The Essential Assessment
It is impossible to tell which marketing is good marketing,
and which marketing is ineffective for your business without
regular assessment and adjustment.
You can make intelligent judgments ahead of time, about whether
or not a marketing tactic is LIKELY to work, based on the
criteria that it has to send an effective message to people
who want that message, but you cannot know for certain which
messages are effective, or which messages are MOST effective,
or sometimes even where the highest concentrations of interested
people are, without some means of measuring results.
Let me make it very clear, that most good marketing takes
time to see solid results. For some kinds of free (and some
kinds of paid) marketing, it can take 3-4 months to get an
initial response. With other kinds, it can take that long
to spot a trend, and with others, it takes that long to fine
tune a campaign enough to know whether it CAN ever yield the
results you want.
Assessment has two parts:
1. Measuring results. You do this by tracking responses,
measuring financial returns, and by seeing where your customers
are coming from with whatever degree of accuracy you can afford.
Sometimes we cannot afford the most accurate methods, so we
make educated guesses based on the available information,
and then we see if a change gives us the result we'd expect
if our conclusion is right.
2. By making choices for changes, based on our interpretation
of the results. Sometimes we hold firm, sometimes we fine
tune, sometimes we dump it entirely and go in another direction.
It can get complicated when we are running several marketing
methods at a time. How can we know if increased traffic comes
from article marketing, or from SEO? We can't really, because
article marketing produces increased pagerank, which results
in indirect increases in search engine traffic, and SEO also
produces increases in search engine traffic. But we can make
educated guesses.
The whole point though, is that we pay attention, as much
as we can, to what our marketing gets us. I have enough sites,
I can test marketing methods one at a time. I can use just
cross linking with site A, just article marketing with site
B, and just forum posts with site C. Most people cannot do
that, but they CAN watch for gradual improvements in numbers,
about two to eight weeks after article marketing, about two
to four weeks after cross linking, and within a day of forum
postings (there will be a second response if the forum links
are counted by the search engines, but it will be minor, and
it will follow several weeks later)..
With any of these though, ONE article will bring only small
results. Cross linking with ONE site won't make a huge difference.
Forum posts will give just trickles unless you do a lot.
The real power ISN'T from one of them. It is from doing that
method repeatedly. After about six article posts (if they
are good articles), you'll definitely see something within
a couple of months. The other methods are the same - slow,
and building rather than sudden and unmistakable.
Once you are certain what does work, then follow the old
business rule:
Do more of what works, less of what doesn't.
In order to follow it though, you have to first accurately
pinpoint what IS working.
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