THE BEST OF TRAFFICOLOGY 1.0 Copyright 2005

Enjoy this training from Trafficology 1.0 but be sure to get in on the Launch Special for Trafficology 2.0 and receive the Evergreen Email Traffic Formula + 11 Exclusive Bonuses for a Crazy Deal for a very limited time – go to http://www.Trafficology.com to Join. THE BEST OF TRAFFICOLOGY 1.0 Copyright 2005-2012 by Trafficology, LLC
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Table of Contents Innovative & Unique Ways to Drive a Flood
of Free or Low-Cost Traffic to Your Website .......................................... 3
Getting Started with Google AdWords ..................................................... 108
How to Turn Traffic Into Sales ................................................................. 110
The Single Most Important Web Business Lesson .................................. 119
The 7 Most Powerful Copywriting Rules of All Time ............................. 120
10 Sure-Fire Methods to Generate
Targeted Traffic To Any Website ............................................................. 122
The Most Profitable Way to Drive
Targeted Traffic to Your Website
Part 1 ..................................................................................... 177
Part 2 ...................................................................................... 195
The Greatest Development in Advertising This Century ........................ 225
The Absolute Best Free or Low-Cost
Way to Drive Traffic to Your Website ...................................................... 239
Top 10 Tips for Using Articles to
Promote Your Online Business ................................................................. 257
How to Increase the Response Rate of Any Website ............................... 263
How to Write the Words that Will
Sell Your Product or Service Online ......................................................... 289
7 Keys to Encouraging Visitors to
Purchase Your Product or Service ............................................................ 301
How to Convert More Visitors
Into Buyers Using Multimedia ................................................................... 317
Innovative & Unique Ways to Drive a Flood of Free or Low Cost Traffic to Your Website FREE ADVERTISING FROM IMAGE HIJACKERS
This is a cool idea we received from a reader. We've printed it just like we received it...
"A few days ago I was checking my server log files and noticed that a lot of websites
were hijacking images from my website.
(Hijacking means linking directly to the image
instead of loading it from their own servers.)
In other words, like this... <img src="http://www.yourdomain.com/image.jpg">
So after that I tried to find a way to avoid this bandwidth-wasting problem. I was lucky and found the
following solution:
I put an .htaccess file into my picture directory.
The file contains the following info:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.mydomain.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://mydomain.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://123.456.789.0
RewriteRule /* http://www.mydomain.com/someimage.jpg [R,L]
This looks a bit technical but it's actually very simple. It checks if the refering page
that tries to load the image comes from my own domain (or own IP). If that's not the case,
an alternate image is returned. (The image is specified on the last line). You can just
copy and paste this into your own .htaccess file AS IS, making sure to replace your own
domain information.
So far so good but where is the free advertising?
The image you specify in the last line will be displayed on the website that tried to hijack
from your site. You can make this image anything you want, so why not add some advertising? Like...
"Buy my product, go to http://www.mydomain.com"
Everyone visiting the page will see your ad! Obviously this works best for sites that have
images that are susceptible to hijacking, but you might even deliberately place a bunch of
high-bandwidth clipart on your site to ENTICE people to link to them!"
Using Testimonials - A New Twist!
Everyone knows that testimonials are nice to have on your own site, but did you ever think about the
value of having YOUR testimonial on the site of others?
This idea was submitted by a woman who has successfully used this technique to drive a considerable
amount of traffic to her own site.
Here's how she does it:
She signs up for lots of free things: free ebooks, free newsletters, free webmaster services, free
marketing courses, etc. And since she's a webmaster (webmistress?), she also uses a number of paid
products and services too, of course. Then, if she likes something, she writes intelligent, glowing
testimonials about these things and sends them to the people who created them.
Who could resist putting this on their site...?
"Of all the material I receive about web marketing and traffic generating, there is NOTHING that I
anticipate more than your fascinating, amazing and interesting Trafficology newsletter. I read it from
beginning to end, very often multiple times. You, sir, are a bloody genius.Mary Smith, webmaster
www.something-something.com"
I mean, you'd just HAVE to publish something like that! And since you'll want to attribute this, you'll
basically be putting an unpaid link to the writer's site.
The trick seems to be to write the testimonial in such a way that it absolutely gets published. Here are
the main things to remember:
a. Genuinely mean it. After all, it's your name that's going to be printed under the words, so don't send a
testimonial about something you don't believe in. And it's obvious when a testimonial is just made up,
or if the writer isn't a "True Believer"... so be genuine.
b. Consider the webmaster's motivations for including testimonials. Is he selling something, collecting
email addresses, soliciting donations? Write your testimonial to address the most likely objections that
his potential customers/clients/readers/users may have, and he'll gladly publish anything you write.
c. It may be a good idea to write the webmaster first and say something like "I've really enjoyed your
BLANK, and I'd like to write a little testimonial about it. Would you mind if I sent you something
over?" How could he refuse? Now you've just put him on record as being interested in your testimonial.
People like to appear consistent, so he'll probably be very inclined to follow through and post it on his
site now.
Maximizing the opportunity:
a. In as polite a way as possible, request the publication of your url.
b. If you choose to do this in a big way, you might consider a specific URL designed to be used solely
for testimonials. It could then redirect to your "real" site. In other words, if your website is REALLY
called "aaaservices.com", which means nothing, you could register a domain like "free-money-for
webmasters.com". Get it?
c. There's nothing wrong with doing a little "marketing" in your testimonial. For example, instead of
"Your book was full of good ideas", I might write "Since my newsletter is read by all the top web
marketers, I'm always on the lookout for new ideas. Your book was filled with them!"
d. If the potential recipient doesn't have a testimonials page, you can still get him to publish your
testimonial if you make the page for him. By copying the same theme and layout of his regular site, it's
quite a simple matter to make a testimonials page (Where yours is first and at the top!) and just give it
to him as a gift. This will save him time and earn you a couple of extra points if he's still doubtful about
including your testimonial and/or your URL. And it only takes a minute.
James Bond, Web Marketer
As you can imagine, I get some pretty strange ideas sent to me every now and then, but this one
definitely takes the prize for sheer audacity.
A gentleman from England has offered to build a device for me that can remotely change the webpage
that a user is viewing. Apparently, he's built a small prototype that can change the currently-viewed
website on any computer, as long as the browser is already open and he's standing about 5 feet from the
computer while using it.
Here's how it works (I think): The electrical impulses being sent from a keyboard to a CPU are easy to
record and duplicate, so that if you have enough power to wirelessly transmit those same
electromagnetic impulses to your CPU from a remote source, your CPU may not know the difference.
In other words, if your computer suddenly receives the corresponding signals for these keyboard keys
(in the proper sequence):
[F4] [H] [T] [T] [P] [:] [/] [/] [W] [W] [W] [.] [T] [R] [A] [F] [F] [I] [C] [O] [L] [O] [G] [Y] [.] [C]
[O] [M] [ENTER]
... and the signal is sufficiently strong, it's doubtful that your computer would behave any differently
than if you typed the sequence yourself. So if your browser were already open, you'd suddenly find
yourself viewing the main Trafficology page, without knowing why.
Of course, being able to accomplish this while standing 5 feet from the computer (in a controlled
setting) is a bit different from accomplishing this from across the street. But my friend - we'll call him
"Q" - believes it can be done with sufficient wattage and the right antenna. I've asked for a personal
demonstration before I fork over any money. In any event, I'll definitely keep you posted.
Admittedly, the idea of "drive-by" web marketing is fascinating, but even if this works, it probably
violates every FCC law ever made!
The 404 Page Fix
If you've never done it before, it's an eye-opening experience to look at the
"404 Page Not Found" errors in your server logs.
Over the past few years, I have created and abandoned dozens of web pages on various sites. Maybe
the information was no longer relevant, maybe it was out of date or maybe it was for a product or
service I was no longer offering.
But even though these pages were long forgotten by me, the search engines remember. And every time
someone clicked a link to these non-existent pages, I lost a potential customer.
This is one of the most fundamental and most obvious fixes in all of web marketing, yet so few people
do it. If you haven't already done it, I would suggest that you drop what you're doing and create a
"custom 404" page. This will be the error page that people will see in case they try to visit a page that
no longer exists.
The best 404 pages explain that the specific information they were looking for no longer exists, but
then offer them several links into the other sections of your site.
Once you've developed a custom 404 page (which is just a basic html page), name it
"custom_page.html" and upload it to your server.
Then, locate the .htaccess file on your server. It's located in different places, depending on your server
software and operating system, but it will be there somewhere.
Edit this file so that it contains the following one line command:
ErrorDocument 404 http://www.yoursite.com/custom_page.html
Obviously, you'll need to change "yoursite.com" to your real URL. Now, whenever someone tries to
access a non-existent page on your server, you'll be able to control what they see.
