Social Networking
Small business owners such as normal online marketers need to watch their budget closely so that they do not burn out their budget and not breaking even as a return. The most important thing about this is that when the money you spend is getting you a nice return on your investment, you will be able to keep spending more to get more back. If you are spending and not getting a return, you should stop immediately. It is very easy to get into a battle between yourself and keep spending because you thought it might work out if you just keep spending.
Here are some great tips to help you improve on lowering your business cost for this year.
Don’t overspend on Traffic.
The thing is, most of the time, if you tried to buy traffic, say 200 visitors, that should immediately tell you if this traffic is converting or not. Some people will argue that you need to test at least 1000 visitors in order to get an accurate result which is true in many ways, but you need to keep in mind of your budget as well. Those who test at least 1000 clicks are those who have a lot of money to burn. Imagine their face when they tested 1000 visitors and they got a just 1 or two sale or even worse no sales? Woops? No… as a business with a small budget, we must not allow ourselves to overspend and chase the wrong strategies.
In fact, from experience, you should be able to see some conversions when you are testing on around 100 ? 300 clicks (depending on click price). If the clicks are cheaper, you can test for more, but if the clicks are expensive, don’t go for a huge volume. Buying traffic is a great way to test your offers. The traffic comes in volumes fast, but you have to always have a good idea of what your general conversion rate is.
Traffic from different sources does not convert the same. It usually depends on how targeted the traffic that you are getting is. The more targeted your traffic is, you will find that the more this traffic will convert. The lesser targeted the traffic is, the lesser the conversions rate you will get. This means that when you are spending for 200 clicks and not getting any conversions at all, it’s time to move on. The traffic could be cheap but surely you can tell that it is not converting, and people are not giving any attention to your product at all. This usually means that the traffic that reaches your site is not targeted.
When you are buying targeted traffic, and this is very important, you should be seeing a healthy conversion rate. This is important because the conversions will be the ones that cover your cost. You will need to be monitoring and calculating your profits. When you are only breaking even, you should look at your own sales message and find out what’s wrong with it. If you are confident that your sales message is strong and other copywriters are telling you the same as well, then breaking even only means that it is not working out for you and you have to move on to another traffic source. Stop paying for untargeted traffic because you are only going to be wasting a lot of money.
Obviously, if you are doing this correctly, not only will you be saving on your budget, you will find that you are actually paying for the traffic with the money you earned from the sales.
One quick note is that it is not easy to find a good traffic source to convert so keep trying. When you find it, be sure to amplify your spending so that you can maximize your return. Another important thing that you should take note of when spending your budget for traffic is that you need to do a strong market research in order to help you locate the traffic that you need. Understand the demographics and you should see a better conversions overall.
Social Networking.
These days, Social networking is the go to place for free traffic (besides the tedious SEO). Now social network is a great place to build a brand for you. However, the conversions might suffer because the people are not as targeted and most of the people are not in the buying mode. However, the traffic volume that dwells inside social networking sites is not to be ignored. Even so, you should be able to pull traffic from these Social Networking sites for free which is great for those who are operating their business on a tight budget and do not have the money to spend on paid traffic.
Again, the factor of how target the traffic is matters because your profits will directly come from your sales and your sales depends on your conversions. The more targeted your traffic is, the better the conversions. Hence, use social networking wisely and turn it into an advantage to your business. Other side benefits from social networking aside from free traffic and brand building is that you could be constantly adding some quality backlink to your site and this will in turn help you out in your search engine rankings. Therefore, you could actually get two traffic sources from just your Social Marketing efforts.
The branding on social networking sites can be very valuable to your business as well in the sense that your customers will trust you more and they will be more willing to pay you money the solution of their problems then to an unknown and suspicious guy.
Review your activities in the past.
It is always good to sit down and do in depths review of what you have spent on in the past and monitor closely on what you will do this year. Find out what is too expensive in your previous year’s spending and find out what has been eating up your budget. Learning from past mistakes is always a great place to help your business cut cost and move towards a better path.
