Network Marketing Approaches: How To Know What Works

Everyone in network marketing uses advertising. With so many people trying so hard to succeed, it's amazing how many people will spend their time and money on advertising that just does not work, and continue to pump time and money into the same useless advertising over and over again.

Why would you spend hours clicking away at traffic exchanges, or spend hundreds of dollars on pay-per-click advertising that is not helping you build your downline? Of course, these can be very effective ways to advertise. But there is no one-size-fits-all solution. You need to figure out what works for you, and keep doing it. Likewise, you need to learn what's a waste of your time or money, and stop doing it!

Be honest. How many times have you sponsored someone, or sold something, and said to yourself, "I wonder how they found my web site?" Why we do it is a mystery to me, but almost every network marketer does it. Ok, I admit it, I have done it, too.

The good news is that there is a way to learn what advertising works, and what doesn't. It's called ad tracking, sometime known as "web analytics," and there are lots of ways to do it. Some methods are only for webmasters and other expert types. Others are so simple that nobody has an excuse for avoiding them.

If you're new to ad tracking, then read the section below on Ad Tracking Basics. If you already know the basics, you can skip straight to Ad Tracking Anyone Can Use.

Before we get into how anyone can use ad tracking, let's cover some basics: campaigns, clicks, and conversions. I'll use the example of an email ad on two different safelists to help explain these concepts.

Ad tracking shows you the effectiveness of an ad campaign. A campaign is the combination of an ad (like your email content) and an ad resource (like a safelist). Maybe you have a great ad, but you're using a terrible resource. By creating separate campaigns for the same ad on different resources, you can tell if one resource is better than another. Similarly, by creating separate campaigns for different ads on a single resource, you can tell which ad copy is best, and which needs work. Don't make the common mistake of using one campaign for the same ad on different resources! If you do, you don't know if it's your ad or your resource that's working (or not working).

Tracking clicks tells you which campaigns are attracting attention. For example, say you blast out an ad on two different safelists. If you track the clicks from both safelist ad campaigns, you learn how many subscribers from each list read your email and clicked on your link. If the safelists give away points for clicking on ad links, you don't know if your ad was well written, or if people were just clicking for points. But you did learn which safelist gets you more traffic. When your advertising resource does not give people an incentive to click, then you can really use click tracking to tell which ads are getting attention, and which are just duds.

Tracking conversions tells you how many people actually signed up or bought something from your campaign. Take the same safelist scenario. You may find that you got a lot of clicks on one safelist but very few conversions from this campaign. If this is the case, then maybe you're wasting your time with this safelist. Maybe the other safelist got fewer clicks, but more conversions. Now you know this is the right place to advertise! Tracking conversions is a little more complicated than tracking clicks, but it gives you the most information.

To be complete, I'll share this link to a Wikipedia page that lists a lot of different ad tracking software. Most (if not all) of these products require that you make your own web pages, or landing pages, where you insert some tracking code. That's fine if you're a webmaster, but what about most network marketers who use landing pages provided by their company?

No problem! These days, I'm using a very simple ad tracking system that works with any web page, whether or not you control the content. It's a web-based system that tracks all your campaigns in one place. I'll explain how it works, and then tell you how you can get your own.

First, you create a tracking URL that redirects to your web page. Instead of advertising your web page URL, you advertise the tracking URL. When someone visits the tracking URL it counts the visitor and displays your web page so fast that your visitor is not bothered by the redirect. With this basic tracking URL you can count visits to your web page.

To turn this into a campaign tracker, all you do is add a campaign name to the end of your tracking URL. The campaign name is a few characters you use to know which ad, and which resource, were used to get the click. For example, the link I give you below will have the campaign name "TrackingHub." The system counts clicks separately for every campaign name, so you know which campaigns are working, and which are not. If you visit the link below I'll know you came from this article about ad tracking, in HubPages!

Best of all, it's free to use for unlimited campaigns of click tracking. If you want to do conversion tracking you can upgrade for a one-time or monthly fee. The ad tracker is just one of several tools in the package, but it's the main reason I'm using the package. I have been looking a long time for a free and simple ad tracker with the ability to run separate campaigns, and this one's definitely a winner.

To get your own free ad tracker, plus a bunch of other useful advertising tools, just CLICK HERE. Think about your needs, and whether or not you want to have conversion tracking, too. They have a one-time-offer page that's a pretty sweet deal, if you know what you're looking for when you sign up.

All the best,

Sam Reichgott 
OneStopPromo.com