SEARCH ENGINE CHART
This isn't exactly a traffic idea, per se, but here's a link with a very interesting chart that shows the
connections between all the major search engines.
http://www.trafficology.com/searchenginechart.html
With this chart you can stop wasting time submitting to certain search engines only to find that they get
their results from another engine you already submitted to.
This little chart helps you know all the engines you've covered when submitting your site.
Google's Catalog Program
The submitter of this idea said, "I am doing this for my current clients with a print mail-order catalog.
This is a tip I hesitate to share, but the word will get out anyway."
Google quietly introduced "Google Catalogs", located at... http://catalogs.google.com
They gathered the favorite mail order catalogs from Google employees (the same ones that come in the
mail) and scanned them into a visual database. Then they made the catalog text-searchable through
some sort of OCR software.
They now have about 1,500 catalogs indexed.
It's very cool to search print catalogs - either within an individual catalog or across all catalogs, indexed
by keyword! (No more scanning all the pages to find something, AND I get to see all the cool catalogs
I don't get!)
So here's the trick... anyone can submit their print catalog and be listed next to the big retailers and top
notch mail order companies for FREE. They also publish the catalog's order number and a link to the
company's website. It's GREAT free advertising and GREAT for link popularity since you get to
submit the catalog's online URL's.
The submitter of this idea has already gotten 3 clients listed.
Obviously, this isn't for everyone, but if your business already has a catalog, you should definitely
submit it. And even if you don't already have a print catalog, it might be worth your while to print
something up - even if it's a simple desktop-published version.
APPROACH WEBSITES THAT LINK TO COMPETITORS
Here's a tip for improving the link popularity of your site while getting targeted traffic from web sites
that are closely related to your business.
As you know, link popularity is getting to be THE determining factor for high rankings on search
engines. The more high-quality links that point to your site, the better your ranking on Google, Inktomi,
Altavista and other major search engines.
The problem with building good link popularity for your website is the time and trouble of finding
partner sites that are willing to place your link. Fortunately, there's a way to quickly find good sites for
linking.
Websites that link to your competitors are the perfect sites for linking to you too! They have shown that
they're willing to link to other sites and they have shown that they are willing to link to sites like yours
(i.e. your competitors).
Not only do you get the boost from this additional link popularity, but you also get good, targeted
traffic directly from the site.
To find web sites that link to your competitors, do the following:
a) Go to http://www.Google.com
b) Enter "link:www.competitor.com (the URL of your competitor)
c) Press the search button
d) Contact these web sites
You can do the same thing faster if you use a linking tool like Arelis or Link Spider...
http://www.Axandra.com or http://www.scamfreezone.com/spider/
Enter the URL of your competitor and the software program will present you a list of all pages that link
to that competitor. You can also email these web sites directly from Arelis.
This is not a short term traffic idea but it will certainly increase the traffic and the search engine
rankings of a site in the long term.
CONVERT EBOOKS TO HARD COPY AND TAP INTO
AMAZON'S TRAFFIC
First, if you haven't already done so, you should consider creating an ebook that addresses a common
problem or a common need... with your company or website providing a solution. The whole purpose
is, of course, to drive traffic to your site, but by giving readers some useful ideas and insights, they'll be
much more inclined to seek you out for further information.
And by offering the ebook free, you'll get quite a few downloads. By offering "free reprint rights", your
ebook will appear in lots of "bonus" bundles (those "... and if you act now..." bonuses that marketers
use to entice buyers) as well. If you DO already have an ebook, here's how to generate more traffic to
your site:
Convert your digital "book" to hard copy! By doing so, you can then offer it on Amazon.com, one
of the most popular websites on Earth. Amazon will take 55% of the price of the book, but that's okay.
Your goal is to drive traffic, NOT necessarily to sell the book. When writing your description, you'll
need to think of Amazon as a search engine, and plan your keywords accordingly. What type of search
phrase would people be searching for when looking for your book? By peppering your marketing text
with appropriate phrases, you'll get quite a bit of lookers. Now, here's how to convert that to traffic.
Buy a descriptive domain and make that the name of your book. An example of somebody who did this
was Mark Joyner's book called... "MindControlMarketing.com". He gets A LOT of traffic to this site
because of people seeing his book on Amazon. And there are plenty of domains that you can buy (even
long ones) that will work.
Something like... MakeAFortuneWithYourWebsite.com or HowToRunASuccessfulWebsite.com are
still available. Of course, for this to work, you WILL need to create a hard copy version of your book.
That's really easy. Just print out the ebook and then use a comb-binding machine at Office Depot or
Kinkos. Voila... a hardcopy. You might want to put a nicer cover on the front and back, but that's
optional because you're not going to be actually selling that many copies.
The purpose is to drive traffic, and in that respect it works very well. One final advantage to using this
technique is that it's perpetual. Since you're drop-shipping the book on Amazon's behalf, they make a
profit on every sale. Consequently, they're in no hurry to remove you from their database. You should
be able to stay on there indefinitely, generating hit after hit after hit... free. To sign up for Amazon's
Advantage or Marketplace book seller program go to:
IDENTIFY YOURSELF AS A "RELATED LINK" ON ALEXA
Here's a sneaky trick that one reader sent in. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks pretty good. If you don't
know about Alexa, it's the company that provides the website data when anyone clicks "Related Sites"
or "Show Related Links" from their browser. If you're using Internet Explorer, do this experiment: Go
to Blockbuster.com... and then on your browser, click the RELATED button, or if you don't see one,
click "Tools" and then "Show Related Links". In the left-hand frame, you'll see 10 related websites,
like "Paramount Pictures" and "Columbia House", etc. On major websites like Blockbuster.com, a
human editor probably compiles a list of related links. But on ordinary sites like yours and mine, this
data is based on other sites that your visitors visit. It's rather like Amazon.com's "People who bought
this book also bought..." feature. In other words, if people visit your site and they also tend to visit
mine, I'll be listed as a "related link" to your site.
So here's the trick...
You can go out to all your competitor's sites and identify your website as a
"Related Link".
Here's how: Download the Alexa toolbar, and every day, go to your competitors' sites and then click
directly over to your site. Eventually, Alexa will recognize your site as related to your competitors'
sites and your URL will be listed in the Related Links list. I don't know how many people use that
Related Links feature, but if you're on enough of your competitors' lists, it should generate some
noticeable traffic.
DEFAULT DESCRIPTIONS
Many, many people out there are still not using the meta description tag, causing search engines to
create their own default descriptions for your site based on random snippets of text. This undermines
your efforts to achieve top positions in search engines because it reduces the number of clickthroughs
you'd ordinarily receive. Let's say you were searching for the meaning of an acronym on a Search
Engine. Which site would you click on?
The Acronym Database ... 71868 times by others.) Are you sure it's meant to be an acronym? It's an
ordinary word in the dictionary, try looking it... Cambridge Dictionaries Online
Or would you click on this one...
The Acronym Database The original World Wide Web Acronym Database (first started in 1991) that
offers a comprehensive list gathered from many network sources.
You probably chose the second one because it was more descriptive and informative. So you see, just
because you're first in a search engine DOES NOT mean you're getting the most clicks for that search
term! And all it takes to fix this is making sure your description is the first thing the search engine
encounters (in your meta tags) and to make sure you use a good title in the title tags.
LEGALLY TARGET COMPETITOR'S TRAFFIC
When you are looking for a website, where do you type in the URL?
In the address bar of your browser, right...
Well apparently not everyone got that memo :-)
An interesting fact is that right now there are many people typing the URL into...a search engine! I
could not believe it, but it is true.
What is even more mind boggling is that people type in the URL of the search engine, into the search
engine. Therefore, every month you find that the top search terms are always google.com, yahoo.com,
ebay.com.... and so on.
Because of people's tendency to search for URL's, there was an old SEO trick that used the URL of
popular search engines to draw traffic to your website - but it is no longer effective.
But then along comes 'The PPC King' to the rescue with a fresh twist on the dead tactic.
Jon Keel, a long-time Trafficology Subscriber (and Pay-Per-Click King), explains how to use this same
concept to effectively find people who are looking for a competitor's website.
He says that instead of using it as a trick, set up a legitimate comparison table between you and your
competitors. Now, you can legally use their name & URL on your site.
Plus, this is the perfect tool for convincing visitors to purchase from you instead of the competitor that
they were originally searching for.
Jon reports no problems getting these pages approved by the Overture & Google editors.
He also finds that even your biggest competitors are completely unaware of the fact that people are
searching for their URL - so there is very little competition for these terms.
START YOUR OWN RADIO STATION
This week we drove by a house for sale. Instead of the familiar "For Sale" sign with a phone number,
they had a sign for a radio station. It read, "For Sale, Learn more at 98.9 FM". We were not looking to
buy a house, but this was so intriguing that we just had to tune in.
I have actually seen this same technology used in several places - Movie Theaters, Park Safari,
Museums, even at a special Christmas light display in the city.
The basic idea is that you set up a small radio transmitter and broadcast your own message. Then
everyone passing by can tune into your station and learn more about what you are doing.
