Tim Bossie.com

I am pretty excited about this new series on the 10 Internet Advertising Questions that you should ask yourself about your ad campaign. If you haven’t read the first one yet, you really should. It’s the most important one and your advertising campaign will actually begin to take shape because of it.

This post is number 2 in the series and is really the second most important question.

Is my plan working?

Ok. You have your goals but that isn’t really your plan. Your advertising plan is a product of your goals. This is where you put actual actions to work for you to achieve those goals. So, it’s obvious that you must ask yourself this question.

Be careful. You can begin to lie to yourself here. You can make several excuses (some of which may even be legitimate). You can talk yourself into dumping more money into something that isn’t working very easily. Resist this temptation. Be very honest with yourself.

Look at last week’s goals and see how far off you were from reaching them. If you are off just a little bit there’s no problem. You just have to work a little bit harder (or think about new strategies) to help you reach those goals. But if you’re off by a lot on a major portion of them, you might as well scrap the plan.

Then you’re left with two options.

A. Create a whole new plan for this product/website
B. Ditch the effort entirely.

Last summer I was working with someone with their advertising for a network marketing company. You know the one I mean. The one where you make $997 for each sale?? Yeah, that one.

Anyway, things started out pretty good, but like most of these opportunities it became severely oversaturated. It actually got to the point where I was writing several ads a week for several different people for this same website. It was crazy.

I told my client that he might want to ditch this effort and move onto something else. We had built his brand and his own website was beginning to come alive. He really didn’t want to (he became attached to the opportunity… big mistake) and wanted me to come up with some new stuff. I gave him two options. Begin working on something new (I was ready to launch his own product for him) and put major effort into that or find another advertising creator/manager.

He chose poorly. After a month of losing everything we had built up he came back and wanted to launch the product. It took a little more time as he had lost the base we built up, but in the end it worked out. And now he isn’t attached to one thing anymore. He knows that if he has to cut off a dying piece of his business, it’s for growth somewhere else.

5 Ways To Evaluate Your Advertising Plan

1. Is your traffic growing, staying the same, or declining? The only good answer it that it’s growing. If you traffic is staying the same, that’s ok, but that should show you that you have some work to do. If it’s declining you need to find out why.

2. Are people unsubscribing from your newsletter or autoresponder messages? If so, then a few things could be wrong. Your content isn’t original. Your market is declining.

3. Is it costing you more for traffic? If your advertising costs are rising to either keep the same amount of traffic or less, something is wrong. A little rise in costs is ok. I like to actually llower costs and if your advertising plan is working, then this is what you should be seeing.

4. Are you making more sales? Obviously if you’re making more money, selling more product, then your plan is in ok shape. Just keep an eye on the ad/sale ratio.

5. Are you building your own personal brand? Here’s where it gets tricky.

You’re selling other people’s products, and that’s a great way to earn money, but are you also building your name, your reputation, your own products? That’s your key to long lasting success. If you ad plan is mostly sending people to a merchant site, or landing page, your plan is severely flawed. Make sure you evaluate this.

Is your advertising plan working?

Don’t make any excuses. If it’s not working, it’s not working. Doesn’t matter what the reason is. It might not be your fault. But the end result doesn’t change. Your plan doesn’t work. Change it, or ditch it.

What’s the next question? You can read Question #3 in the 10 Questions to ask yourself about your internet advertising campaign here.