How cost effective are your marketing tools?

Online marketing is essential for driving traffic towards your website. Whether you are trying to gain clients, page rank, subscribers, customers, or general traffic - Marketing is an absolute necessity.

You will discover that there are many spots where you can buy essential marketing applications, such as email marketing software, back office website consoles and maybe even forum software. But have you considered the possibility, that even though you feel you're getting a good deal - you may not be.

Let's take a look at your email marketing; you need a subscription box and a means to issue your important newsletters, email campaigns and/or eCourses. You find a recommended and popular email system and sign up for the low fee of $15 a month for up to 500 emails. This is great - you're on your way!

Then you need a website where you can add your subscribe box. You would also want some really good features such as a blog, a forum, web apps, and of course hosting - you'll also discover a great deal for this online, for the small fee of $14 a month. You add your subscribe box and you have your 2 systems up and running.

But then you would like to sell your products online, so we throw in a shopping cart too. As this involves payment gateways, and checkouts, this could be slightly more pricey. So you search out the best deal you can find, at a reasonable $34 a month for the basic version, and of course when your business expands and you exceed your basic capacity, this could jump up to $99 a month, but we'll concern ourselves with that later, right?

So, now we would like a member's area. We want to offer excellent customer service, which means keeping our customers details secure and accessible, and as we don't want the hassle of arranging it through a hosting company, we opt-in for another low cost option - essential SSL, the lowest cost around at $10 per month. Along with our customer service we could really use an excellent CRM (customer relationship management) system. So, we throw in another $10 a month.

Such small amounts of cash to spend, but absolutely necessary for your marketing to run properly. So, let's look at what free services we can add on... Analytics, and a Blog in addition to standard email. Let's take a look and see our result.

* Email marketing $15

* Online business console $14

* eCommerce $34

* Additional extra's $20

* Total $83 per month minimum...

Then consider, how much is your time worth? Does it really make sense to deal with your online business in 7 different systems?

So, at $83 a month for bare minimum basic fees - and several hours of your time, exactly how cost effective are your marketing tools?