Hi Ron Gee - I somehow missed your first post. Sorry about that! : ) ======================================= I'm Ron Armacost, and yes I'm on a learning curve. ======================================= Well, welcome to the club. lol. We all are. They say true wisdom starts when we realize that the amount we know will never exceed the amount we don't know. Heh. ========================================== I have used some of the classified ads in Adland for promotion. The views are OK, but the hits are low. It maybe that I'm a little impatient and haven't given it enough time. How long should I run an ad before making changes? ========================================== Well, I'm a little crazy when it comes to that. I run ad campaigns for some of my clients. When I first create an ad, I monitor it hourly if it's getting a lot of views, and several times a day for less active sites. See, I figure that if an ad shows 100 views and no clicks, why keep running it? Why not change a word or two and see what happens. Often, I'll have 3-5 totally different ads running at a time. I can see which is getting best response. Then I'll remove the dud, and take the "best" ad and tweak a little. Change a word or two and test it against the original to see which works better. If the changed version works better, it moves to top spot. If it gets less response, I change it again. That way, I always have the "best pulling" ad running, as well as some test ads that are getting tweaked and changed to see what happens. Sometimes, one little word can make a difference. : ) Linda

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Hi Everyone, This is Larry. I have been here for less than a month at AdlandPro. I am faced with a great opportunity and a challenge. I have an opportunity to market a service online. The service itself is already successful and growing. The service provider must keep focused on providing his service. In other words, he has no interest or time to market or advertise himself. He like to grow by referral from existing clients and word-of-mouth. I have a background in writing, selling and teaching. Communications is my strong point. But that doesn't automatically translate into being an Internet Marketing Expert. So, here I am with a chance for a JV/Business Partnership where I do the telling and the service does the delivering of a high-quality service. The Internet is my oyster. But I need diving lessons to harvest the oysters. That's kind of how it feels. I am considering publishing an e-zine to start. Maybe a simple site. But, this needs to be a true shoestring operation. I don't really have capital available to launch a business. And I don't have the experience to know just how to do design the Internet Marketing plan. I can write copy and generate concepts for testing the market. But I would need inexpensive and user-friendly tools to allow myself to put into action some of what I read about Internet Marketing. My target market, is NOT Internet Marketing. But after being here even for a short while I am considering some affiliate programs that relate to what I need to use myself in Internet Marketing. In that sense being here at AdlandPro has opened my eyes to additional possibilities like affililiate sales. Well, I'll wrap it up here for now. I'm glad I joined this Forum. Any input would be very much appreciated. Thanks Larry

Hi Larry, You'll get lots of vauable information here in these forums and lots of great input. Interesting business your friend must have. Only person I ever knew with a business that didn't have an interest in advertising to grow his business. Out of curosity, what do you consider a shoestring budget? I hear so many people say that. Usually, they mean "nothing". I've never met anyone who has done well online with out making some kind of investment.

Thanks for the post Winston. Just to clarify, I do mean low-cost ways to start. I don't expect all Free services or products to be sutiable. On the other hand I'd like to keep costs at the minimal level to start and let sales, even meager to allow me to buy more sophisticated and helpful tools to help my marketing efforts and presence on the web be as professional as possible. My shoestring budget is not literally nothing. but I'd want to keeo costs very low to start. For example, I am open to using Free HTML Editors and FTP Programs. I expect to pay for hosting as I have learned that Free hosting is not a good decision overall. I'm looking for the best features for the buck I can find to start. Then I hope that some affiliate sales might cover costs for availing myself of more professional and expensive services to grow and make use of the best automation services available. The person who runs the service I mentioned would be very glad to get more business. I meant that he does not advertise at the moment. And he likes the targeted referrals he is getting by word-of-mouth. I put that to his credit actually. My mission as I see it is to develop a marketing plan to attract targeted, somewhat pre-qualified interested people to refer to him using the Internet. This, if done right, I'm hoping will keep the conversion rate from interested to client ratio as high as he enjoys now from his personal word-of-mouth referrals. I look forward to researching and moving forward with this with the assistance from others here at AdlandPro Larry