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In order to create the most effective ad for your business, you will need to test different versions of your copy and track the effectiveness of where you advertise. Experiment by changing the copy, tweaking the looks, rearranging the layout and testing where you place your ad.

Changing The Copy

Try several different headings for your ad. Just a one word change may have a significant effect on the response rate. Test different versions of your copy to find the most effective wording.

Tweaking The Looks

Change the font style, font sizes, and font colors. Emphasize important words and phrases by placing them in italics, making them bold, changing their color, and highlighting them. Add a border, a different border color and/ or a different border style. Try different combinations of these and find out which combination works best.

Rearranging The Layout

Rearrange the components of your ad to see if it affects the response rate. Add a short testimonial or two to see if that has any effect. Try adding more than one call to action link.

Testing The Placement

Track and test the response rate for your ad. An ad in one
e-zine may result in 100 clicks while an ad in another may only result in 50. You will want to know where you get the best response for your advertising dollars.

You will want to track your ads for these four reasons:

1. To save money.

If you know where you get the best response from, you won’t waste money by advertising on places where you get a poor return.

2. To maximize your profit.

While advertising on one place may bring you a better response than advertising on another, you need to take into account the cost of each ad. If you get 200 responses from one advertising source but each response costs you $4.00, it may be better to advertise on a place where you get 100 responses that only cost $1.00 each.

3. To improve your ads.

By testing different versions of your ad, you will find the most effective one. To obtain a true test of a particular ad, you will need to know how may people were shown your ad, how many people acted on your ad, and the result of that action. (For example, your ad was shown to 1000 people of which 100 clicked on your ad link and 2 bought your product.)

4. To find out what works and what doesn’t.

You will want to know what components of your ad work and which don’t. You can only find this out by tracking different versions of your ad.

While knowing how many people click on your ad and how many sales you make is important, you will want to know how much each click and sale actually costs you. In order to maximize your Return On Investment (ROI) you should monitor the following:

1. How many unique visitors each ad or promotion generates.

2. The number of sales each ad or promotion generates.

3. Which ad or promotion generates the most traffic to your website.

4. The Cost Per Click and Cost Per Sale of each ad or promotion.

5. The Click to Sales Ratio which will show you the quality of the traffic you’re getting.

6. The ROI for each ad or promotion.

You will also want to track where your traffic is coming from. You may get traffic from an e-zine ad, from a forum post and from a banner ad. One of these sources may bring you a significant amount of traffic while another brings you little or no traffic at all. By tracking every ad and promotion you place, you will find out where to direct your advertising efforts, thereby saving you both time and money.

Only about 1% of your competitors track their traffic sources. By tracking your ads, you will gain an advantage over 99% of your competitors. At the same time, you will boost your bottom line as you will no longer be wasting money on useless advertising.

Everyone online wants to make money; however, there are many people online who need to go back to some of the basics outlined below. There is entirely too much hype, too much hoping for the “next miracle ebook” or some other short cut.

The truth of the matter is that for the average Joe or Josephine online, the business will not be built overnight and they will need to adhere to some of the same basic principles that those offline stores use to get customers in the door.

The first thing you need to do is realize that the Internet is a place where you have to establish your creditability on each transaction with each customer. Doing what you say, offering quality products that you yourself have tried, and maintaining an attitude that the customer needs to have the reassurance to do business with you, will get you many more dollars than high pressure sales tricks. There is no reason for a customer to trust you unless you offer your complete name, business name, address and a way to contact you within your website or your order form. A thank you note also helps the customer to confirm that their order was processed correctly and gives you a chance to acknowledge again their value to you and your respect for them.

Make your website easy to navigate. Make the products and the way to purchase them stand out. Do not add a bunch of other filler or banners and items that only take away from your main focus - your product or service. When a shopping cart or buy button is presented, make sure that it is a smooth transaction and ask for as little information as possible to get the order confirmed. People hate to fill out tons of lines on your form and will leave if you try to ask them everything under the sun about their situation on the first contact. Also, make sure that they are aware of your privacy policy that you will never share their information.