You could use this concept to promote your website. Just set up a small radio transmitter that talks
about your website, and then on the sign for your business (or on your front lawn) tell people to tune
into your station to learn more. This will be especially effective if you are near a busy street.
Here is a twist on that concept.
Every local electronics store sells personal radio transmitters. They are designed to plug into your MP3
player and allow you to listen to MP3's in your car.
No one ever said that your MP3's have to be music. Instead set up a quick 15 second commercial for
your website and set your player on loop. Then get a bumper-sticker or one of those car window or
door signs instructing people to...
"Tune in to hear Trafficology.com at 88.1 FM".
The standard transmitter has a range of only 50-100 feet, which would work fine for stop 'n go traffic,
but you could probably even find a "suped-up" one online. Although, 50 feet should be plenty of range
for the guy sitting behind you in traffic to hear all about your website.
Also, election season is coming up. I'm sure everyone has seen that group of people standing near every
major intersection in town. You know, those people holding up red & blue signs for one candidate or
another.
Well, put your MP3 player and your personal radio transmitter in your pocket and stand next to them.
Everyone is already looking in that direction; just make yourself stick out with a bright yellow sign that
says "Tune in to hear Trafficology.com at 88.1 FM".
Now, everyone driving by will be so curious that they will have to listen to a message about your
website.
BUILDING TRAFFIC USING RSS
One of the best ways to drive traffic to your website is to publish quality free content. The principle
behind this traffic creation technique idea is simple - people search online for information.
So if you provide high quality information, then people will come to your site. That’s the "If you build
it, they will come" theory... And as we all found out, it only works for Kevin Costner.
The problem is that the Internet is huge, and for people to read your great content, they first have to
find it. If you do your keyword research (part2 of the Trafficology Mini Course covers Keyword
Research) and develop a quality site, then you will generate a good amount of search engine traffic.
But, what you really need is links on related websites. They not only help your search engine ranking,
but they also expose you to a large group of traffic that someone else has worked hard to create.
The problem with links is that they do a very poor job of selling your site; they are small, plain and not
extremely effective. Sure, you could create a big banner, but most webmasters will not place it on their
website (unless you pay them).
Another problem with links is that most of the time they are placed in a "link directory" or are sent to
the bottom of some obscure page. In both cases, no real person will ever see your link (never mind
click on it and visit your site).
What you really need to do is post an article on someone else's site with a link back to your site for
more information. This way the other webmaster gets free content for their site, and you are able to
grab a large section of their most valuable real estate. This is also good for the visitors because they are
looking for quality content and you are able to pre-sell or influence them with your article.
Sounds great, but...
Wouldn't it be better if you could get a spot at the very top of a website? Or even better yet, provide
timely updated content to every site linking to you without all the logistical hassles?
Seriously, who has the time to update 100+ articles every month, and it is not very likely that the other
webmasters will go through all the effort of changing your article. What if you could automate this
process?
Now you can with RSS.
RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication (sometimes called Rich Site Summary or RDF Site
Summary).
It provides an easy mechanism for webmasters to share their content with other websites.
You can quickly syndicate a headline, an article or even your whole blog on someone else's site.
Therefore, you can send your updated content to hundreds or thousands of sites around the globe, just
as easily as sharing an image. Since your information is fresh and can be in headline format, it will
usually be near the top of the other website, and since it is timely it is more likely to be read and clicked
thru by readers.
The process of getting someone to place your RSS feed on their site is very similar to getting a link.
You can use online research tools such as Alexa & Google to find a matching site, then contact them.
Also, you will need to set up your RSS XML page and you may have to explain RSS to the other
webmaster.
That all sounds like a fun way to spend your Saturday afternoon, but there is an easier and more
efficient way to use RSS. Instead of contacting individual websites, you can submit your RSS page to
aggregators - or central websites that collect and distributes your RSS Feed.
Think of it as one-stop-shopping for website content. Aggregators allow you to quickly gain exposure
to a large pool of websites actively searching for an RSS feed.
There is another even more powerful way to draw traffic to your site using RSS.
Another group of aggregators have created desktop programs to distribute your news directly to users
without the need of a web browser. It's like an email client for syndicated news content from any
website you wish. This is great for users because they get convenient access to the content they want,
and this is great for webmasters because you get to "push" your content out to the readers.
That last point is subtle, but extremely important. Now, with RSS you have an efficient way of sending
your message directly to the members who have asked to read your newsletter. This provides all the
power and benefits of email marketing, with out any of the hassles of email marketing (spam, spam
filters, viruses or over flowing inboxes).
All the experts say that the best way to draw consistent amounts of quality traffic is to create a large list
of opt-in email addresses. I think that RSS has the potential to be just as useful, and even more effective
as email marketing.
One last note, you don't need to use RSS to take advantage of the power of articles. All you have to do
is have a good idea and submit it to a site on that topic (with a link back to your site).
For example, if you have some great traffic creation & conversion information, submit it to us. We will
review it and possibly include it in our next newsletter. Don't worry about the writing. Just explain the
idea; we will research and write it for you. Then we will place a link and a couple lines of information
about you next to your idea.
To demonstrate how effective this technique is in driving traffic to your site, think about this; a
Trafficology member who submitted an idea reported a doubling of their opt-in list within 24 hours of
publication.
HOW TO CLEAN-UP RANDOM TRAFFIC
If you took our course on the 7 Most Effective Traffic Creation & Conversion Techniques, then you
already know about our preference for "Targeted Traffic".
Quite simply, there are two types of web traffic: Random & Targeted.
Random Traffic consists of people who have reached your website and are not ready to make a
purchase. They usually have been tricked into visiting your website, or reached your site without
knowing anything about what you sell.
Examples of random traffic are the visitors from hit swappers or traffic created from a contest.
These people are not visiting your site because they want what you have to sell, they are only there to
win a prize or were blindly taken to your site. It is very hard to convince these visitors to make a
purchase.
Targeted Traffic is people who have come to your site with the sole purpose of learning more about
your product service or content or to purchase your product online.
Obviously, these visitors are significantly more valuable than random traffic - because they already
want what you have.
Here is an interesting idea of how to convert random traffic into targeted traffic:
Mark says:
Use traffic exchange programs in conjunction with banner exchanges.
We all know the quality of traffic exchange traffic is very poor, to say the least. But, if you set your TE
(traffic exchange) homepage to one of your pages that has 1 or 2 banner exchange banners, you can
increase your traffic from the banner exchanges.
TE's send real visitors, so all of the traffic will count, and it will go towards raising your impressions on
the banner exchange pages, which will send you better quality visitors."
Submitted by: Mark Johnson http://kickme.to/career Get paid $25 - $90 just for completing
surveys. Scam-free. Earn an extra $500+ per week.
This idea sounds like it has potential. Although, I would recommend that you test the conversion rate of
the banner ad before spending too much time & effort creating the random TE traffic.
To take it one step further, you could also add one of the email "co-op" services to this page and earn
targeted email subscribers as well. One example we use is http://www.subscriptionrocket.com
If you find that the banners do produce paying customers, then you could easily use them with many of
our other random traffic ideas.
For example, above in tip #4 we discussed changing the homepage computers at a cyber-cafe, computer
lab or library. I argued that these people are not purchasers - but you could use this method to create
banner exchange credits and then receive quality traffic in return.
Although, this only works if the banner exchange traffic does convert.
UNUSED ONLINE REAL ESTATE
Have you ever seen an abandoned farm or a closed factory and thought to yourself that someone
should put that land to good use? You could use that land to make something and give people good
paying jobs.
I see the same thing online all the time.
Everywhere I look, there are vast amounts of "unused online real estate". I know that if people just put
up a link to www.Trafficology.com they could make some easy cash - without doing anything else.
Sound too good to be true?
Nope -- just simple "no payment down, no interest, no cost" online real estate.
For example...
When people started signing up for our 7 Part eCourse on Traffic Creation & Conversion, my inbox
was filled with messages from people using the spam blocking software.
If you are not familiar with this technology here is how it works: It's like a Cyber-Sentry.
Every time a message is sent to your inbox from someone who is not in your address book, the spamblocker stops the message. Then they send an email back to the sender, and the sender has to confirm
that they sent the message. Once they confirm the message, the original email is let thru and all future
emails from that recipient are also sent straight to your inbox.
The point of all this is that a spammer will not go through all the trouble of confirming the messages,
but real people will - so you only get messages from real people.
I think this is a great idea and it's amazingly affective for cutting down on spam. Even though it filled
my inbox with confirmation requests, I was happy to spend the hour or so confirming the messages
because I knew that they would get through to people who are winning the battle against spam.
Back to the traffic creation idea. Remember I said that the Cyber-Sentry would send me a message
informing me to confirm that I am a real person....
Well, most people leave this page blank. This is a huge tract of unused online real estate. You could use
this to promote your website or if you don't sell anything, just place an affiliate link and a blurb about
some product that you really like.
