In my previous article, "What is a Lead Worth?", I showed ways of determining how much you should pay for each lead you get to make sure you are profitable.  In that article, I decided that I could easily afford to pay up to $2 for every lead while making good profit.  My definition of a lead in this case was someone who bought online or joined my subscriber list.

Now, I am going to share with you my actual Internet advertising results after 30 days of testing of a number of different Internet advertising and marketing techniques.

How Did I Track My Internet Advertising?

I have carefully tracking my advertising and marketing techniques using 1ShoppingCart.  Another system you can use for tracking advertising is Ultimate Affiliate Manager. who have a one-time fee of $97 instead of a monthly charge.

What Did I Promote Through Internet Advertising?

To keep the test fair, I used the same ad in all the various Internet advertising systems.  It was an ad to promote my popular free e-book, "Promote Your Web Site for Free."  The ad and free e-book have proven to be very popular over a number of months, so I knew if an advertising source did poorly, it wasn't the quality of the ad or product offering.

Where Did I Advertise Online?

Here are the 5 Internet advertising and marketing techniques I tested:

1.  Instant Buzz:  A free Internet advertising system that lets you exchange ads with others through an Internet Explorer toolbar with no popups.  They also have a free community where you can connect with other members.

2.  Ryze Membership:  An online community with over 200,000 members.  I tracked signups from my activities within Ryze such as people visiting my member profile and my participation in various discussion groups

3.  Ryze Classified Ad:  A paid text ad within the 200,000+ member Ryze online community.

4.  Ecademy Membership:  An online community with over 44,000 members with a strong U.K and European membership base tracked the same way as Ryze Membership.

5.  Google Adwords:  Advertising on Google when people search for key word phrases relating to web site promotion and free e-books.

Actual Internet Advertising Results

Here are the results of these five campaigns.

These 5 campaigns generated a total of 79 leads.  In my previous article, "What is a Lead Worth?", I calculated that a lead is worth $10.36 in sales to me.  So these 79 leads would have a sales value to me of $818.44.

Let's look at how much these campaigns cost me.

So, for a cost of only $51.66, I generated $818.44 in sales.  Outstanding! 

Let's look at how much I paid for each lead.

So Which Internet Advertising Technique Here is Best?

All of them!  That's right, I should continue with ALL of these techniques because they are ALL under my target cost for acquiring leads of $2 per lead, so they are all profitable.  If I were to drop any of them, I would lose a good percentage of my leads. 

The surprise to me in this group was the success of the Ryze Classified Ad.  One of the lowest cost of lead generation along with the least amount of my time spent.

Internet Advertising Time Spent

Time is the other factor to take into account:  Here is the ranking from least to most time I spent on each Internet advertising campaign.

1.  Ryze Classified:  Only the time to set up the initial ad campaign and tracker, which was a few minutes.  Great results for a few minutes of my time and minimal money investment.

2.  Instant Buzz:  After the initial signup, I have been spending some time each month inviting new contacts into the system and I spend a little time helping out in the online communities.  No cost and minimal time investment and good results.

3.  Google Adwords:  After the initial setup, I spent some time monitoring and adjusting the ads once per week.  Minimal time investment but a little more cost.  This cost might be lower in other fields as I had to spend additional time finding low cost key words to advertise with as Internet marketing related key words are highly sought after.

4.  Ecademy:  I spend a modest amount of time each month and get a good return on my modest cash and time investment.

5.  Ryze Community:  I spend more time here because I moderate the Internet Marketing Tools forum.  Good return on my moderate time investment and modest cash investment.

Of course your results may vary as you will be offering different products and advertising messages, but BEFORE you start your Internet advertising campaigns, it is critical you know what a lead is worth to you and that you track how much your leads are costing you.

I offer a coaching service to help you learn to set up and track Internet marketing campaigns.  If your time is tight, I can also connect you with an E-Business Tutor-trained Internet Marketing Virtual Assistant who can set up your campaigns and tracking.

Garland Coulson, ?The E-Business Tutor? is an acclaimed speaker, author and coach in the field of Internet marketing for small business and home business. For more information, visit The E-Business Tutor web site at www.ebusinesstutor.com or call toll-free in North America at 1-866-413-0951.

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Last Updated Sunday, August 21 2005 @ 04:21 PM CDT