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No
matter how you decide to advertise, whether it is free banner
exchanges, paid ads in newsletters or submitting your site to
free-for-all links pages, you need a way to track your campaigns.
If
you do not track your advertising, you will have no way of knowing
which of your campaigns are the most effective and which ones
are a waste of time and money.
There
are two ways to track your campaigns.
Method
#1
Setting
up redirect pages is free, but requires much more time and effort
on your part to set up. First, you will have to sign up with
a hit counter company to use a different counter on each redirect
page. Do not put these counters on your actual website - that
is considered to be the sign of an inexperienced webmaster.
The best collection I've found is at Merlet.com.
140 + counters
Second,
you will need to create a "redirect" page for each
link you want to track. To make a page redirect, copy-paste this
META TAG to the HEAD of the page. That means between the open
<HEAD> and close </HEAD> tags.
<META
HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" CONTENT="0; URL="http://www.melonbones.com/bizbuild/adtracker.html">
You
will have to change the green text to point to your own
page. If you use the code above, it will redirect to this page.
Don't forget to leave the "> at the end of your URL.
Create
your page and save it with a descriptive, but short name. Put
a counter on it to see how many times it is accessed. Add the
code that will cause it to redirect to the actual page you are
advertising.
You
are now ready to advertise your redirect page in emails, free-for-all
link pages, banner ads, or wherever you want. Don't forget though,
for EACH place you advertise, you will need another redirect
page with a DIFFERENT hit counter code on it. Make a list of
every page you create and include where you advertise it, the
URL of the redirect page, and the URL of where it points so you
can tell how many people click on any given advertised link.
Here
is a sample link that will take you to a redirect page back to
this one. Note the simplicity of the page - this is VERY important.
The page must be made to load and redirect as quickly
as possible. DO NOT ADD GRAPHICS!!!
Test
Redirect Page
Lot
of work isn't it? That's why I use:
Method
# 2
The
best way I have found to track advertising is with a company
called NitroStats. At the time of this writing, they have an
introductory offer that allows you track unlimited campaigns
and update them as often as you like for only $1.00 for the first
month. This will also allow you to use an impressive list of
marketing tools from the NitroStats arsenal. Another advantage
to using NitroStats is that some of your affiliate programs,
or even your own web pages, can have very long URL's. The NitroStats
URL's are relatively short. This is important when advertising
by email because sometimes when a URL wraps to a new line, it
"breaks" it.
Read
all about your trial NitroStats account here:
NitroStats
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