One of the truisms of online business is that “If you build it, they will come” just isn’t true online. You have to do a lot of work to get people to your online business.

One of the things you need is a good advertising strategy. You probably don’t have a big budget for advertising, especially if you’re just starting out, but you should budget something.

One thing you need to have in your advertising is a solid message. You want people to know why they are coming to your site. The ideal respondent to any advertising you do is strongly interested in what you have to offer. You want your message to attract them.

There are many places you can put your message to help. Business cards, forum signatures, email signatures, flyers, just to name a few.

The message needs to match the message of your website. If you promise blue widgets in your ads but really only sell red ones, you aren’t going to get many sales.

Just to make things a little more challenging, the advertising message that works on a forum may not work at all on a business card. The medium of your message makes a big difference sometimes.

One of the most important advertising strategies is to track and test. You need to know where you are getting the best results and where you need to improve. If you’re sending everyone to the same place with no way to track, how will you know which ads are working?

Basic tracking can be as simple as adding a tracking code to your links. If you make your link look like http://www.site.com?trackingcode, you will have some idea as to where your traffic is coming from. You can also do some tracking by checking your website statistics, especially if your statistics package lets you follow what visitors are doing. You can also try signing up for Google Analytics (but you might have to wait!) and use their system.

Keeping in contact with current customers is a good idea too. This is why so many people recommend having a newsletter. I honestly suggest having more than one… one for those who haven’t bought, a different one for those who have. This way you don’t keep offering something they’ve already bought to your existing customers. It doesn’t have to be too much extra work; you may even be able to give them most of the same information, depending on how you want to do things. The main thing is to promote the right items to each group.

Advertising is as much art as science. It takes a great deal of creativity, yet you need to be able to understand the results you are getting.

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