First and foremost, the most important thing to do when advertising is this: TRACK YOUR ADS! I cannot stress this enough. There are too many people that just toss money into random ads and fail to track them. If you have seen the people at the top of the leaderboards of your business, they definitely track and test their marketing tools constantly. For example, David Parnell (a self made millionaire through internet marketing), has at least a dozen tested ads in circulation every week and has five more new ones. He scraps the ads that don't generate sign ups and he resubmits the ones that do. It's that simple. After placing the ads, the ad tracker service records the amount of hits your ad is getting as well as how many sign ups are coming in from each one.

Think of it this way: if you paid for three ads and knew that only one was effectively recruiting sign ups, would you want to put money in the other two? Of course not, but how can you tell the effective ads from the ineffective ads if you don't track them? You can't, so you need to TRACK YOUR ADS!

Another strategy many successful internet marketers do with their solo ads is split testing. By split testing an ad, you run two different versions of the same ad on a rotator. Every time someone views the ad, it switches to the second version for the next viewer. By doing this, you can see which colors, styles, and wording generate sign ups for your business and which ones don't.

But solo ads aren't the only marketing methods you should be tracking. You should also track your marketing with adwords in order to see which keywords work the best. In addition, you can track your articles and see which categories and article topics generate the most traffic. Classified ads and press releases can also be tracked. The purpose of ad tracking is to see what's working and what's not so you can stop throwing your time and your money away and put it to good use. It's the people that don't track their ads that burn out and end up quitting because they use the same marketing techniques that fail to generate leads over and over again and wonder why they never get any sign ups.

There are several ad tracking services. Two of the best, in my opinion, are Adminder.com and Adtrackx. Just make sure that no matter what type of marketing you are conducting, whether it be paid advertising like solo ads, or free advertising like articles, that you TRACK YOUR ADS! You must constantly track and test every one of your marketing strategies, reuse the successful ones, and dump the unsuccessful ones. If you do, you will find yourself with a lot more money and a lot more free time.