Is Internet Marketing Still Effective?

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It’s often hard to know how effective your internet marketing is or even if it’s working at all.

Things take so long to take effect.

Sometimes it’s like the proverbial butterfly that flaps its wings and eventually causes extreme weather conditions – you get a blip in your traffic or even a constant increase.

And other times it’s as though you’d done nothing at all and have just wasted your time.

How can you check the effectiveness of your internet marketing?

Or is it like the quote from John Wanamaker “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

Although that quote was about advertising it applies equally to internet marketing.

A lot of the time, it’s difficult or even impossible to split out cause and effect.

Google and Bing rarely tell you the search terms used before people click through to your site, so there’s not much of a clue in the data they sent you. Maybe you could drill down to the pages reached but with the increase in long tail keywords and related keywords even that is unlikely to help much.

Your logs will show you other referring pages, so if you’re using forums or Twitter or videos or other web pages then there should be some clues there.

But they’re only clues.

Even Sherlock Holmes would be hard pushed to work out where your internet traffic is coming from. The detective work involved in even just one incoming click is usually much higher than the benefit of knowing what caused it.

There’s a danger of getting trapped by analysis paralysis here.

Personally, I think it’s far better to spend your time creating new content than it is to fret about where your existing traffic is coming from.

Of course, you still need to do a reality check every now and then, otherwise you risk spending too much time on methods that are outdated and are no longer effective. So if you’re almost the only person commenting on a forum or visiting your Facebook page or reading your Tweets then it’s probably time to reconsider.

Or at least cut back on them until they show signs of doing more than being for an audience of one (you!)

Part of the problem is the time lag.

Different things react differently.

The response to an email to your list will likely be mainly within the first 24 hours of sending, with a small dribble coming in for another day or two, rarely much more.

You can set your autoresponder to track clicks or you can send links via a redirection service on your website of you prefer.

That’s measurable and you’ll see how effective your emails are almost immediately.

Of course, you still won’t know 100% because email responses vary by time of day, day of week and time of year. So even then a controlled experiment is difficult. But if you generally get a better response to emails sent out in the morning on weekdays then that’s a good enough clue.

Tweets, Facebook posts, etc. usually have a much shorter lifespan than emails so their effect falls away faster unless you get re-Tweeted or someone mentions your post. You’ll usually get notified when this happens so you will know that someone else thinks it was worth letting other people know. “All” you have to do then is figure out why they did it and replicate it more often.

Forum posts can get an immediate response or a time lagged response if they get picked up by the search engines. That’s one of the reasons forum posts from months or years ago suddenly come to life again: someone has found the post – probably via Google as most people don’t seem to use the (often poor) forum search options – and replied. Maybe genuinely, maybe in a bid to increase their post count but either way it brings the post to the top of the forum and puts a new lease of life into your old content. boosting its effectiveness.

Posts on your own website can get an immediate response if you’ve got a very active band of followers or if you let people know they exist.

You can tempt people to enhance the effectiveness of your posts by encouraging the use of the social media buttons that you’ve almost certainly got on your pages, You can see an example on the pages on this site although I don’t often nag readers to click the buttons.

But once you’ve written a post, it’s weeks or months or longer before the search engines will pick up on it and show it in the search results.

That’s far too long to wait to judge the effectiveness of the content you’ve created.

So you’ll have to take a view.

That normally means going with your gut reaction.

Which for me is keep creating reasonably long content on a reasonably regular basis and letting all the behind the scenes algorithm stuff happen in its own sweet time.

For this site, the trend from the search engines is slowly upwards.

Not enough to crack open the champagne.

But certainly enough to encourage me to keep creating content.

There are lots of ways to get more traffic and visitors to your site.

Individually they may be next to nothing.

But collectively they are effective.

The trick is to gently monitor what’s happening and do a bit more of what’s working slightly better for you.

Tipping the balance – even just slightly – can make all the difference.

But the main thing is to keep at it.

Because persistence is definitely a big part of the effectiveness of internet marketing.

If you’d like to find out more, my suggestion is that you follow the route of affiliate marketing first so that you can find your feet quickly and start getting cash in your wallet.

Click this link to find out more about how to do that.

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