Internet Marketing Ideas by Steve Weber   Reply to Me On Twitter: Click Here

Something came up in our conference call tonight I wanted to cover further. It has to do with competing sites found in search engines results. Here is the gist of what we were talking about:

Say there are 50,000 results for a long tail keyword relating to lawyers. Another keyword phrase relating to gardening also has 50,000 results (potential competitors).  Does this mean a page optimized for the lawyer keyword is just as easy to rank with as a page optimized for the gardening keyword?

No! Here’s why:

There is a LOT of money to be made with a well ranking site related to lawyers. This means there are some of the best SEO professionals in the world helping to optimize those lawyer pages. This is not the case for a lower paying niche like gardening. There are not to many of those sites with big-gun SEO forces behind them.

Even though the number of possible competitors is the same, the quality of those competitors can be very different.

These same phenomena can be seen in other high paying niches like insurance, gambling, home mortgages, etc. Also, Internet marketing is a very difficult niche to SEO for. The best of the best are optimizing for that niche!

Consider those factors before attempting one of those niches!

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I finally have my new Adwords product completed and ready to go!

AdWords can be a real “money pit” for those without a working method. With AdWords Guerrilla I teach you the EXACT method I use for success.

Check it out here…

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If you currently have AdWords campaigns running, you should know that Google has automatically enabled a new feature within each of your campaigns.

It is called Automatic Matching.

I won’t go into all the details here what it does, but basically it will enable Google to ALWAYS max out your daily budget by supplying additional keywords of their own choice in order to reach the daily budget.

I for one do not want Google to pick my keywords for me without being able to test this (which I don’t have time for right now).

I highly suggest turning that option off in each of your campaign settings until you fully understand Automatic Matching and can test it

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Unfortunately, the vast majority of people using AdWords (or any other pay-per-click system) are losing money with it right now.

For most, the only answer is to keep raising their bid prices; they think that will turn things around for them. Beginners in any area of Internet marketing think there surely must be some quick and easy trick they are missing. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I was listening to Perry Marshall’s Mastermind call the other day. One of his guests who had great success with AdWords mentioned how he often spent up to two months studying a specific market before he started his first AdWords campaign for it.

Can any beginner reading this right now imagine spending two months studying one market before attempting to make money? That idea is simply beyond the comprehension of 99.9% of all beginners!

AdWords is a tough method to learn. I have to admit I gave Google a ton of money along the way before I finally found Perry’s information.

I wish I had known back in the beginning what I know now about the importance of learning methods and concepts before jumping into Adwords. Google would be a little less rich right now if I had taken the time to learn before diving in.

Anyway, I hope you can learn from my past mistakes. Here’s the link again to Perry’s free Five Day AdWords Course. Yes, this is a shameless self-promotion since I am Perry’s affiliate. However, if you want to eventually succeed with AdWords, you NEED the information he offers in this course.

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Wow! Guess who I talked to today!

Perry Marshall

THE Perry Marshall

I have been a customer of Perry’s for quite some time now. Without his weekly newsletters and monthly CD’s I would not have a clue about how to profit with AdWords!

Today was the first time I have talked to him. He offered a live call-in this morning for his customers. If you got through, you could talk to him for 10 minutes and ask him anything.

It was a great call! The 10 minutes were very productive; I have spent this afternoon putting into place the ideas he had for my business.  

I recently upgraded to his MasterMind club. I was a Renaissance member for the past year or so. I found out about Perry when I subscribed to his Free Five Day eMail Course. I learned more in those 5 days than I knew from using AdWords (trying to use AdWords) in the previous 2 years!

I learned what it took to succeed with PayPerClick advertising. Shortly after the course I bought his Definitive Guide to AdWords eBook. From there I was really able to ramp up my AdWords advertising success.

Anyway, I just wanted to say a big THANK YOU to Perry for all he has done for me!

Steve

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When I logged onto my AdWords account today, Google had a message. As of April 1, 2008 (could it be their April fools to us?) they are going to force the landing page domain and the display URL to be the same.

This means the use of vanity URL’s will be a thing of the past. I have not done too much in that area, but I did have some plans to. I guess I’ll have to rethink them.

I’ll clarify a few of their new rules:

The rule only applies to new ads. If you have an ad in place now which does not conform to those rules, it seems they will continue to allow it as long as the ad remains active.

