Chapter 2: Getting Traffic to Your Website 

Section 3: Using Pay Per Clicks, including Google’s Adwords

If you follow along with this section, you can learn how to set up an account and have live, targeted traffic coming to your site within 10 - 15 MINUTES! This is an extremely useful tool to have at our disposal. I heard a quote from a long time direct marketer (directed thousands of "salesletters in the mail" campaigns over decades) who said that pay per click (PPC) had been the biggest advance in marketing in the last hundred years, and have completely changed the dynamics of marketing.

You see when you set up a PPC campaign, your target audience is finding YOU, not the other way around. Even beyond that, you can easily and automatically track exactly what search terms people are finding you, and how many are performing a certain action like signing up for your newsletter or purchasing a product. This information, coupled with the instant reports from google on how much you are spending in total and by keyword, allows you to quickly determine which keywords are profitable and which are not.

Perhaps even more importantly, you can very easily allow two different ads to "compete" to see which one performs better, and use google adwords to perform quick, live "market tests" on different products that you may be considering to promote or create.

Imagine how much more efficient you will be than large companies that do things like spend millions of dollars on superbowl commericals to create "brand awareness" and usually have NO WAY to to accurately measure resulting sales!

If you are not yet aware, when you do a google search sometimes in addition to the "natural" results on the left there are short 4 line ads that show up on the right, and sometimes 2-3 ads that show up on top of the regular results. These are ads that someone else has paid to be placed there when you search the term you did. (And sometimes not the exact term you searched for, which can sometimes lead to irrelevant and ineffective advertising, which I’ll tell you how to avoid below.)

Now, the cool thing about google, and the difference between google and some of the other PPC options we’ll talk about, is that the relative placement is NOT strictly determined by highest bidder. (Ie, in some cases, the ad that is showing in the #1 spot cost LESS than the ad showing in the number #5 spot!)

Google likes to have more relevant ads showing more prominently in their results, regardless of how much the sponsor is willing to pay. To figure this out, they calculate what is known as a click through rate (CTR) for each ad, which is simply the number of times the ad is clicked on divided by the number of times they show the ad.

Then, they combine the CTR with the maximum bid each advertiser is willing to pay in a proprietary formula to determine the order in which they show the ads. It is this CTR rate that will allow us to separate from our competitors (most people just don’t do what I am going to show you), and consequently allow us to get targeted visitors more cost-effectively.

Here is what we will be doing as an overview:

1. Set up an Adwords account. That will only take 10 minutes and there is a one-time setup fee of $5.

2. During set up, google asks you to create your first ad, so we will know how to do that.

3. I will show you how to generate large lists of keyword phrases to help you cast a wider net to bring in more traffic. Remeber, some of the longer, less frequently searched phrases will perform well.

4. Most importantly, I will show you how to organize your campaign into smaller 5-10 related keyword groups into adgroups that each have their own slightly different ad. This will allow you to get higher CTR than you would otherwise, and allow you to get traffic as cheap as possible. This is what many people miss out on, because it takes a little more time to do, and can make the difference between making money and losing money.

The videos above will walk you through each of those steps. What I’m showing you is what you need to get up and running quickly. If you are serious about using PPC to generate visitors and sales (and I’ll discuss some things you can sell that are related to MLM and can also generate leads for you at the same time in my Funded Proposal section), you really need to pick up a copy of Perry Marshall’s The Definitive Guide To Adwords. This is a 200+ page e-book that lays everything out in more detail than I can go into here, and will help you separate yourself from everyone else.

A couple other quick notes before we go on to the next section. There are several other places out there that you can run PPC campaigns. Once you master adwords and get profitable, there are really only two other places that I think are worth your time: Yahoo and MSN.

In the market research I’ve seen, google accounts for about 80% of the searches done on the internet world-wide, Yahoo has about 12%, and MSN another 5% or so. Just by learning and applying adwords, which has the best reporting and tracking features, you are already hitting 80% of the traffic off the bat. That being said though, if you have a profitable campaign, why not pick up another 17% by going to Yahoo and MSN?  I will write more about how to use those services at a later time.

Lastly, there is something frustrating that you are going to have to watch for, usually I’ve seen this happen about 1-2 days into an adwords campaign. It is called a "google slap". What happens is that all of a sudden, keywords that were costing you 25 cents a click and were generating sales(!) now have a minimum bid of $10. (FYI, not many markets can support that! For our market, depending on the product you are selling, you generally won’t want to go above $1 as your maximum bid, and usually not more than 50 cents.)

What has happened?!?  Google has decided as an overall philosophy that it prefers large websites with many pages vs smaller websites with just a couple pages.  Although that might seem to make sense in some cases from a user perspective (more info is better), sometimes that really may not be the case.

In our case, we may just have a one page "salesletter" website that effectively conveys why they need to buy a particular e-book. People find the page useful, buy the e-book, and find that very valuable. But, google doesn’t see all the pages of the e-book. They just see a one-page website and penalize it for not having enough content.

Google calls this "landing page quality", and like it or not, that is now a factor to be dealt with in adwords. A few quick tips will usually help you get around this penalty.

First off, make sure the landing page is part of a larger website. That is no problem in our case. Secondly, use plenty of the keywords that you are targeting on the landing page. Third, make sure there is a good amount of content on that page. Lastly, it is also good to link to other highly regarded websites that relate to your topic (like this site!) from your landing page to avoid any type of penalty. You can do this at the bottom of your page, so that you are not losing traffic to that link.

Once you make those updates, it may take half an hour or so before your minimum bids requirements reduce back down to what they were before. If they don’t, give me a call or e-mail and I can take a look at it for you and see if I can help.

Here is some quick advice right now on writing your google ad line by line:

1. Headline - make your headline catchy by asking a question that targets your audience, or makes a statement they can relate to, and use your main keyword from the corresponding adgroup. (ie, if your adgroup centered around the phrase "MLM Leads" a good headline might be:   "Sick of Buying MLM Leads?")

2. 2nd line - This should always be a BENEFIT, which lets the reader know what is in it for them. For example "Learn How to Get Free Leads."

3. 3rd line - This should generally be a feature of your product or service, or a call to action. For example "Expert Marketer Teaches You How" or "Free Report Teaches You How".

4. 4th line - This is your display URL. It doesn’t have to be the actual website of the landing page, but it must work. Ie, if your landing page was www.mysite.com/landingpage, the display URL could just be: www.mysite.com or even mysite.com.

A couple general tips: use your keywords as much as you can in the ad itself (and use it exactly), and use the keyword in the URL of the landing page too if you can. The reason you want to do this is that whenever their exact search words appear in your ad they wil be highlighted, which will attract their eye and help your CTR out. Questions and quotes are also always good to use because they are eye-catching.

You can learn more about how to write great ads and copy in the copywriting / adverstising section of Section 3.

One thing I didn’t cover here is how to set up proper tracking tools, so that  you can quickly and efficiently know which ads are producing, and which ads are simply costing you money. All the detail behind this critical step is covered in the how to track and test section next…