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Are you trying to shoot a flying pigeon in a dark room, when it comes to advertising? It would be a lot easier to do if you were using a bright spotlight.

Using a bright spotlight would mean:

--Targeted Ads.

Who would you think would be more likely to buy your product..your target market or just anybody?

Ex-You are selling a romance book. Who would you think would be more likely to buy your romantic book? If you ran an ad in a marketing newsletter, you might find 3 or 4 people that wanted your book, but why settle for peanuts when you can have the whole elephant? If you ran the ad in a woman's newsletter, you would get a better response. Who would be more interested in a romance book than women? If you could find a newsletter that was targeted to women who read romance books, that's even better or a newsletter that did reviews on romance books.. You get the idea, I'm sure.

Summary: Run your ad to a market that is interested in Your niche product.

--Track Your Ads

You need some important answers that only tracking can give you:

1-Is my ad a good ad?

Write 5 different ads for your product. Get your friends and family to read the 5 ads. Don't tell them they are your ads. Tell them a friend asked your opinion about the ads. That way, you will get their honest opinion. Discuss the ads with them. Ask them what they think would make them buy the product, if they saw the ad in a classified section.

2-Now that we are sure we have some good ads, we need to make sure that our ad is being read. Is the readers of a newsletter responsive?

To test this, I would run an ad in a newsletter 5 times. Why? Let's all be honest. How many times have you had a deadline to meet, been working on a great product and haven't had time to read a newsletter that you are subscribed to? Maybe you deleted it, maybe you saved it to read later but important things just kept coming up and you never got around to it? This happens sometime. Just like s__t happens. That's why running an ad just once is not a fair test.

Summary: You need to run your ad more than once to get a true test.

3-Which newsletter did the ad or click through come from?

To find this out, you need a different tracking url for each ad and keep track of which newsletter you put each unique url in. Most tracking scripts will do this for you. We have one at Three Dollar Ads that will do just that. You can see it here:
http://threedollarads.com/linkexpire/signup.php

Let's say you place an ad in newsletter X and another one in newsletter Z. You use a different tracking url for each {even if it's the same ad}. When you check your stats, you find that you had 2 click throughs from newsletter X, but you had 10 click throughs from newsletter Z. I bet you can guess which newsletter gave you the best results?

Summary: Use a unique tracking url for every ad you run to track it's total performance.

4-Will people buy from your affiliate link or will they change it to theirs {if they are an affiliate for that program EX-Clickbank} or bypass the affiliate link all together and just go through the company?

The best way to make sure this doesn't happen is to cloak your affiliate link. The tracker we have set-up at Three Dollar Ads will do both. It will track you ads, give you stats and cloak your affiliate link all at once:
http://threedollarads.com/linkexpire/signup.php

That way, you don't have to worry about anyone stealing your affiliate commissions. That should take a load off your mind!

Summary:Cloak your affiliate links to keep from losing your commissions.

If you pay money to run ads, why not get your moneys worth? Find out for yourself what works and what doesn't.

Stop trying to shoot a flying pigeon in a dark room! Turn on your bright spotlight. You just might be able to hit your mark!