subject: Opt Ins and List Building - Why You Should Track Your Results [print this page] Opt Ins and List Building - Why You Should Track Your Results
When you first start building your list you will be grateful for opt ins from anywhere. There is no better feeling than getting that email that informs you that you have a new lead on your list. Although you might not think it important where that lead came from you need to know, let me explain...
When I started marketing online it was a safe bet all my leads came from Twitter as I spent a lot of time and effort growing my Twitter following and I tweeted links to my website and capture pages. These days I get opt ins from many places and I'm always trying new methods to build my list even bigger, I have pay per click adverts running, people find my websites in the organic search engine results too, people read articles like this and check out my author bio at the bottom and come through to my site from here too plus many other methods. My point is this, if you are not tracking where your leads are coming from then you have no idea of what you are wasting your time with and what is worth investing more time in.
Your Autoresponder gives you lots of tools to help you out. You can create different web forms for different sites and even if you use the same web form, your autoresponder will tell you from which site your opt in came from.
Google Analytics is also easy to set up. Google provides you the HTML to include on your site and then it tracks lots of information about the traffic to your site. In addition to the statistics of number of hits to each page and information on if the person viewing your website was a returning visitor or a new one google will also tell you where your visitor came from, be it from a google search or from a link in Twitter or facebook.
There are lots of URL shortening websites that also provide this sort of information so if you are experimenting with advertising your links in more than one place why not create more than one short URL. http://bit.ly or http://tiny.cc are 2 examples but there are many more. You can refer back later and see which link had the better response.
In summary you need to concentrate on what works. Forget what doesn't work and continually try new things to find more methods that work. You can't do this unless you track your results. Take action now and let me know how it goes.
Agree / disagree? Leave your comments and let's help others
