| Why Most Online Businesses Lose Money with Free Internet Advertising |
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Pretty bold statement, huh! Well it's true. Today I want to
show you a different side of free advertising because it could very well ruin
your business if you are not careful. First you must understand one certain wealth principle... We've all heard the statement that "time is money," haven't we? Well this statement is very true, especially with online businesses. What is your yearly income goal? Let's start there if we may. Let's say that our yearly income goal is $100,000. That's an achievable goal for most of us, especially with the tremendous marketing power of the Internet.Now, how many hours do you want to work in an average week to achieve that goal? Let's say that you want to work 40 hours a week, OK? Now 40 hours a week multiplied by 50 weeks a year (assuming a two week vacation each year) is 2000 hours that you plan to work each year. With me so far?So, if you want to make $100,000 a year you must value each hour at roughly $50 per hour ($100,000 divided by 2000 hours). This is where free advertising can kill the average online business. You see, if you are not putting a value on your time then you are missing a very important wealth building principle. Time is money... This is not just idle chatter, it is the most important business rule you will learn. If you don't fully comprehend it then your business will likely never get off the ground.Here is why many, many people are actually going broke with free Internet advertising... Let's remember that we have to make at least $50 per hour to meet our income goals. Now let's take a typical scenario with someone trying to build a business with free advertising...You spent 2 hours today posting dozens of free classifieds on various Web sites You spent 2 hours today posting free links on hundreds or thousands of FAA pages (with the help of multi-submitters of course).You spent an hour today contacting a few other Web sites about exchanging links or submitting to some search engines. You spent two hours today in the chat rooms, at forums and at bulletin boards looking for some good leads.All in all you have spent 7 hours today placing free ads. What are your results? Well typically not very good. Did you get 50 hits? Probably if you are lucky... Well according to industry averages you have to drive 75 hits to your site just to make one single sale. Obviously this is very general but you get the point I hope. If you got 50 visitors today you would be really lucky to get one or two sales, you probably won't get any. The question here is was it worth spending 7 hours of your valuable time to get 1 or 2 sales? Probably not. Not if you are serious about that $100,000 income. Why? Because you just spent $350 in labor to get 1 or 2 sales that probably won't bring you $350 in return.Now, not all forms of free advertising are bad, if they were I wouldn't be writing this article (another form of free advertising). But the point here is that you must start to put a value on your time. Let me tell you what you could have done with that $350 as a simple example. You could have put $70 of guaranteed advertising in five places...http://www.goto.com http://www.7search.comhttp://www.findwhat.com http://www.kanoodle.comhttp://www.sprinks.com These search engines allow you to pay per click to your web site. In other words you get guaranteed traffic for a set price. Let's say that you paid an average of 10 cents a click with the keywords you had listed in these search engines. For $350 you could have received about 3500 hits to your site. Again, let's assume that you close only one in 75. That would be over 45 sales!!!I know what you're thinking... You don't have $350 cash to advertise. You only have time to put into your business. Well at least find free advertising sources that produce better results. Your business success depends on it. Here is cold hard reality staring you in the face...You worked those 7 hours to produce 2 sales that gave you a total profit of $40 (assuming $20 profit per sale). In other words you made $40 for 7 hours of work or $5.71 an hour. You will never get rich at $5.71 an hour, that's barely above the minimum wage where I live. Didn't you start your own online business to get away from being a wage slave? I know I did. So how do you find out which free ads are worth your time and which are not?You must track your ads to see what is going to pull adequate results and what will not. There are basically two ways to do this. 1. You can set up different web pages (mirror sites) or email aliases for each ad source. This is great if you have adequate resources and skills to do so.2. I have found that I would rather use an ad tracking service like ROIbot, designed by free advertising guru Mark Joyner. ROIbot has a free and also a professional version. Basically it tracks your ad results through setting up redirect addresses for you. This has been an invaluable resource in my online business. If you are interested in finding out more about ROIbot go to: http://www.roibot.com/r.cgi?R16351 When you track your ads you will immediately be able to see which of your campaigns are paying off and which you should avoid in the future, because again, not all free ads are bad! It's just that some are an obvious waste of your precious time.Not all forms of free advertising are created equal. There are some good ones out there. But please, if this hits home with you, then you absolutely must do something to increase your bottom line right now. Get rid of the wasted hours that don't produce and work to find good sources of free advertising or even paid advertising. If you want to make $100,000 a year then your time is worth $50 per hour and you just cannot allow yourself to settle for much less. Unless you are looking to work 80 hours a week for $25 an hour. Ugh! Or how about 160 hours a week at $12.50 per hour. Wow, that would leave you 8 whole hours a week to sleep, shower, eat and spend time with your family. Time really is money! Dean Garrison |
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