Here are some more examples.
There is plenty of unused land on most websites.
Thank You Pages or Confirmation Pages
Do you have a contact form on your website? You know, one of those fill-in-the-box forms where
people leave their comments or ask you a question. After visitors click on the "submit" button, they are
usually taken to a "Thank You" page. And this page usually just says "Thank you...".
Foreclose on this piece of property and post some useful information. You could ask people to sign up
for your newsletter, you could post links to your other sites that people may be interested in, or you
could inform them of a product that you have "on sale".
What about the "Order Confirmation Page", the page that people see after they have placed and order?
It is a fact that people who have just ordered are the hottest prospect you can get. Use that space on the
order confirmation page to promote a related product - either yours or an affiliate link for someone
else's.
Here is another huge one - what about those "404 Page Not Found" Errors. These are a bonanza of
traffic that you would have otherwise lost. It is very easy to set up a custom error page.
Just create a page called "custom_page.html"
And insert the following line of code into your server's .htaccess file:
ErrorDocument 404 http://www.yoursite.com/custom_page.html
Then on" custom_page.html" provide a way for people to find what they were originally looking for.
You can just place a site map, or get a little more sophisticated and take the information from the error
and search your site for related terms.
If the search finds no matches on your site - then place some affiliate links to related products or have
link to a contact form where they can ask you for help.
If that is not enough unused real estate, then you can take a look at every out going email that you send.
Do you send an email confirming an order? Do you send people their UPS tracking number when the
order was shipped? What about a message saying that your contact form message was received?
In all of these cases, it is extremely easy to place a couple links to "this months special" or have a link
where people could join your newsletter.
Almost every website has some form of unused real estate. Do a quick search of your site, and I am
sure you will find a couple ways that you could be generating more traffic and more sales without any
more effort than adding a simple link.
COMPETITOR'S TRAFFIC
In a previous tip we talked about how you can legally & ethically draw Search Engine & PPC traffic of
people who were looking for your competitors.
This idea is not restricted to these two tools. In fact, there are many creative ways that you can
effectively convince competitors to willingly send you their traffic.
First, in the last tip you learned how to use the unused real estate on your page. Well, you are not the
only one with that unused real estate.
When you are contacting people for link exchanges or for RSS feeds, you could very easily ask them to
put your link on their 404 page, the contact for thank you page, or their order confirmation page.
They would be even more excited about the idea if you provide them an affiliate link, and why not.
You get prime real estate and they get cash. Who would turn that down?
Now, your competitors may not be extremely excited at first, but remember the old saying "If you can't
beat'em, join'em"...
The first thing you need to do is determine your conversion rate. There are many ways to do this, but
the most simple method is to divide the amount of sales by the number of visitors - this is technically
called "Visitor Value".
$ of Sales / # of Visitors = the value of each individual visitor.
Then, before you work on creating any more traffic you spend your time increasing your "Visitor
Value". This is done by making subtle changes on your site and tracking the effects of each change to
find which ones increase your visitor value.
Finally, once you have finished optimizing the conversion on your site, then approach your competitors
and propose to them the idea of placing your affiliate link on an exit pop-up from their page.
(An exit pop-up is a new window that will appear only after a visitor has left that website.)
Your smartest competitors will realize that more than 90% of their traffic is leaving their site without
making a purchase. You can then provide them the opportunity to generate revenue from all that lost
traffic by using an exit pop-up.
Since your offer will only appear after the visitor has left the competitors site, they have nothing to
lose.
Ok, now the exit-pop concept is a great idea on it's own, but you can really take it to the next level by
combining it with the traffic conversion work we explained before.
If you have done a good job of optimizing the conversion on your website, then your "Visitor Value"
will be significantly higher then your competitors (because they probably are not doing any conversion
work at all).
Once the traffic starts rolling in from the competitors exit-pop, they will see how much more money
they can make by sending their traffic to you. Keep this up for a couple months, and they will be
calling you to find out how you are doing it.
Then, you show them your affiliate program and explain how you can work together to make everyone
a lot of cold hard cash. They keep doing what they do to get the traffic, and you do what you do to
convert it into satisfied paying customers.
Sound too good to be true? Well, it's not. In fact, last week I heard from a company who used this exact
same strategy and forced their competitors surrender. Now the people who used to be competitors work
for them.
All from your knowledge of web conversion. As Jon Keel says, "Know your Numbers".
"DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME"
Go to park with bottles of white-out. Bring some bread and make friends with pigeons.
Grab a pigeon (be nice) and put your domain on the side of a pigeon with white-out.
Then release pigeon and repeat as needed.
Then -- imperative! -- find a pigeon-high board and add white-out or paint in reverse of your domain. If
a pigeon fancier complains (even though it is only white-out and will wash out) and you are escorted to
the park authorities, "discover" the reverse paint on the board and say that the pigeons must have run
against it while trying to keep warm. "What a coincidence."
This could make the newspapers or even the Tonight show if you do it first.
Lotsa hits (or jail term).
Submitted by: David Kesterton http://www.watcher1.com Top internet auctions teach you what
people like Cars, motorcycles, land, Elvis, Barbie & more * Although this idea is not advised, what
other ideas does this (or any of the tips) lead to?
GOOD CLEAN CODE
For everyone interested in Search Engine Optimization, it was pointed out to me, and rightly so, that in
my eCourse I failed to mention the importance of externalizing your
JavaScript & CSS.
You also need to be sure to keep your html code as *clean as possible*. This is so important that until
very recently I wrote all my HTML by hand, using only Notepad.
Keeping your code clean means:
1) Placing all JavaScript & CSS code in a separate file 2) Eliminate any extra and unnecessary
HTML tags 3) Ensuring your HTML is Valid and up to standards
Placing all JavaScript & CSS code in separate files
When Search Engines visit your website they read the "source code" of your site - not the page you see
in your browser window.
In the source code, at the very top of many pages you will find:
<SCRIPT> </SCRIPT> and <STYLE> </STYLE>
Usually you will also see about 5 pages of code in between these two tags.
Remember, a search engine has to read each of these lines before it can get to the rest of your page. So
it is very important to make this code as short as possible and let the search engine get to the code you
want it to see.
Furthermore, (and especially with JavaScript) many search engines process these extra tags. Therefore,
there is the possibility that they can become lost or tangled and never get to the part of the page you
actually intended.
Lastly, search engines only search a specified amount of your page. If you have a very long page with a
large amount of JavaScript at the top, it is possible that the search engine might not see some of the text
or links that you wanted them to see.
These problems can be avoided very easily by placing your JavaScript and CSS code in an external file.
Then link to them, instead of placing all the code in the <head> of the HTML file.
Eliminate any extra and unnecessary HTML tags.
When designing a page you make many changes. Sometimes when you make these changes you forget
to remove HTML tags that are no longer needed. This is especially true when using an HTML editor
such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver. These programs are notorious for adding extra & unnecessary
HTML code.
To resolve this problem you can use a program from the W3C call HTML TIDY. This free utility will
analyze your code and identify any html problems. It will also help you make your page more
accessible - which will also help the search engines.
You can get HTML TIDY from the W3C it at:
http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/
Ensuring your HTML is Valid and up to standards
Another similar problem to having extra HTML is having invalid HTML. It is very easy to make a
mistake in HTML and most web browsers are designed to just overlook these problems. But, as a
general rule of thumb, the cleaner your code the happier the search engine. Make sure your html meets
the current standards by using the W3C HTML Validator
You can find the HTML Validator from the W3C it at:
http://validator.w3.org/
Remember that the search engines can't include pages they can't see. Make it easy for them to get to the
heart of your pages by providing good clean code.
PLAYING THE SEO FRAME GAME
Trafficology Member, Big Bill wrote:
If you're given a site to optimize and it has frames and the client insists on keeping them, build a site
map and link to it from inside the noframes tags.
This Makes it easy for the search engines to get around the whole site as opposed to running smack up
against the frameset.
www.kruse.co.uk Certified SEO with 11 years internet experience. Member of the HTML writers
Guild and the International Webmasters Association.
That is good, sound SEO advice. I have also had luck using the <noframes> tag.
In addition to the sitemap, I like to include a specially optimized homepage. This gives both the search
engines and people who are using no-frames browser something useful to view.
SEEING WHAT THE SEARCH ENGINES SEE
Getting a Top 10 ranking is only half the battle; it just gets a link to your website in front of the
searchers eyeballs.
Once you are on the first page of results, you still have to entice the visitor to pick your link from the 9
other competing sites.
When you use PPC, you get to hone the exact copy that makes the visitors (who are ready, able and
willing to buy) click on your ad.
With Organic (un-paid) Search Engine listing you must use your HTML code to make a compelling
pitch that will grab the readers attention.
The main link is derived from your <TITLE> tag.
But your description can come from either your <META Description> tag or from the words at the top
of your page and around the keyword that the searcher typed in.
