Re: PPC

Having trouble using PPC for your home business?

Here is the report my friend Jim Yaghi sent me last year, in its entirety… It still very much true today… June 2011!

Remember to leave a comment or any question you might have in the comment box.

If we get enough interest I’ll get Jim to do a private call for us.

Enjoy!

Jerry

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Trends in Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Marketing For 2010

It was October of 2006.

I was a little internet marketing newbie with my crappy bizop. And I thought I was a master seller held back by having no leads.

Adwords came to the rescue. With their simple interface and genius system…I quickly saw that a tiny investment could bring me prospects within minutes. I was amazed. I could sit at my computer right on the pulse of my ads. I could change a word here and there and see the impact without waiting.

I spent hours refreshing every few minutes to see the clicks and leads stack up.

Everything came together when I found a funded proposal I could send my traffic to. The landing page was generic, proven, and ready-made along with an entire sales funnel.

It’s not that easy any more.

In those days, I bid on network marketing company names only. I bid 20 cents and had very little competition. There was no quality score. Clicks came in double-digit click-thru-rates.

Not anymore.

I copied other people’s ads. I made them my own. They were cheesy, they were direct. People still clicked them.

Can you still do that now? I don’t think so.

Google Adwords is one of the most dynamic, constantly changing platforms ever created. For example, a quality score was added. It became difficult to keep Google happy. Advertising replicated pages and domains became impossible.

Then a few months ago Google doubled their stock price simply by moving their ads closer to the search results. Click-thru-rates shot up but landing page quality became more strict.

A couple of years ago, many companies filed complaints about the use of their trademarks in Google ads. And advertising on company names resulted in disapproved ads. Some marketers got around it by using misspellings, but Google got wise and smacked them too.

Then some months ago, trademarks were allowed in certain markets. And company name advertising was allowed again…with some restrictions.

Earlier this year, there was a sudden surge of company name advertising to replicated pages. Aside from the increase in competition and click-cost for those normally effective keywords, Google responded to the junk landing pages with their famous bitch slap.

Network marketers became frustrated with the changes. They tried everything to get around them without tackling the problem at its source. Some of them outright quit PPC marketing and tried their hands at free search and social media.

Then the FTC cracked down on affiliate marketers. Google quickly complied by suspending accounts that were in violation. Some pages were removed from their search results. And it was game over for many marketers.

With all these changes going on, how does a PPC advertiser survive today?

Surely there is a way. There are still plenty of people still going strong, generating leads, and making money from PPC.

Their secret?

Elimination of competition.

In 2010, you will need to adjust how you tackle pay-per-click marketing. Instead of fighting, biting, and scratching your competition off Google’s sponsored links to take their place…you’ll be advertising where less opponents are playing.

There are a few ways to do this. But let’s see what actions home business owners have been taking which are reducing their chances of success with PPC.

Adwords is not the best way to duplicate your efforts.

Due to the “leverage” model inherent to network marketing it is not in your best interest to replicate.

Affiliate marketers and people with business that do not rely on leverage are lucky in this regard. They do not require the success of their competitors to make money. You may have also noticed that super affiliates who generate all their income from their successful PPC campaigns GUARD closely their entire business from other marketers.

Many go so far as to hide their identity. In case someone should recognize them and copy their work. The most successful affiliate marketers are actually underground non-gurus.

Google competition has become extremely intense. That even network marketers need to keep their campaigns to themselves, secret from their downline and upline alike.

A simple solution more network marketing teams will take if they want to continue to get traffic from PPC is to start a united SINGLE effort to generate leads for their opportunity. An example is advertising co-ops.

In this way, they can organize their efforts and increase their chances of success with much larger advertising budgets without canibalising their own team-mates. There would be a convergence of a single landing URL for each large team or company.

Additionally, there have been many new marketers entering the Google AdSpace.

In the past, I would recommend that new PPC marketers learn Google Adwords only and focus all their efforts there. The sheer volume of easy traffic that was available made it the obvious choice to gain plenty of search volume and save time by focusing effort in one place only.

However, in 2010, advertisers facing difficulties will be abandoning Google and using some of the other available PPC engines.

On the one hand, I believe that this is a good idea because you simply avoid the problem of the ever-changing, ever-increasing strictness of Google rules. On the other hand, I would not recommend abandoning Google all together.

It will always be a very powerful source of traffic.

Having 10 other PPC engines in your marketing will increase your chances of long-term success.

This way, you gain a lot of extra traffic that would not have been available to you through Google alone. You’ll also have less competition and cheaper clicks in other engines.

Most importantly, whether Google decides to kick you off or not, your business doesn’t stop overnight. Your advertising will not be interrupted by their changes. Leads will continue to flow from your other engines while you figure out how to adjust for new rules Google comes up with.

Despite these modifications in your marketing, you’ll still want to Google’s traffic. You can punch the problem of competition right in the throat by making the following change.

You might have experienced much higher minimum bid costs for keywords you used to get for only a few cents in the past. Instead of trying to modify your ads and landing pages, you will find it far easier to move onto other keywords.

There’re an infinite number of suitable keywords available that your target market are searching for. But few people are bothering with them.

We’re now seeing increased minimum bids in Network Marketing because as more networkers switch to online advertising, they are also sharing their successful keywords with their team.

As soon as you share profitable keywords with other people, regardless of whether you benefit from their efforts or not, you’re harming yourself. Others who bid on the same keywords are now required to bid higher, write better ads, and create VERY unique landing pages. You’re competition to them, and they too become competition to you.

This idea of sharing keywords is very similar to “poaching” prospects from one’s teammates. To a lesser degree, of course.

When a person searches for a particular keyword where you and several members of your team have active ads, that same searcher is in principle being prospected by all of you.

Because of this, it’s no longer enough to just make your landing page look and feel different. Nor is it enough to alter the wording of your ads to appear different from your team and other adwords competitors. Your entire offer has to be different.

Otherwise the searcher will become annoyed when they click multiple ads and discover the same thing being offered on each page. In the same way, they’d be annoyed if the top 10 results on a Google search all yield the exact same information for their search.

It ruins the searcher experience. And Google’s reputation as a “useful” search engine is affected.

This is why Google reacts by slapping and more recently banning people who advertise the same thing.

So your first reaction in light of this information should be to guard your keywords from others. Regardless of which team they belong to.

You should also think of other keywords less obvious to competition.

There are a number of creative ways to find new keywords. You will have to think outside the box and stop relying on popular keyword research tools. Keyword tools restrict your ideas to the same ones that others are using, since others use the same tools as you.

Better ways to come up with your keyword choices are to read literature, blogs, articles, books, and ebooks, as well as watch videos and find market vocabulary there. You’ll still be able to use keyword tools to expand on your ideas.

Sometimes these keywords are not going to be directly related to your offer. But some smart ad writing and landing page content will allow you to bridge the gap between what someone is searching for and their original problem.

Once you’ve eliminated competition by teaming up with your downline and making a united single effort, once you’ve added other PPC engines to your marketing efforts, and once you’ve thought outside the box and come up with new keywords…

Then you can build unique offers on your landing pages and optimize that content for best conversion and sales.

Remember, in 2010, the competition in Google PPC marketing is going to become even more intense.

Google will continue to chop indiscriminately as many of the low-quality, similar offers from their results as they can.

Only the best, most unique, and most legally compliant offers will survive in the Google PPC space.