I have a new client who is spending $500 a month on an advertisement in a daily newsletter.  The ad basically just has the company’s logo, name, tagline, and contact information.

Clicking the ad goes to the company’s home page.

Maybe you’re thinking, “So what? Isn’t that where they should go?”  Well… no, actually.  And here’s why:

1. You can’t track the source of the traffic. In the case of a newsletter, the visitor is clicking on a link in an email.  When this happens your web site has no way of knowing exactly where that click came from.  The visitor might just as well have typed the company’s web site address right into their browser.  This is called “direct traffic” as opposed to “referred traffic.”  What you want is referred traffic. I’ll cover the reasons why in another post, but for now just assume it’s true .
2. You can’t measure results. Without knowing WHICH visitor took WHAT action, you have no way of knowing whether that click source is working or not.  If you have several Internet channels you are using to drive traffic to your site, if you send them all to the same place, all you’re doing is driving traffic, not results.  When someone takes action on your site — clicks a button, signs up for your mailing list, buys something, requests a quote — you are getting results.  If don’t know where that visitor came from, you can’t identify the specific channels that brought you the visitors who took action.  (Ever heard the saying, “I know I’m wasting half of my marketing dollars, I just don’t know which half”?)
3. You can’t get specific. Since everyone’s going to the home page, what you end up with is just one big pool of visitors.  They came to your site because they were looking for something.  Your home page doesn’t have enough detail for your visitors to see clearly whether you have what they were looking for.  People are busy.  If you don’t give them what they need quickly, they will go elsewhere.
4. You can’t do any split testing. By giving everyone the same message over and over, you have no way of knowing whether your content can be improved.  Split testing is a way of randomly displaying slightly different variations of the same content and then measuring which one gets better results.  Then you take the variation that “wins” and create another slightly different (hopefully better) variation and test those together.  This is a way to continually improve your content, and therefore your results.  Home page content does not lend itself well to this type of testing.
5. You can’t segment the visitors. If you offer a variety of products and services for different types of buyers, your different marketing channels will pull different kinds of buyers to your site.  Since you know which buyers come from which source, you can essentially give them different information based on what you think they are looking for.  If you send everyone to the home page, you are not able to provide that visitor with a clear value statement that will compel them to act.

Back to my client… when they hired me, the first thing I did was put Google Analytics on their web site and add a landing page.  Then I had their office manager contact the newsletter owner with a request to change the advertisement’s link to the new landing page.

For now the landing page is just a copy of the home page (we’re doing a redesign anyway) but at the very least we can start measuring how many people are clicking on their ad.  That’s a first step.

As it turns out it’s about 30% of their existing traffic.  That’s good to know.  But it’s only about 3 or 4 clicks a day.  That’s also good to know.  We can probably improve that by changing the ad, and we can also work on a better landing page as part of the redesign.

The tools are out there, you just need to know how to use them.

I’m feeling rather guilty that I haven’t posted in over a week.  But I have a good excuse, I promise!

Last week I went on hiatus in order to put the finishing touches on my recently released E-Marketing 101 Video Training Course.  Basically the technology needed to be fixed in order to deliver the lessons automatically to each subscriber every week.

And I did it!

Yup, I finished the job, and in celebration, I have posted an amazing offer on the web site.  Until the end of this month, you can get the program for just $47 per month for five months.  It’s a 21-week program that teaches you step by step how to plan and implement a complete e-marketing program for your small business.

The best part is it’s totally risk-free!  If you cancel within 60-days you will get your money back.  You can watch every single video and implement everything you learn and even keep all the handouts that come with it, and we’ll still give you your money back.  You don’t even have to tell us why.  Just cancel your account and ask for a refund and you’ll get it.  It’s that simple.

You can’t lose!

How can we offer you this?  Because we’re convinced that you will see the same amazing results that our other participants have seen who have gone through the program.

Check out the web site at www.LearnEmarketingNow.com.

