One of the biggest problems on-line is getting the most “bang” for your buck, and what I mean is the age old question of “What is the best way to get visitors to my site?”
Large companies, offline focus on “branding” themselves- becoming a well known . One of the best examples would be amazon.com for books.
The biggest exposure for branding is TV because this is the easiest and quickest way to got into millions of homes. But times are changing. Here’s an example:
I happened to notice a TV ad from a large successful company. It featured a special offer and directed people to their web site. Not the exact site but:
The big companies are starting to wake up! The link above is tracking responses from the advertising and it’s something you can do with your business on-line and off.
Below I’ll explain how you can track your advertising… Small warning here, it’s slightly technical but not too hard. 🙂
What the company has done is created a folder, just like the ones on your computer with 1 web page in it the actual web page name would be index.htm or index.html.
When you go to a folder, the page that is automatically seen in the index page. So… http://www. thesite.com/tv is actually:
http://www. thesite.com/tv/index.htm
The folder name being “tv”
This page will “redirect” to the special offer or the home page every time a visitor comes to the page. When it redirects it also “counts” each visitor. They can also count sales and calculate exact profit and effectiveness of the advertising quickly.
This is called “cloaking” a link and is not new. It simply means the true address of the page is not shown. The way you can use this in your business is that it can help those that think they have seen an offer before and also it can be used for affiliate programs.
You may get a much better response for advertising that has a link of: http://yoursite.com/free than an affiliate link like: http://www.thesite247.com/a/signup.cgi?id=123
The process is actually not that hard.
Ok lets create your special redirect page its called a ‘Meta Refresh” page. There are other ways to do it but this is the easiest.
By the way, you must have your own website for this to work.
Use Windows NotePad program or any plain text program. Follow the below steps:
1. Copy the following text:
<#HTML>
<#HEAD>
<#META HTTP-EQUIV=”refresh” content=”0;URL=http://www.thenewsite.com “>
<#TITLE>redirect</TITLE>
<#META NAME=robots CONTENT=”noindex,follow”>
<#/HEAD>
<#BODY> #Please wait
<#/BODY>
<#/HTML>
2. Paste it into NotePad
3. Remove all the # symbols
4. Edit “http://www.thenewsite.com” to the site you want it to go to.
5. Choose “save as” from the save menu of NotePad and save it as “index.htm” or “index.html”
Now you have a page that will redirect a new page or site, to check it you should be able to click on the file you have created and it will open your Internet browser, show “please wait” and then load the site you have specified.
If you save the file in a folder called “new” and then upload it to your web site, then you can use:
http://www.yoursite.com/new for any promotion.
Now you have a clean link than does not show the destination web address.
Now we want to take it one step further and know what response we are getting from the advertising. Tracking is very important as you need to know what is most effective for your business, saving both money and time.
There are a 2 different ways you can track the response:
1. An installed script -This is a special program, installed on your hosting to track both responses and sales.
Example of this type would be:
This full-featured script comes installed for you and has some excellent features, especially for those who are working with affiliate programs. It has a nice demo so you can see how it runs.
2. Third party services -This provide the same process, normally at a monthly cost with no install required
Example of this type would be:
A very known and used tracker with some great tools. Which you can test drive at no cost
This is a full featured tracker and combined statistics program which also tracks keywords from search engines, actually sales from specific words on PPC search engines. And has a super easy setup program, which can put the links in all your pages in minutes.
Using the method above you can also track how many visitors on your site click on different link text, creating better conversion from your visitors. You can use as many of the redirects as you need, allowing you to compare real numbers.
The Internet being such a vast space, it’s important, actually crucial to your success, to know which efforts you are using are bringing the best results.
Paul Easton is the editor of Power Promotion Plus. Learn how to
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