...uick fix,the instant gratification. I see it all to often as I am sureyou have. The post in the blah blah forums asking "What is thebest way to advertise". I do have the answer. Are you ready. Theanswer is........It depends. It depends on who your market is.What age group are you targeting? What demographic are youstalking? If you can answer these questions you are on the righttrack for success. The answer is not a simple one. Most oftenthe answer is a medley of different ans...

...wers and quite often onethat nobody hasn't thought of yet. When advertising, never doit out of emotion. When starting an advertising campaign makesure it can be tracked. Weather you pay for it or not, if youcan't track it, your wasting your time and or money. Lets sayyou want to start an opt-in e-mail campaign. You send out300,000 e-mails. You get 3000 responses(by the way, that isextremely good). Where did the they come from. Why didn't theyor did they buy? If you can learn something from it that makesthe next campaign better it is not a failure. By constantlyanalyzing and readjusting your campaigns, you can zero in on themost effective form of advertising possible for your specificbusiness. In the words of Colin Powell, "There are no secrets tosuccess. It is the result of preparation, hard work, andlearning from failure." Most hosting companies today offer website analysis software. Use it! I can not stress this enough.Its amazing to me how many webmasters don't know what therehighest traffic days are. How many unique visitors are yougetting? What is the most popular page on your web site? What isthe least? What time of day does the bulk of your visitors show?There is so much useful information that can be harvested fromthese programs. I had a friend of mine come to me and asked formy help. He was getting a lot of visitors to his site but theywere leaving and not buying. He did know that but he should havedug deeper. After reviewing his site statistic reports I noticedthat a lot of shopping carts were being abandoned. This isn'treally all that uncommon accept for the fact that 90% were beingabandoned at a specific point in the check out process. I ranthrough the check out process myself and discovered thatselecting payment page was very confusing. I let him know aboutit. After fixing the issue his sales went up 150%. That's huge!How much would you pay to increase your business 150%? This isone of many examples of the potential benefits of knowing thevisitor flow and behavior of your site. Don't let your ego getin the way. Don't get dragged into an advertising war with acompetitor. Its human nature to be competitive and that isn'tnecessarily a bad thing but it can turn into a disaster if itgets the best of you. Just take a look at Google Adwords. I'veseen certain search terms as high as $3000.00. I've seenbusinesses fold partly due to there advertising budget that hadgotten out of control. Always have a plan. Always know were youare going, were you are now, and were you have been. If youfollow these simple guidelines, success is just a matter oftime.