Todays Quick Tip answers the question What is promoting?

Advertising is salesmanship. The only purpose of advertising is to build sales. It is profitable or unprofitable according to its
actual sales.

- Claude Hopkins, one of the early masters of branding and author of My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising.

This #1 issue of Copywriting Classics Quick Tips focuses on the late, grand Claude Hopkins and how you may apply his decades old marketing wisdom to your online efforts today.

Jay Abraham, renowned as Americas Number One Marketing
Wizard said this about Hopkins. Claude Hopkins is the master
of them all. His influence has easily added over $6 million to my personal Incomeand still counting.

So, what else did Claude have to say about selling in addition to the proverb above? Hopkins said Advertising is not for general effect. It is not to keep your name before the people. It is not primarily to aid your other salesmen. Treat it as a salesman. Force it to justify itself.

Compare it with other salesmen. Figure its cost and result. Accept no excuses which great salesmen do not build. Then you will not go far wrong.

So how many of us do a sizeably successful job of this in the online world?

Obviously the only way you might know if your marketing is profitable is to be able to accurately track its results.

How many of us have thrown money at the concept of branding - of keeping our title before the many people ? Just hoping wed get some results. I know Ive been guilty of it in the past.

So when youre grasping ready to place that banner ad, or pay for some online or offline directory listing, or bid on that keyword at Overture.com, how are you going to track the cost and result?

And do not delude yourself into thinking that any selling is
free. The most valuable resource any of us have in our advertising arsenal is most definately our own measure .

What do you value yours at? $25 - $50 - $100 - $1000 per hour? Or more? So be sure and add the cost of your measure or whoever youre paying to perform that selling task into calculating the true cost of your advertising.

This is truer then ever in the Internet world. So, know your costs
and measure your results. There are online tools available to help you do this, so dont get careless or lazy. The effectiveness of your online selling might only be measured by its actual sales.

Your task: Analyze all your selling to determine its true
effectiveness. If youre not tracking your results you have to figure out a explicit way to do it now. Why? Because Claude told you so.

Next week youll get some more thoughts from Claude Hopkins. This instant about how long you should make your advertisement copy in order to contruct the sales. Until then, my best wishes for success in all your selling endeavors.

2002 TWI Press, Inc.