If you have any questions, post them here and I’ll answer them as quickly as possible.  Or email me directly at lpecunia[at]avarrasolutions[dot]com and I’ll answer them privately.

I reached another milestone this week.

I’m getting emails from strangers.  They want to sign up for my newsletter. They are wondering when my next free webinar will open up for registration.  They want to get a free analysis of their web site.

It’s thrilling.

As a small business owner myself, I’m constantly promoting my business services using internet technology.  Of course I do, that’s my business.

But it still has it’s frustrations.  I tell my clients — not everything you do will work, and nothing works immediately.  And finally, the more you do the better.

My marketing tends to work slowly because I have limited resources and can only do so much.  Plus I do a lot of different things, so I’m spread pretty thin.  I also do a lot of local business networking, and that’s where I see most of my business coming from still.

The end goal is to have most of my business come from the Internet.  I’m far from being there, but I can see the shift coming.

Talk about being stuck in a rut.

I recently ran across the web site of a local company here in Northern Virginia.  I won’t name names, but it is a PR company based here in my town.  They’ve been around for a while — longer than I have anyway.

First of all, their web site is not that great.  It uses bleedy jpegs and old-fashioned table-driven layouts.  It’s OK if you don’t know what that means, just trust me it’s very last decade.

According to their About Us page, they don’t do web design (but they do do web development), so I guess they can be excused for the 90′s design.

Basically they are a traditional PR company.  Everything about their list of “What We Do” items screams WE ROCKED TEN YEARS AGO.

Oddly enough they did tack on Social Media to their Interactive Advertising line item (“Interactive and Social Media Advertising”).  Wow, that says it all.

But the biggest sore thumb is the content.  Everything on their site talks about them.  What they do, how they do things, how great they are. “Our unmatched market knowledge”…  really?  “Our focus”… seriously?  What about the client’s focus?

It’s completely impersonal, almost barren of personality.  I wouldn’t trust my advertising campaign with this kind of company.  Now, in reality, they’re probably much better than their web site indicates, but how would anyone know?

The point is their web site is not only not working for them as a sales tool, but it could actually be a turn-off.

I hope you don’t fall into this trap with your own business.  Just look at your copy — for every time you say the word “We” or “Our” or use your name in the third person, that’s an opportunity to turn that sentence around to focus it on your customer, his pain, their challenge, or her need.

A colleague of mine recently wrote an article for her newsletter on the topic of list size.  Many business owners who rely on email marketing for sales leads constantly stress over the challenge of growing our lists.

I had to chuckle when I saw her article because 6 months ago she was lamenting to me that her list wasn’t nearly as big as those of other, well-known people in her field.  At the time I said to her, “It’s not about quantity, it’s about quality.  The size of your list is not as important as the number of people who see real value in what you provide.”  Clearly she got the message.  Whether it was from me, or if I just planted a seed and she took it from there, I was happy to see she changed her mind and doesn’t worry so much about comparative list sizes any more.  By the way, her list is way bigger than mine .

Many of the “big names” in the industry have tens of thousands of people on their list.  While this sounds great, you have to wonder what percentage of those people actually pay any attention to the messages that get sent to them from the provider.  How many mailing lists are YOU on?  How many of those messages do you actually read?  Maybe it’s time to start unsubscribing… liberally.

The size issue is the same deal with Twitter followers and Facebook Business Page Likers.  You can use a site like fiverr.com to hire someone cheaply to get followers or likers for you, but are these followers really paying any attention to your messages?  I think it’s more about ego and bragging rights than about really connecting with your audience.

If you are one of these people who think more is automatically better… my advice to you is “get over yourself.”  Provide real value to people and they will join your list.  It’s that simple.

My friend who wrote the article made the suggestion to me that the bigger your list, the more your quality degrades.  I’m not sure I agree with that completely, but it gave me something to think about.  I had not ever considered that point, and plan on doing some research to find out what others think about it.  If you have any thoughts about this I’d love to hear them, please comment below.

Lisa