Let’s be honest. With all the different advertising avenues on the Internet, it’s hard to know what methods are going to bring you the best results.

While it is not the intention of this article to try to figure out what methods of advertising are good and what methods are not so good, it is the intention to point out the best ways to maximize your advertising dollars so that you get the most out of every ad you place.

The actual process can get a bit complicated but for the sake of this article, we’re going to simplify some of the numbers. Yes, there is some number crunching involved, but we’ll keep it as simple as possible.

Let’s start with a simple ezine ad. Let’s say you want to take out a solo ezine ad with one of the biggest ezines in your niche on the Internet. Let’s for argument sake say that this ezine has 100,000 subscribers and a solo full page ad costs $250.

The first thing you have to look at is the product you’re going to promote. Let’s for argument sake say that the product sells for $50. In order to just make your money back, you’d have to make 5 sales to that list of 100,000 subscribers.

The next thing you have to look at is the historical conversion of your product. Let’s for argument sake say that it converts 1 sale for every 30 clicks. So the next thing we have to look at is how many clicks you can expect to get from a list of 100,000 people.

This is always the hard part, but rule of thumb for any email promotion is that you’re going to get about 3% of the people to open your email and go to your site. That comes out to 3,000 people.

If 3,000 people go to your site and you make a sale for every 30 visitors, then that means, on average, you’re going to get about 100 sales for this mailing. At $50 a pop, that’s $5,000 in sales. Not bad for a $250 ad.

But what if that $250 ad only went out to 10,000 people instead of 100,000? That would translate to only 10 sales or $500 in income. While you’ve made a profit, you certainly can’t claim this campaign to be a smashing success.

Was it worth sending to 10,000 people to make $500 and a profit of $250? Well, I’m not going to try to answer that question because everybody is going to have different criteria for what they call a successful campaign.

However, and this is the point of this article, you want to go through each campaign that you’re considering of running. Just as I added up the figures here, you want to do the same thing with your campaign. Naturally, you’ll have to estimate some of the figures.

However, after doing this, you should have a pretty decent idea if the campaign you’re going to run is going to turn out to be profitable or not.

It’s not an exact science, but trust me on this much. It works.

© Neil-Harvey.com