To take the guess work out of this use the Google Poodle Predictor
Laurette says: Poodle Predictor is a little known tactic for increasing web site traffic and yet it is so
easy to use that anyone can do it.
Go to google.com and type in "google poodle" Click on any of the sites that host the predictor.
When there simply type in the url that you want to check to see what your site will look like in searchengine results. You might be surprised to find that what you thought google
or any other search engine would pick up from your site such as your carefully crafted description is
not at all what google sees and presents to the public.
Keep changing the text at the top of your url until you get exactly what you want your visitors to see.
Write new text if needed.
This will increase the amount of traffic that you get since most people don't know about this trick
Laurette Trudeau http://www.highrankingsolutions.com New Concept In High Search Engine
Optimization... New Automated High Search Engine Ranking Software
I encourage you to try this for yourself and see what other people see when viewing your search engine
listing. I found the Google Poodle at: http://www.gritechnologies.com/tools/spider.go
DO YOU HAVE A COOL DOMAIN NAME?
You know, a domain name that other people would want? Something like Golf.com - or maybe the
name of a place like, Vermont.com.
One way to get both a lot of repeat visitors and also start your own viral marketing campaign is to offer
a free web based email account with your domain name.
How many people do you know would rather have a free email address of Jon@golf.com rather than
Jonthebarber564@Hotmail.com
I call these "Vanity Email Addresses" - just like Vanity License plates.
Try it out, two places I know you can go to get a "vanity email account" are:
http://SirAnthonyHopkins.com http://www.vermont.com
This is good for eBusiness because the person who wants a "vanity email address" would also be a
good prospect for what you offer.
For example, the person who signs up for the email address Jimbo@golf.com would be a good prospect
for golf related products or services.
Additionally, Jimbo probably has some friends that are golfers. Therefore, whenever he emails anyone
he is sending out an advertisement for your website. Now, anyone interested in Golf will also come to
your site and see what you have and maybe sign up for their own email account.
This is a good way to get new, highly targeted visitors who will come to your site repeatedly. It is also
a great viral marketing tool and an effective way to build a quality list of opt-in email addresses.
To set up a "Vanity" email system for your domain you can either work with a web host that offers
unlimited free email accounts or partner with a 3rd-party provider.
The company used in the two examples above is http://www.everyone.net
THE REPEAT VISITOR GOLDMINE
It is a fact; most buyers do not make a purchase on their first visit.
One tactic that I encourage is to focus your efforts on bringing people to your site who are read, able
and willing to buy right now. But that does not mean you should forget about the other visitors who are
not at that point...yet.
I have seen several studies; some say that your average customer will come to your site 3 times before
they make a purchase. Others say that you need to contact your prospect 7 times before they are ready
to hand over their cash. Who knows what to believe, but I think it is fair to say if a visitor who is not
"ready-to-buy" visits your site, you will have a better chance at converting them into a customer if you
can get them to come back to your site multiple times.
This will build a trusting relationship with your customers, it will build a bond and condition them to
visit your site. Then, when they are ready to make a purchase they will be comfortable with your name
and your site.
Here are some ways to encourage repeat traffic:
Fresh, topic specific content.
If you subscribe to the theory that people search online for information, then "Content is King". This is
the best way draw to highly targeted people to your site. The search engines will love you and your
visitors will love you more if you can give them great, relevant and fresh info that can not be found
anywhere else.
Create an Online Community
One of the things that makes the Internet so powerful and compelling is the ability to be interactive.
Not only can you read about what "experts" think, but you can contribute too... and even have a spirited
debate on the most important topics in your life... with people from all around the world.
People like to be around people who are "just like them". If you create a place where people can
congregate and discuss a niche topic, then you will have plenty of repeat visitors - and great content
too.
This is also a good way to keep your "thumb on the pulse" of the market you serve. If you create a
message board, forum, chat, mailing list - or some other form of community communication, then you
will know the wants, desires and needs of the people who you are trying to sell to. Use that info to
create a product that solves their problem and people will gladly pay you for the solution.
Hold a Poll
People like to voice their opinion - and they will come back to see if other people agreed with what
they had to say. Combine this with current events and other content on your site and you will have a
great way to draw people back for a second round of your sales pitch.
Have a Newsletter
This is the most basic web traffic tip. If you build an opt-in list and send people information that
interests them, then they will follow a link to your site to find more information.
If you provide quality information then people will appreciate your hard work and will be open to your
advice regarding related products or services. Just make sure you only recommend quality products that
you personally reviewed and recommend; otherwise readers will not take you seriously and it is just a
waste of your time and money.
Send out a set of tips via autoresponder.
This is a variation of the newsletter idea. A newsletter implies that the information is timely. You could
instead create something like 21 tips or 52 tips and send people a new tip every week. This will have
much of the power of the newsletter with out all the hard work of developing new content every month
Those are some good ways to get started building repeat visitors. There are others, such as contests,
but they tend to bring "random" traffic". The key to repeat visitor traffic is to focus on bringing back
the people who are interested in your topic and are on the edge of making a purchase. If done
effectively, you will be right in front of their eyes whenever they do decided to make a purchase.
Building Links & Increase Link Popularity
We all know links are a great way to drive traffic to your site and increase your search engine ranking.
But, when most of us think about building inbound links we are paralyzed by the daunting process of
requesting a link exchange.
To relive your pain and enable to you take advantage of this powerful web traffic creation technique,
here are Trafficology’s Top 5 Ways to Build Inbound Links.
#1: Write Free Online Articles Websites and eZines all over the Internet are constantly looking for new, fresh content. You can easily
sit down for an hour and write an information packed article on a topic related to your site. For
example, if you site sells Golf Equipment then you can write about how to select the perfect Golf Club
or you could write a piece explaining technological innovations have made Golf easier and more fun to
play for the weekend recreational player.
The point is to write a quality article that people who purchase your product or service want to read.
Ideally, you should make the article very informative so your readers feel you gave them something of
value and learn to respect your opinion on the topic.
At the end of the article include an “About the Author” resource box. This section should have your
name, a brief sentence about you, and a compelling reason why the readers should visit your site. Try
to tie this section to the content of the article and always include a link to your site.
Now all you need to do is pass your articles out to other Webmasters, eZine publishers and Article
Directories. If you article has quality content they will gladly add it to their site.
#2: Give a Testimonial for Complementary Products One of the best ways to increase the conversion of your web copy is to add a good testimonial. The
problem is, most sites are horrible at getting their customers to give one. You can help another site
improve their sales letter and get a quality inbound link for yourself by actively giving out testimonials.
So, the next time you find a product you like or a website you found particularly helpful, offer to give
them a testimonial. Make sure you provide creditable, believable & quantifiable information and don’t
forget to give them your link and a little bit of bio info too.
To super-charge this technique send them your picture (a simple headshot or a picture demonstrating
the success you had using their product). If you want to go all-out, then get yourself an
AudioGenerator.com or InstantVideoGenerator.com account. Nothing (and I mean nothing) will
encourage other webmasters to include your testimonial on their homepage like giving them a free
multimedia clip. Just set up the audio / video testimonial and send them the code to post on their site at
no charge.
#3: Make Posts in Forums, Blogs & Online Journals This process may take a bit of time, but can easily add hundreds of inbound links to your site. Just do a
search in Google Groups, Blogger.com or LiveJournal.com for keywords related to your area of
expertise (Blogger & LiveJournal require you signup for a free account first).
When you find a result that matches your area of expertise, make a meaningful addition to the
discussion and add your signature with a link at the end of your post. If you are truly adding useful
comments and helping answer peoples questions, then this can be a fun and easy way to rack up
hundreds of inbound links.
#4: Blogging & RSS This is really two tips, but they are closely related. First, get yourself a free Blogger.com account and
add several posts about your site with links back to your home page and other key pages.
Then, use PingoMatic.com syndicate the posts you made (and thus your link) out to all the major Blog
search engines.
Finally, if you are really ambitious turn on the RSS option in Blogger, do a Google search for RSS
Feed Aggregators and submit your Blog RSS Feed to as many as possible.
The second part of this tip is to create an RSS Feed for your website. They are actually very easy to set
up (specific directions are provided at http://www.trafficology.com/setuprss). Once you have
established your own RSS Feed, then like before, just do a Google search for RSS Aggregators or RSS
Directories and submit your website’s RSS feed to as many as possible.
(http://www.Trafficology.com/rss55 lists the 55 Best Blog Directory and RSS Submission Sites)
#5: Use Automated Software Tools There are many tools out there to help you build links and increase your link popularity. They cannot
do all the work for you, but they do a great job at helping you locate and manage new link partners,
automatically build custom links pages, and check to make sure people you have traded links with in
the past are still linking back to you.
This method will not boost your link popularity as fast as the other techniques. But if you dedicate just
two or three hours a week to running the software, at the end of the year you will be very happy with
the results.