Remember, the goal is to either get them to purchase a product or to get them to leave their email address and first name so that you can contact them again with tips, articles, and other software or items that will be of interest to them. Let them receive something for nothing for a while as everyone loves free items and they will look forward to receiving your newsletter. Most people will not buy on their first contact with you or your website, so you need to reinforce your trustworthiness.

When you send out a newsletter, do not send it too frequently. Once a week or twice a month is much better than three times a week. Always use the same format and make it quick, swift and to the point. This is not the place to write your life history and what you did for entertainment that weekend. It is a method that you can communicate with your customer and encourage them to trust and place their confidence in you. Anything that you can do to that end will reward you many times over.

If you have a product that others are marketing, then check out their websites. Find the top people in your business and see what they are doing. You can search Google or Yahoo or any of the other major search engines to come up with these competitor’s websites just by inserting keywords relevant to your industry and seeing the top ten that come up. Do not copy what they have on their websites, but just get the feel for the website and why they are having success. Make notes as you scroll through the website and see what you like about their website, how they showcase their products, their ease of use, their ability to explain their product or service in easy to understand wording, and how their guarantee works, anything that will help you to understand why someone would come to this website and feel comfortable with their decision to purchase from this vendor.

Another important point is to make sure your colors on your website convey the mood you are trying to establish. If you do not know what colors can do for your website, then do a search and some reading and learn the combinations that are pleasing to the eye. Do not load the website up with graphics that are not necessary. Even flash introductions seem to be on the way out lately. Everyone has moved back to the website being functional and less is more here. You will have more customers, more visitors, and more orders for your company if you keep things simple but professional.

Make your headline and subheadings grab the attention of the reader. Most people will not stay on a website but a short time unless they are directed through curiosity to find out more about what you are offering. So, lead their mind where you want it to be within the first headline and first couple of sentences. Avoid mundane headings like Welcome to My Website or I am so glad to have you visit - I am happy to be able to show you my products. Do use headings like Are You Afraid You Are Being Left Out?

Your goal is to direct the customer’s mindset and allow them time to indulge in reading your website. If they think they will find some value within your words, products or services, then you will continue to keep their interest if you are honest with them. Usually, the first hint of the self-indulgence type of sales words and the customer is long gone.

Fulfill a need, provide an excellent service, make the website easy to understand, and do not be pushy or extreme in your declarations. Then you will have the basics down of making your Internet business lasting and successful.

As more and more consumers learn about Voice over Internet Protocol phone services, they are trying to find a definitive answer to one burning question: Is this thing reliable enough to replace the Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) they grew up with and have built their lives around?

There are, in fact, a great many positive reasons to switch from POTS to VoIP:

1. It’s cheaper. Way cheaper. From about $9.95 for the most basic service (still far better than POTS) to $39.95 for residential; business plans usually run from $49.95-to-$99.95 and include a separate fax number.

2. The free VoIP “modem” is shipped to you in 5 to 10 days; buy it at a store for same-day service and the VoIP firm will reimburse or credit it against your bill.

3. “Extra” services widely standard: VoiceMail, Caller ID, Call Waiting, 3-Way Conferencing, Call Forward, Repeat Dialing, Call Block, unlimited calling (local and LD) - in short, virtually every option ever offered - for an additional fee - by any POTS company.

4. No charge for incoming calls from anywhere, unlike US cellular providers; same for outgoing “local” calls (depending on plan; some use a cellular-style monthly minutes package).

5. With VoIP, “local” in North America almost always includes both the US and Canada; some also include Western Europe, parts of Asia and parts of Latin America. For those countries not included free, international plans are available for far less than standard LD companies. Or you can make occasional calls without a plan for far lower per-minute charges than most LD plans. This generally applies - more or less in reverse - for VoIP services in Europe, Asia and elsewhere, as well.