The destination URL can still be a redirect. For example, if the ad is for an affiliate product, you can still use your affiliate link in the destination URL as long as it resolves to the same domain as the display URL.

What has changed is your ability to buy a “flashy” domain name for the display and destination URL but have the domain redirect to your chosen landing page. Whatever your display URL is has to be the URL the searcher ends up on.

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“Buy my product for $99 and you’ll be making hundreds of dollars a day starting tomorrow!” Are you buying? Probably not…you know me too well to think I’d offer such a thing.

However, there are PLENTY of takers for just such scam offers. I help out with a large affiliate network’s help desk a few hours per week. Today a very angry person submitted a help ticket.

It seems he had gotten involved in one the “type at home” scams. Their “program” described how “filling out forms” could earn someone large amounts of money. Of course the forms they spoke of were Google AdWord ads. This guy was angry because he had been promoting a vendor as an affiliate and had spent over $1000 already with Google AdWords without generating one sale.

His thinking was that the vendor should reimburse him for the $1000. After all, the Google ads sent a bunch of traffic to the vendor’s site!

Worse yet, the product he spent $1000 on promoting was only a $9.97 item. A sale would only result in four or five dollars for him! It is all but impossible to promote low priced affiliate products with AdWords AND make a profit.

I wanted so badly to ask him the obvious question: “Why had he let it go on so long? Why didn’t he cut his losses at say, $50, or $100, or even at $500 without a sale?” But I didn’t ask him…no sense kicking a guy when he’s down!

The moral of this story: Stay away from PayPerClick until you have some success with other methods. PayPerClick, in my opinion, is the hardest Internet marketing method to master. Using SEO to rank well in Google is MUCH easier!

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I’ve always believed in not reinventing the wheel. I remember when I first read about a basic list building technique involving AdWords. Here’s how it works:

The purpose of the AdWords campaign in this case is to generate leads for a targeted list. The AdWords ads push traffic to a squeeze page. A sales page for an affiliate product is presented after the opt-in page. At best, the idea is to almost break even. In other words, hopefully enough sales are made to offset the cost of the AdWords clicks. Therefore, the targeted leads can be acquired almost for free. What a deal!

However, if the sales page does a great job, the campaign just might generate a ton of leads AND make a profit while doing so!

When I read about this technique a few years ago I thought how awesome it would be to generate leads AND make money at the same time!

To make a long story short (and after a whole lot of “failing fast”, I found a combination of ads, keywords, squeeze page, and product which does just that! With this one campaign I am generating 40 to 50 VERY targeted leads per day, paying for all the clicks, AND profiting between $15 and $25 each day!

I’m not going to tell any good secrets here about the niche or keywords. However, the method is a tried and proven way of building a nice sized list and making a car payment at the same time…with just one AdWords campaign.

Don’t expect to hit a winning combination right off the bat. It may take 3 or 4 or more cycles of campaigns and products to get it working just right.

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Everyone who uses Google AdWords has had this happen to them:

Your start a campaign and all is fine for a few days. Then, out of nowhere, Google disables one of your keywords which you had been paying .25 per click for. Now, Google is demanding $5.00 or MORE to get the keyword reactivated!

Here are some things that Google is using to determine which keywords aren’t worthy. Remember, Google is all about providing a quality experience for their customers; their customers are the people who do the searches.

The decision to deactivate a keyword is based partly on the following list.

Compared to the other advertisers using that SAME keyword:

How long do visitors stay on the site the ad leads to? The longer they stay, the more Google thinks the site is good for the keyword.

How much relevant content is on the site? How well does the content match the keyword?

How well does the ad match the keyword AND the content of the site?

Remember, your ad is being compared in these ways with the other advertisers using the SAME keyword.

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When you set up a new campaign in Adwords, the Content Network is checked by default (located in campaign settings). I don’t know how many times I have been contacted by beginners who are having poor results with AdWords (spending far more than they are making) while serving their ads to the Content Network.

Display your ads only to Google’s search. That is all you need to do in order to test your campaign. No matter what, you will be tweaking your campaign’s keywords, bids, ads, etc. (If you are not tweaking and testing, you will surely fail.) You should not include the Content Network in the mix while you are testing. Be sure to uncheck it!

If you do ever enable it, be sure to set the bid price much lower for it when you start testing.

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