Yesterday, I was so befuddled about how to put a marketing plan together, it woke me up early. After thinking about it most of the day, I finally came up with a starting point at least. What I came up with is not a full blown marketing plan. It is more a plan for what I need to do to advertise more efficiently. If I am more efficient, I should be able to put a plan together.
So I thought about where does all my time go when I want to start marketing something new. Most of it goes to entering urls into traffic exchanges and sending emails. I can spend hours going from one traffic exchange to another enter the new urls. It dawned on me I have the solution to this – ROTATORS.
I use HitsConnect as my tracking software and it has rotators. Why don’t I put HitsConnect rotator URLs in the traffic exchanges instead of the direct links. I am sure many others have thought of this but it was an original idea to me today. If I use rotator urls then I can change what link I am showing in multiple sites by just changing it in HitsConnect. Also, this sets me up for split testing. Just add the urls to be split tested in the rotator, drive the traffic to the rotator and, poof, I am split testing. The only other thing I need to do is reset the counters.
How easy is that? I don’t even have to type what is entered into the rotator. HitsConnect provides a list of all the urls entered and I just have to check the ones I want in the rotator. There is a couple of complications with this method.
- There are some traffic exchanges that don’t allow rotators. I assume this is because only one site is verified when a link is added. So a rotator could ‘hide’ a site that does not meet the te’s rules. But I am going to give it a try. The traffic exchange will let me know if I do something wrong. I will just have to keep a list of those TE’s that reject my rotators.
- To me the bigger problem is the HitsConnect urls. I have run into several sites that when I use HitsConnects tracking urls, they won’t verify when checked or they verify but don’t display. The original url displays fine, the tracking url displays fine outside the traffic exchange but do not display in the TE. (HitsConnect says this is because the traffic exchange hasn’t updated something.) So I will just have to use a different rotator. I will add these to the list too.
Hopefully, the list doesn’t of problem TE’s doesn’t get to long or this idea won’t work as well as I think. So, tomorrow I will start changing the sites displayed in the TE’s to rotators. That will easily take all day, maybe more.
I didn’t intend for this to be a review of HitsConnect but it did. I really believe rotators are the way to go and once I get all the traffic exchanges converted I will save time. At least, I won’t have to wonder about what is being displayed on what traffic exchange reducing elminating that clutter from my mind.
Until Next Time,
Bob Caine
