to take too much notice of their recommendations. Only we know how large our list is, how long we have offered useful advice without throwing adverts at our audience and whether our content might be at fault. Could this be the problem?
Links on one's website are a little more difficult but a lack of clicking could well be due to uninteresting or badly written text leading to the link or it could be that we have overestimated the interest of our target audience in the product or program on offer. This could have something to do with inappropriate keywords used in the meta tags of the page so experimenting with different ones could be advantageous.
Visits from readers at article directories are easily tracked. If I don't get a sufficient number of visits from certain directories, I don't submit to them any longer; there are plenty of others out there. The reason could well be the demographic of those particular directories' visitors.
If I don't receive the appropriate number of visits from traffic exchanges in ratio to visits made by me, I usually contact the owner before making a final decision to stop using a particular exchange. Some exchange visits don't register with some trackers so it's worth asking the question.
Next, I check the statistics provided by Adsense and other affiliate programs such as Allposters and Amazon. All these programs give a good amount of detail in terms of click throughs and they do have means to identify the page that the product appears on and in the case of Adsense, the positioning of the ads if you use their channels cannily. Try changing products or moving ads around or using different advertisement formats, if the results aren't as planned. Above all, make use of the tools offered by the various programs.
Obviously, I can't cover all possible programs and means of tracking here, but the message is this; do use trackers, do check statistics and do act on the results. There is absolutely no point knowing that an advertisement doesn't work, if we don't do something about it!
Liz Canham is the webmistress of Liz-e-Biz.com which offers tips, tools and training for internet marketing newcomers.
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