While you can find a dozens of link popularity tools online, the two I would personally recommend are
Arelis and Zeus. You can get a free trial of the Arelis Link Popularity tool from Axandra.com or get a
free trial of the Zeus Internet Marketing Robot from Cyber-Robotics.com.
DESKTOP MARKETING
As discussed in a previous tip, repeat marketing is a valuable tactic to creating targeted traffic. The key
is to be in front of the customers eyeballs when they are finally ready to make a purchase.
Another way to do this is called "Desktop Marketing". The principle behind "Desktop Marketing" is
that one thing that most computer users see on a regular basis is their desktop. Therefore, if you can get
an icon on their desktop that links to your website then you will have many repeat visitors.
An example of this being used in action is
http://mikes-marketing-tools.com
If you notice in the top left corner there is an "Add to Desktop" graphic.
This concept is very similar to the "Add to Favorites", but instead of your link being hidden among
hundreds of other "Favorites" - your logo is right on the customers desktop.
Long time Trafficology Subscriber, Mike Wong from Mikes Marketing Tools, uses "See You Again
Short Cut" to do this; but I am sure that any competent Java or Windows programmer can create a
similar install program.
See You Again Short Cut bills this as "Put Bill Gates to Work for You", and I tend to agree with their
philosophy. This is a powerful way to draw traffic to your site by taking advantage of Microsoft's
market dominance. To find more info on "Desktop Marketing" check out
http://www.seeyouagainshortcut.com
and take their 2 minute tour.
Although I really like this idea, there were some things that I did not like about this way of doing it.
First, when I clicked on the "Add to Desktop" Icon, I thought that I was going to get *1 Desktop
Shortcut*. Instead I found 6 "Desktop Shortcuts", 6 "Start Menu Shortcuts" and 6 "Task Bar
Shortcuts".
That is a total of 18 things - when I thought I was only going to get 1.
Second, there was no "uninstall". After being bombarded with shortcuts, I had to remove each one of
them individually.
Third, it costs $19.95 per month to add this feature to your website.
WEB BROWSER MARKETING
A similar idea to "Desktop Marketing" is "Web Browser Marketing".
This is primarily done by creating a branded tool bar, like the Google Toolbar.
Nick Says:
We offer an absolutely free customized toolbar application [like the Alexa and Google Toolbar]
complete with a pop-up blocker and history cleaner.
The webmaster may link to any number of inside or outside links, customize with logo/pictures, buttons
and more. [Absolutely no spyware]
Our only hook is a link back to us in 'About Toolbar' or a 'Get Your Own Free Customized Toolbar'
link.
This is not a cheap, out of the box or weak web-based toolbar.
The software alone on this application is over $1000.00... let us build it for any website free.
Nick West http://www.freecustomtoolbar.com American Consumers First proudly offers free or low
cost promotional tools & marketing resources.
How to Get Your Ad on Other People’s Car
If you’ve been reading Trafficology very long you already know how fond I am of Vehicle
Advertising. Month after month I’ve shared with you innovative & unique ways for you to drive traffic
to your website while stuck in traffic.
But, every time I think of a new Vehicle Advertising idea I can’t help but thinking what we really need
to do is find a way to get your ad on other peoples cars.
We’ll now someone has… and you don’t even have to pay for it!
DrivAd has build a large database of drivers all across the country who are willing to put your ad on
their car in exchange for free products and services. Plus, you can sign up to be a driver and get loads
of free products & services your self, just for putting someone’s ad on your car.
Check them out at:
http://drivad.trafficologyresources.com
Lessons Learned from Holiday Shopping Season
While traditional retailers had a disappointing holiday shopping season, Online Holiday Shopping
exceed expectations by pulling in over
$23 Billion in sales a 27% increase over last year.
Last month we gave you 7 tips to increase your online holiday sales, this month we are going to look
back and see what lessons we learned from the ‘Net most profitable period in history.
First off, sites who did the basics right generated the most sales. There is no substitute for sound
keyword research, enticing ad copy, vibrant-crisp images, and a clean easy to navigate website.
Second, online holiday shopping started early. Forget ‘Black Friday’, in cyberspace you better be
ready by October. If you were not prepared early, you missed out on a good number of sales.
Finally, here are several tips and techniques successful holiday shopping sites employed.
• Offer Gift Certificates, not just digital but also a nicely boxed Certificate for under the tree
• Add a section of your site just for holiday gifts. Feature the most popular gifts on your homepage
and get into the holiday spirit by doing a little seasonal online decorating.
• An Affiliate Program – all of the most successful sites have them. Get one too.
• Take a proactive approach to reducing Abandon Carts. The first step is measuring them. The
second step is to reduce the number of steps in the check out process. Offer free shipping or
make your shipping policy clear from the very beginning, and provide the alternative payment
methods such as PayPal or online checks.
• Keep your products in stock. If you run out immediately remove it from your site or clearly mark
it out of stock. Remember, online shopping is primarily about trust and repeat business creates
profits. If you can’t deliver the product in a timely manner you will lose that customer for life.
• Offer additional holiday services such as gift-wrapping and handwritten cards.
• Increase sales by holding online auctions for your holiday gift products. Do not underestimate the
volume of traffic auction sites will drive to your site.
As a parting thought, if you want to be successful next year maybe you should spend some time doing
keyword research now. Most of the tools still have data from this past holiday season. You’ll easily be
able to identify the holiday trends you missed out on this year and use that data to be prepared next
time around.
And while you’re at it, why not start building your 2005 holiday pages now. Sure, you may have 9
months left to prepare, but if you want to carve our your piece of next years holiday shopping bonanza
you better start early.
Dead Domains
Thousands of domains expire everyday taking their traffic, their search engine rakings and their links
with them. Whether the owner forgot to renew, closed their business or just lost interest in the site this
valuable source of instant traffic is being wasted. Instead of letting these domains remain inactive you
can use them to drive traffic to your site, create sales and improve your search engine rankings.
The key to making this idea work is finding expired domains that are related to your niche. To do this
use http://www.deleteddomains.com and search by keyword. A better resource for this is
http://www.FallenDomains.com. There you can also search by keyword and results will include traffic
information such as Google, Yahoo, Looksmart, dmoz and inktomi rankings.
Fallen domains has a free trial from time-to-time, but the $25/month fee is worth the price. If you only
find 1 good domain you will have still saved over $200 on the Yahoo! Listing fee alone. Not to
mention the branding power of a short, compelling, keyword rich domain name.
A twist on this idea that I used successfully is to approach the owners of niche sites that are no-longer
active, but their domains have not expired.
In one case a major portal site for the city I live in went dead. The company that ran it just closed up
shop, canceled their hosting and moved to Florida…leaving their site and the over 2000 local
businesses linking to it dead.
It took a bit of effort to track down the rightful owners, but when I did they were very receptive. They
gave me the domain, plus all the content on their site for only the price of the remaining years of
registration.
I’ve done this for several sites including other web design and web hosting sites in my area. It only
takes minimal research to track down the sites, their clients and create residual income. Knowledge is Traffic
Here’s a creative way to use the lessons you’ve learned in Trafficology to create a free source of high
quality targeted traffic:
Create a Web Traffic Co-Op.
That’s right, use Trafficology to master a traffic creation technique such as PPC, Writing Online
Articles or Offline Advertising. Then partner 4 or 5 online or offline businesses that complement your
product or service and are not using these powerful web traffic creation techniques. By working
together the partners can split the start-up costs and share in all the leads and traffic created.
For example, if you’ve learned about online & offline classified advertising you found it to be
powerful, but costly to roll out on a large scale. Once you’ve done some tests and found yourself a
productive place to advertise you can become the gatekeeper and get your advertising for free.
Just use your knowledge to set up everything and divide the costs between your other partners. If you
have 5 partners and the promotion costs $1000, they each pay $200 to cover the entire costs. Your only
contribution is time and effort.
This is a very powerful technique that can be used with just about any advertising technique, but is
most effective with things like postcards or flyers that have an up front fixed cost. This prevents many
businesses trying them on their own, but by working together you can all benefit.
Email Marketing QuickTip
If you have an eZine or Newsletter make sure to give away a free report or a 7 part eCourse on the front
end and then offer updates via your ezine.
People want instant gratification and have started to loose interest in Newsletters. Satisfy their need for
something right now by positioning your eZine as a free report and you will get a significantly higher
opt-in rate. Do You Froogle?
One of the very first questions I ask clients who sell a physical product is, Are you listed in the Online
Comparison Shopping Sites such as Froogle.com or mySimon.com?
This is easily one of the most overlooked source of very targeted traffic. The typical visitor who uses
online comparison shopping sites is ready, able and willing to purchase a product online. They usually
know exactly what they are looking for. They’re in the final stages of a buying a specific product, but
they have not yet chosen which merchant they want to purchase from.
Contrary to common believe, people who use comparison sites do not always choose the low cost
provider. While brand may not be their chief concern, quality is just as important to them as any online
shopper. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that people who search Froogle & mySimon often
point to a merchant’s trustability as a major influence on their final decision.
