When you start your online business, you
will go through a series of steps like:

==>Domain registration
==>Website designing and installing your
inventory and order links
==>Advertising about your products or service

Regarding advertising, you should always target
your audience.When you are selling garden tools
in Miami, you will get better results with
offline advertising and Joint Ventures with
other websites that are focused on Gardening and
pointing to Miami area.

After Advertising, one important step is 'TESTING'
your advertising campaign.

Why?

Look at this example.You spent $50 on keeping an
ad on some famous site or a email campaign.Let's
say this is one time ad.

If you don't know how many people clicked on your
URL or how many people bought your product coming
through that link, how are you going to spend
another $50 on the same advertising method?
Rather than Click thrus you can go one step further
and calculate the number of sales per one advertising
method.

Here are few methods you can use to track your
results.

**1.Email Tracking:

If you have ezine and you are keeping your subscription
email links in different places like other ezines,
websites and ebooks, you can give a little code to your
email address.

Like this-

subscribe@yourdomain.com?subject=ezine
subscribe@yourdomain.com?subject=ebook

First one in ezines and second one in your ebook.That
little code goes in to subject area of emails.

By seeing your emails you can know from where you are
getting more response.

**2.URL Tracking:

There are different ways to track your URLs.

You can keep your URL with a little code similar to
emails.

http://www.yourdomain.com/product.html?source=ebook

You can also upload a different page for your each ad
campaign.See the example below.

You have a page like-
http://www.yourdomain.com/product.html

Then you can upoload the same page with different URL
like-

http://www.yourdomain.com/prod.html

So the visitors that comes to that page can be seen
in your weblogs.If you have a good logging software
you can save all the visitors information for that
particular page.Check this weblogger-

http://www.logitpro.com

This weblogger tells you exactly how many hits are taking
by one webpage and referers.

So you can see how many hits are coming to your
'/prod.html' page and referers.

**3.Click Tracking Software:

If you have a good click tracking software that records
all details about your referer pages and visitors you
can also use that to track your results.

http://www.scripts4webmasters.com/clicktracking/index.shtml

This little cgi script tells you the number of clicks,
referers and time of click etc.

IMPORTANT TIPS IN TESTING YOUR ADs:

==>If you think your URL is 'Alive', don't delete that
page on your server.
If you keep an ad in your ezine articles and submit to
other ezines, your articles will be spread all over the
net after a while.If you delete that URL on your server
people will get '404 page not found' error and you
will lose your potential visitor.

==>In email campaigns consider short URLs.Long URLs will
break up in to two lines and the reader can not click
on it to get your desired page.

==>Test ONE VARIABLE at a time.Suppose you want to
check the response and sales rate for two different
types of sales letter and by giving free gifts with
your product.
Don't test both at once.
First check the sales page variable.If you don't get
good response then go to free gifts variable.

If you get good response to one of the sales pages,
then use the free gifts method in different advertising
campaign.

Good luck!!

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Radhika Venkata
http://www.ebooks-world.com/
Subscribe to 'EbookBiz Magazine' which is completely
focused on ebook business and recieve FREE Ebooks with
Resale rights everymonth.
http://www.ebooks-world.com/freetosell.shtml
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