6. No computer needed, just plug a standard phone cable from the VoIP box to your regular desktop phone or portable base station.

7. Activate every phone jack in the house - just plug the VoIP modem into any existing wall jack, after first disconnecting your house’s internal phone wiring from the POTS world at the phone box outside, probably on your front wall. This option generally is not available to apartment dwellers. Sorry.

8. Virtual Phone Numbers: For a low price (usually about $5), you can have a phone number in almost any area code, so friends or family can dial a local number that rings on your phone. You can’t use it for outgoing calls because it isn’t a “real” line.

9. Low-cost 800 Numbers: Want to make it free for a lot of callers without bankrupting you? Most VoIP providers offer cheap 800 numbers - free to the caller, fixed monthly rate for you (varies, but roughly $5 for the first 100 minutes each month, then 4.5-cents or so per minute beyond that).

10. Find Me: Some include a system that, if you don’t answer, will call three or more other numbers you designate, in sequence or simultaneously, then go to voicemail if you still don’t answer.

11. And this is THE KICKER: Take your home or office “phone” with you when you travel. Just pack the VoIP modem in your suitcase; on arrival, plug it into any high-speed Internet connection (hotel room, friend or relative’s house, airport, whatever) and, bingo, you can place and, more importantly, receive calls made to your regular phone number. And that is true anywhere in the world (with charges based on your home location). Go to Bora Bora and someone calling your home or office number in Des Moines will never know you’re not in Iowa when you answer; call someone and your usual Caller ID shows.

For every ying, of course, there must be a yang - so now for the downside:

1. If you have a cable Internet connection, your downline is 2 to 10 times faster than your upline. As a result, you may hear the other person clear as a bell and they may not hear you at all. This will lead to them hanging up on you (they don’t know you’re there) or demanding you “get off the speaker” or “hang up your cell and call me from a real phone”. And those are the polite ones.

The VoIP companies insist 256K up should be more than enough for a clear signal; that does not appear to be the case in actual use. There are ways to overcome this, if you get a knowledgeable VoIP support tech.

2. High-speed connections vary in quality based on a host of factors, from how many other users are sharing that cable line to how far it is from the nearest DSL booster node. Which means day-to-day, even call-to-call, VoIP quality is going to vary, as well - sometimes to wild extremes.

3. When no one is speaking, there is a “dead” silence that makes most people, accustomed to the slight “buzz” of a POTS signal, think the connection has been broken. If you don’t want to hear a constant “are you still there?”, explain this to everyone at the start of any conversation.

4. If you try to “activate” a new credit card by calling via VoIP, the computer at the other end may insist you are not calling from your home phone. “Why?” is an as-yet unanswered question from the VoIP providers.

5. Never, ever, let anyone put you on silent hold. If your VoIP service doesn’t hear something on that line for several minutes (how many seems to vary), it may simply disconnect you, apparently on the theory your phone is actually off the hook.

6. If your up-line signal is not strong enough, your call won’t go through, leading to an annoyingly frequent “Your call cannot be completed at this time” recording.

7. Occasionally, your VoIP will just stop working. The fix varies slightly by provider, but basically involves a lot of unplugging and replugging of VoIP modem, router, cable/DSL connection, in a specific sequence provided by the VoIP company.

8. Last - and by far worst: If your Internet connection goes down for any reason, you have no phone service. Anyone depending entirely on VoIP is strongly encouraged to keep a cellphone handy (keeping in mind you can set VoIP up to automatically call your cell if you don’t answer the VoIP line).

Bottom line: Commercial VoIP is a real telephone service, unlike computer-based “messengers” or even Skype (which clearly states it is not telephony); marks against, include no video (yet) and a lot of bugs yet to resolve. Still, at a savings of $30 to $100 a month, these problems aren’t so severe you can’t learn to live with them. It’s a bigger issue for your office, but add a cellphone to the mix for back-up and you may soon join the growing number of consumers who have gone all-VoIP, with no intention of ever going to POTS again.