To get started, I highly recommend that you first try Google’s Comparison Shopping Site, Froogle. It
is free to get your products listed and some experts believe a Froogle listing will even improve the
Google ranking your product’s page. Additionally, Google also provides a special links to Froogle
products in their search results above all other search results.
(Test it out, try searching for “nike air jordans”in Google. At the top you’ll see a shopping bag icon and
3 product links, those are from Froogle)
Another reason to start with Froogle is because it is easy. While technically, Froogle may find your
site on it’s own, I highly recommend you use their “Data Feed”. Basically you just sign up and they’ll
email you a username and password. Then just fill out the spreadsheet and upload it using the
instructions provided. It’s that easy.
After you have worked with Froogle and found what products are converting well, then you can expand
to other sites such as mySimon.com BizRate.com, PriceGrabber.com and Shopping.com. These
comparison sites work on a PPC model. Usually their rates are set by category and will often be less
than the bids you’ll find on Yahoo/Overture or Google AdWords.
When you are ready to take this to the next level try selling your products on auction sites such as
eBay, Yahoo Auctions, Overstocked.com and Amazon zShops. They require you pay an up front
listing fee plus a percentage of each sale. Once you’ve leaned how to use Froogle and the PPC
Comparison sites you’ll know exactly which products will be profitable using an auction.
Remember, these sites are essentially lead generation sources. After you’ve generated a sale you
should focus on following up with each customer and building a long-term business relationship.
Doing so will increase your overall profitability and enable you to use extremely aggressive pricing for
the products you sell via these services.
Create An Instant Buzz
Over the past few months the word “Instant Buzz” keeps popping up. Honestly, when I first heard
about it I went to the site, checked it out and was not extremely impressed.
Basically it’s a free traffic exchange system, but instead of using pop-up or other annoying methods to
display the ad, it only has a small toolbar at the top of your browser window to show a 1-line text link.
At first glance it seemed like just another traffic exchange and when an audio file on the homepage
started playing automatically, I did not stay on the sales letter very long.
But for the sake of thorough web traffic reporting I asked around a bit and actually got quite favorable
reviews. Then Mark Joyner said, “It’s the only free traffic system I’d recommend these days that
works”,
I knew I had to test it out (and so should you).
I personally do not like traffic exchanges. But, admittedly this is a very non-intrusive method of
driving traffic to your site. Just like any traffic exchange, the quality of traffic you have depends
completely on your ability to write a compelling headline. Plus, some niche sites may have trouble
generating a good volume of visitors.
Unfortunately the text ads are completely random. If they developed a technology to display ads
relating the to content of the page you are visiting (like Google AdSense) this idea could really take off.
Until then many members are using credits to displaying their ads to people completely not interested
in their topic.
On the positive side it’s an almost completely passive way to drive traffic to your site. The ad just sits
on the top of the page. It doesn’t blink, it doesn’t annoy and it does not interfere with the work you are
trying to do. Several people who’s opinion I respect have said good things about it. With what Mark
Joyner had to say how can you not at least check it out for yourself.
Bottom Line: Instant Buzz is a viable free traffic creation method I recommend you try. Sign up for
free at: http://InstantBuzz.TrafficologyResources.com
Web Conversion QuickTip
Trust is one of most important element of the online shopping experience. Believe it or not, if you
offer a physical product many potential customers will wonder if it will actually arrive.
Therefore, consider offering expedited shipping. It will build creditability and increase conversion of
all shipping options. Additionally you’ll ensure a positive experience for your customer and improve
the chances of a repeat purchase.
More Profits?? ... More Keywords!
As I explain in the Trafficology eCourse getting the right keywords is crucial to the success of your
business. (sign up for the Free eCourse at http://www.trafficology.com)
In fact, one of the most important parts of both SEO & PPC is creating a very large list of keyword that
are relevant to your site. In fact some of the most successful sites have lists as long as 3000 keywords.
Now, I am not saying that you need 3000 - but I am saying that you should try very hard to find every
keyword that you can -- that you competition is not using.
There are many automatic ways to do this and you can find a complete list at
http://www.trafficology.com/research/
But, like all good things -- the traffic from your best keywords will plateau, and you will have to find
additional sources for new keywords that the automatic programs can't find.
One of the best resources for related keywords are books on the topic. A book is nothing more than a
collection or related works organized in an understandable format. So they are gold mines for
keywords.
Basically all you do is find a book on your topic and then search for related keywords on the cover, in
the table of contents and in the index. Also, if you flip through the book you may see some "sidebars".
Those are perfect for finding related topics that you would never have previously considered
But, don't think you have to go to the library or your local bookstore - you can find all the info you
need in 1 convenient location… Amazon.com
Plus Amazon has many extremely usefully features that will help you find even more related
keywords:
1) Amazon is structured like a search engine, so you all you have to do is type in your current
keywords and all the books that relate to topic will appear.
2) In addition to books they will also other products and magazines, both good sources of
keywords
3) Don't forget to read the descriptions, reviews and other comments people made about the book especially the negative ones. These will reveal related topics that the book did use specifically.
4) Look at the "Customers Also Bought" section. That will tell you other things that people who
purchase your product are interested in - another great source of keywords.
5) Amazon has things called "listmania!" and "so you'd like to" - these are humanly compiled lists
that are somehow related to your keywords in some way... this is a whole tip itself - if you
want to find the best keywords- definitely spend some time looking at these.
Look, if you cant' find all the keywords you ever need here - then you need to start thinking about a
different product, or maybe you should focus on a totally different market.
PARTNERING WITH EBAY SELLERS
Every day, thousands of eBay sellers ship packages to the winners of their auctions. Here's an idea I
came up with to take advantage of that.
If you search on eBay right now for items related to your particular business, you'll probably find
hundreds of listings. (If not, you're in a pretty obscure business... or you need to try different search
terms.)
For this example, let's say your website sells auto repair manuals. (I just made that up - it doesn't matter
what your site is about.)
In the "car and truck parts" category on ebay - there are nearly 100,000 different auctions going on
right now.
Presumably, if a person is ordering a "car part", they know where it goes. And by extension, they
probably do some of their own auto repair. A prime candidate for your manuals!
Every one of these auctions - if the reserve price is met - will result in someone boxing up a car part
and shipping it to the winner. Wouldn't it be nice if in every one of these boxes was a nice note telling
the buyer about your auto repair manual site?
Here's how to arrange that...
Set up a simple affiliate program.
Next, approach some of these sellers with the following proposition...
"I see that you occasionally sell car parts on eBay. I've got an idea on how you can make a little extra
money on each part you sell. My company produces auto repair manuals, and we convert about 4% of
visitors into buyers. We get $40 per manual and we pay $20 commission on each sale. If you'll include
a simple hand-written note with each part you sell, we'll give you credit for every order that comes
from your customers... etc." You'll have to re-write that for your own particular offer, but you get the
idea.
The eBay seller will then HAND-WRITE a note to each person who wins his auction. It will go
something this...
"Thanks. Good luck with your Ford Mustang. By the way, the best repair manual I've ever seen for
Mustangs is from http://www.yourdomain.com/rtj2.html It's well worth the money!
Thanks again, Bob."
If you're converting 4% on normal click-thrus, you'll probably convert 5 times that amount (20%) on
this kind of endorsement!
You might be wondering where the eBay seller's affiliate ID is and how you know to credit him with
the sale.
Here's what I did:
If you were to give a normal eBay buyer a URL like this...
http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/affiliates.cgi?id=3213032
... they would probably realize that you're an affiliate with ulterior motives. Or worse yet, they'd just
mistype it.
But by using something like http://www.yourdomain.com/rt2.html you can make that page a simple
redirect (using a meta refresh tag) to the "real" affiliate URL. Of course, each one of your eBay sellers
will get their own special redirect page so that you can track them appropriately.
I don't think anybody's doing this, but I think there's some real potential here. Good luck!
Dictionary Profits
This is an idea I have personally used and it always - no matter what kind of site you have - it always
produces quality web traffic.
Submitted by several readers, here are the two best explanations of specifically why this idea works and
exactly how to implement it on your site:
Kelly Monaghan says "Dictionaries Draw Eyeballs":
When I created my site about how to become a Travel Agent I included my Travel Industry Dictionary
as a small component of the home study course. This was mainly a way of adding functionality and
usability to the site. I never anticipated it would be the eyeball magnet it has become. In some months,
40% of my traffic visits the dictionary. I let a few dictionary sites know it existed and was never very
aggressive about seeking links. But it seems to have had a viral effect. Many dictionary sites started
linking to the site, then travel schools, and even high traffic consumer sites like Fodor's, which view it
(I assume) as a non-commercial resource for their readers. When I did seek links, I found the
conversion rate high because I was offering a valuable resource, rather than a sales letter site. Another
benefit: much of the traffic the dictionary attracts comes from people searching for specific words and
terms that don't appear elsewhere on the site, so my log files tell me what people are interested in,
allowing me to create content geared to newly popular search terms. I'm not sure how large a
dictionary or glossary you'd need to be taken seriously by the dictionary guides (mine is over 3,600
terms), but creating a specialized dictionary or glossary might be worth considering.
