This is the #1 problem business owners and entrepreneurs face when doing marketing on the Internet - taking full control of knowing where their customers come from.
This starts with the epiphany that you must track your marketing efforts online somehow. Some entrepreneurs and bloggers think that it is enough by looking into your overall website statistics using something like Google Analytics and that will do - just to realize sooner or later that looking at most of that data leaves them clueless.
If your goal is to run a profitable business you know that creating and sharing great content for example on your blog is just the start to attracting paying clients.
No matter if you want to sign up people for your newsletter, drive sales with affiliate links and gather a commission from them or let people buy your services and products directly from your own website - the question that daily hovers over your head like a dark cloud is "where did that reader of my blog came from, where did that buyer of my product did originally find me in the first place?".
The most frustrating thing of not having any sales or new customers is actually getting a sale and a new customer - and NOT knowing where they did come from. And you know that where they came from are more that there are even more of them that want your services and products. Yikes!
The most amazing part is this: if you have the habit of asking your new customers where they did find you - most of them do not remember, even if they just found you within the last hours. Was it that Facebook ad, a guest blog post, a post in a forum or the newsletter that you just sent out this morning?
And this is so surprising to see that the majority of online marketing activities and important website links are not being tracked and business owners are feeling that most of their business depends on sheer luck or just doing "massive action" on social media, no matter what it is.
It seems that for many businesses they compensate the lack of tracking their marketing with just doing "more marketing stuff" as if this would magically solve the problem.
As long as you do not track your marketing down to single links and monitor all your paid marketing (Facebook, Google ads or
Yahoo Bing or others) or free marketing (like posting on forums,
blogs and sharing articles, posting on your Facebook timeline, sending a tweet), you are doomed with this dark cloud that will simply not go away.
And let's face it - there is no free marketing at all. All of your marketing efforts take time and therefore valuable time is spend for those "free" marketing activities. Some revelation about those "free" activities: once you know that those activities make you sales you can analyze them correctly and see if you can scale them and outsource them to multiply your results.
This is an unpleasant but liberating truth: you will discover that a lot of your marketing activities are useless. You will discover also for example that some of the so highly praised "free" marketing methods can't be scaled up.
Posting on forums can't be done on your own, you can't multiply yourself. If you want to reach more forums you need to outsource this - and know which forums return customers and sales to you. Impossible to know without tracking your links.
Writing guest blog posts needs a smart distribution strategy, meaning while you might be able to pull it off to write those guest blog posts yourself, you need to outsource the distribution process on where to post those articles and then track your links from which blogs you get the most valuable traffic that converts into customers and sales.
Of course all of this is not really something new - but yet most online entrepreneur and businesses that use the Internet for their marketing seem to ignore this simple #1 online marketing activity that needs to be done in order to succeed:
Track Your Marketing - Or Track Your Marketing Better!
Why do people not track their marketing efforts?
The most often heard excuse is that it is so complicated to track all your links and that it takes away so much time from their actual business. This is like saying you do not have time to sharpen your ax because you have so many trees to cut.
The negative psychological effect on your business of not tracking your marketing is really like a dark cloud that will influence all your business activities. It will rain on your business success, because you will have this constant voice in your head in all that you do: "What I do right now, will this bring me new business today or is it just busy work?"
The only way out it to break out of the old habits and get started to strategically track your marketing efforts better. Monitoring the money (or your "free" time) you spend on advertising activities and tracking your links does not have to be complicated at all. (Just check my signature
!)
BTW: This was an article that I just wrote last week as a guest post and thought I would like to share it here and post it, even maybe some of the content is "old news" for more of the more seasoned Fastlaners here...
This starts with the epiphany that you must track your marketing efforts online somehow. Some entrepreneurs and bloggers think that it is enough by looking into your overall website statistics using something like Google Analytics and that will do - just to realize sooner or later that looking at most of that data leaves them clueless.
If your goal is to run a profitable business you know that creating and sharing great content for example on your blog is just the start to attracting paying clients.
No matter if you want to sign up people for your newsletter, drive sales with affiliate links and gather a commission from them or let people buy your services and products directly from your own website - the question that daily hovers over your head like a dark cloud is "where did that reader of my blog came from, where did that buyer of my product did originally find me in the first place?".
The most frustrating thing of not having any sales or new customers is actually getting a sale and a new customer - and NOT knowing where they did come from. And you know that where they came from are more that there are even more of them that want your services and products. Yikes!
The most amazing part is this: if you have the habit of asking your new customers where they did find you - most of them do not remember, even if they just found you within the last hours. Was it that Facebook ad, a guest blog post, a post in a forum or the newsletter that you just sent out this morning?
And this is so surprising to see that the majority of online marketing activities and important website links are not being tracked and business owners are feeling that most of their business depends on sheer luck or just doing "massive action" on social media, no matter what it is.
It seems that for many businesses they compensate the lack of tracking their marketing with just doing "more marketing stuff" as if this would magically solve the problem.
As long as you do not track your marketing down to single links and monitor all your paid marketing (Facebook, Google ads or
Yahoo Bing or others) or free marketing (like posting on forums,
blogs and sharing articles, posting on your Facebook timeline, sending a tweet), you are doomed with this dark cloud that will simply not go away.
And let's face it - there is no free marketing at all. All of your marketing efforts take time and therefore valuable time is spend for those "free" marketing activities. Some revelation about those "free" activities: once you know that those activities make you sales you can analyze them correctly and see if you can scale them and outsource them to multiply your results.
This is an unpleasant but liberating truth: you will discover that a lot of your marketing activities are useless. You will discover also for example that some of the so highly praised "free" marketing methods can't be scaled up.
Posting on forums can't be done on your own, you can't multiply yourself. If you want to reach more forums you need to outsource this - and know which forums return customers and sales to you. Impossible to know without tracking your links.
Writing guest blog posts needs a smart distribution strategy, meaning while you might be able to pull it off to write those guest blog posts yourself, you need to outsource the distribution process on where to post those articles and then track your links from which blogs you get the most valuable traffic that converts into customers and sales.
Of course all of this is not really something new - but yet most online entrepreneur and businesses that use the Internet for their marketing seem to ignore this simple #1 online marketing activity that needs to be done in order to succeed:
Track Your Marketing - Or Track Your Marketing Better!
Why do people not track their marketing efforts?
The most often heard excuse is that it is so complicated to track all your links and that it takes away so much time from their actual business. This is like saying you do not have time to sharpen your ax because you have so many trees to cut.
The negative psychological effect on your business of not tracking your marketing is really like a dark cloud that will influence all your business activities. It will rain on your business success, because you will have this constant voice in your head in all that you do: "What I do right now, will this bring me new business today or is it just busy work?"
The only way out it to break out of the old habits and get started to strategically track your marketing efforts better. Monitoring the money (or your "free" time) you spend on advertising activities and tracking your links does not have to be complicated at all. (Just check my signature
!)BTW: This was an article that I just wrote last week as a guest post and thought I would like to share it here and post it, even maybe some of the content is "old news" for more of the more seasoned Fastlaners here...
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