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Budget

Setting up a budget for your campaign is not as easy as it sounds. You may have a specific amount in mind but simply using up the whole amount at least initially may not be the wisest idea. Online advertising comes in many forms. You could run a series of 5 campaigns as well as a series of 50 campaigns. The key is to spend your money right.

Some campaigns are obviously more expensive than others. Some may even be free. This means that it is not simply a case of saying that you are going to run a series of five different campaigns covering a range of advertising media and so you will split your budget equally between the five campaigns. You do not know what campaigns yield better results by simply knowing the costs.

Any successful campaign is formed of the right ingredients. The hardest part of your advertising campaign is not to set it up or maintain it but to find the right ingredients. This can only be done with time. I would suggest that you do not stretch you budget initially. Start with a few campaigns well within your budget and track their performance over a period of time. This will give you a better idea of what strategies work for you and what don’t. In fact, it may not be a bad idea to spend less than half of your budget initially. This way even if you lose all your money you would still have money left for other campaigns.

On the other hand, if your initial campaign works, you could continue with them and also jack it up a notch.

Tracking your campaign

Tracking your advertisements, as discussed above, is essential for the success of the campaign. By employing some sort of a tracking system you would be able to figure out which advertisements bring you the highest number of responses. This is so very important, especially initially. It not only focuses your efforts on the right advertising strategies but also helps in achieving maximum ROI.

More information on Ad Tracking systems is given later on in this chapter.

Analyzing your visitors

There are two phases involved in measuring the performance of your ads. One is tracking which ads get you good responses. The second is to identify those visitors who actually go on to sign up for your newsletter from your website. You would probably have a text box to allow visitors to enter their email address and sign up for your ezine. In the section on websites, I recommended that you have a separate page for each ezine. Apart from other benefits already discussed, this would also enable you to identify visitors who sign up for your ezine. This can be done by simply studying the traffic logs to track the hits on the sign up page.

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