How about a glossary of snowboarding (or even snowboarder slang)?
An audiophile's dictionary? A New Age Dictionary?
My guess is that whatever your site's topic, there's a glossary to be created. Another possible
application: Turning your glossary into a paid or freebie ebook that could be widely distributed (with
links back to you, of course.)
Kelly Monaghan http://www.hometravelagency.com The Internet's premier home study course for
home-based travel agents.
You can see what dictionaries are already out there and find places to submit yours at:
http://directory.google.com/Top/Reference/Dictionaries/
Keith Sager really breaks it down step-by-step when he explains how to use a topic specific glossary to
build traffic, build your brand and get paid too!:
Here is an idea that you can use to promote your website, and get paid to do it. This idea was BORN
for use on topic-specific portals, but should work well for any niche market website. I do not know of
this EXACT model in use anywhere else on the Internet.
This concept is a traffic-generating, brand-building, moneymaker. I'm confident that if you brain-storm
with this for awhile, you will get quite excited about various ways YOU can implement it to get paid to
promote YOUR website...
Step #1 - Build a Topic-Specific Dictionary/Glossary for your Niche Market
Build an extensive DICTIONARY and/or TERMINOLOGY GLOSSARY for your specific niche
market. Every page of your dictionary should be reserved in size to a maximum of 510 pixels wide.
This width will support a pop-up window that will include a 468 Google AdSense banner, and a
vertical scrollbar.
A basic format would be: The dictionary index page will consist of nothing but the alphabet, a to z,
arranged neatly in an invisible table. Each letter is linked to an intermediate page with a list of words
and/or phrases that begins with that letter.
As an example, a dictionary for the jewelry industry would have the "A" link point to an intermediate
page with words like "amethyst," "aquamarine," and "amulet," etc. Each of these words will be a link to
a dedicated page for that word's definition. (for a more polished presentation of your dictionary, try a
JavaScript or a DHTML fly-out menu instead)
At the top of each dedicated definition page, you will place your code for a 468x60 Google AdSense
banner ad. (Step #2 below) Also, to build traffic and your brand recognition, the bottom of EVERY
PAGE in the DICTIONARY (not just the definition pages) should have a small-font hyperlink that
reads, "Dictionary Courtesy of www.your-website.com." (You may want to consider an additional link
for visitors to suggest new words and their definitions.)
[Side Note]: For usability and convenience, you would of course want to link every word in your main
website's content to it's definition in your dictionary-glossary. That will be a huge convenience for your
visitors, and they will more than likely come to visit you rather than your competitors if you make their
research easy.
Step #2 - Syndicate your dictionary to smaller websites of similar-content!
PAY other webmasters (with related content), to use YOUR DICTIONARY on their site as a valueadded service for THEIR visitors. I recommend paying webmasters 5 cents for each unique visitor to
the Dictionary ALPHABET PAGE ONLY. (Tracking unique visitors to the "Alphabet" page can easily
be accomplished by using readily available affiliate software) As an additional incentive, you could
provide an "alphabet page" template to each webmaster, allowing them to place their logo at the top of
the page.
Place this dedicated index page in a subfolder on your domain.
Now they have a semi-private-branded dictionary that THEY ARE GIVEN and PAID TO USE (THEY
SHOULD BE QUITE HAPPY WITH THIS ARRANGEMENT!)
Now lets review what we have done...
You have YOUR DICTIONARY PAGES accessed on potentially hundreds of related content websites,
and each access could be worth 50 cents or more! [As their visitors research terminology, they are
exposed to more and more Google AdSense Ads (or any other affiliate programs you are an affiliate
with) on your definition pages!]
EVERY PAGE has a link back to your website, either your index page or a dedicated landing page.
+ Every page has potential to drive traffic back to your main site + Every page view helps build your
BRAND-AWARENESS on the Internet
Every Dictionary ALPHABET PAGE viewed on another related website LINKS BACK TO YOUR
DOMAIN, THUS PROVIDING THAT MUCH MORE LINK-POPULARITY and RELEVANCY,
PUSHING YOU HIGHER IN THE MAJOR SEARCH ENGINES rankings.
Additionally, AFFILIATE LINKS you place on your dictionary definition pages will get much more
mileage than just placing it on your site only!
HERE IS A CONSERVATIVE EXAMPLE:
50 Dictionaries X 10 unique users / day = 500 users / day Payout 5 cents X 500 unique users = $25/day
expenses
----------------500 users / day X 20 cents AVERAGE AdSense revenue per user $100/day
----------------$100 Gross - $25 Expenses $75 / day NET! ($2250 / month income)
PLUS GREATER RELEVANCY in the SEARCH ENGINES
How much is that worth? Have you priced BUYING a higher listing in a search-engine lately?
PLUS THOUSANDS OF FREE CLICK-THRUS (FREE TRAFFIC!)
Remember the link on every page: "Dictionary Courtesy of www.yoursite.com" If 15% in the above
example click-thru to your site, that is 9000 visitors/month FREE!
PLUS BRAND RECOGNITION
Who has 10s of 1000s of Dollars to pay for brand advertising? Get PAID to do it with your DictionaryGlossary!
I'm confident each of you will be able to add minor refinements to this concept, specific to your needs
and your traffic goals. I hope you can see the potential here. With very little modification, ANY
website can take this methodology and make it a profit-generating, traffic-building brand-builder. I
invite you to try it, and I solicit your comments.
Keith Sagerhttp://www.expresswebpresence.com Rapid Web Presence Solutions Discount Domains,
Hosting, SiteBuilder and More...
GOOGLE WEB ALERTS
Trafficology Subscriber Chris Graham reports on a new way to Google
that is almost guaranteed to increase your PageRank.
Web Alerts is a free service by Google that will automatically
send you an email when someone new links to your site.
Chris suggests that Getting free email alerts when someone links to you is pretty cool, but it's even
more useful if you get alerted when someone links to a competitors site.
You can use this information to your advantage by immediately approaching the site that linked to your
competitor and asking if they'll link to you too.
The likely hood of successfully getting the link is many times higher than standard link building
because the prospect is both fresh and already interested in linking to a site similar to yours.
All it takes is a quick email saying... 'Hey John, I noticed you just linked to XYZ.com. I'm from
ABC.com and we sell widgets too, I added a link from my site to yours and would appreciate it if you
added a link back to my site.'
Requesting links doesn't get any easier than that!
Why should you do this... We'll if you did not already know linking and link popularity are major
factors in the search engine rankings. In fact, Google's PageRank or PR is basically a measure of the
quality and the quantity of links to your site.
One last thing on Google Web Alerts. Don't forget you can use multiple queries and keep tabs on
multiple competitors.
This is easily done by adding an "OR". For example: link:www.xyz.com OR link:www.def.com OR
link:www.uvw.com
Chris Graham If you'd like to find about the work of Friends of the Earth (and how you can help) go
to: http://www.foe.co.uk
To Set Up Google Web Alerts, all you have to do is answer a couple of questions, and Google then
emails you when there's new info matching whatever search you asked for.
The URL is ...
http://www.google.com/webalerts/create
The second cool service is a way you can track any types of news that influences your marketing, your
website, or anything else you're interested in.
To track news articles, try Google News Alerts at ...
http://www.google.com/newsalerts/create
BECOME A "LOCAL" SELLER USING GEOBUTTONS
We received this VERY interesting concept from a nice lady in Utah:
"We market satellite TV systems and accessories in 48 states. As you know, many customers visit the
internet just to shop around and then visit a local retailer to actually make the purchase. We found a
great way to BECOME the local retailer, as far as the customer is concerned."
There's a company that has "mapped" IP address blocks to specific cities, so if your visitors live in or
near any Top 50 US city, you can dynamically determine their geographical location and use that to
your advantage.
In other words, if someone were to visit your website, and her IP address (or her ISP's IP address) was
216.147.23.70, you would know that she was physically located in Baltimore, Maryland.
With that knowledge, you could place a dynamically generated headline on your website that said,
"Baltimore's One-Stop Widget Store" or "Serving Baltimore and Surrounding Areas".
The city is inserted dynamically based on the visitor's IP address. If done properly, this will make you
become a "local retailer" in the minds of many customers. The submitter of this idea said, "We suspect
that you will find, as we have, that many more customers will buy from once they consider you a local
retailer."
Here's how to add it to your site:
Go to the website below and customize a FREE "geophrase" to insert on your website.
http://www.geobutton.com/
(Note that the code you are given will put a blue hyperlink to the geocode website in the geophrase you
create. For maximum effectiveness, you may want to hide the fact that it's a hyperlink.)
Next, be prepared for your site visitors to talk to you like you're a "local." They will expect you to at
least know their state.
The submitter said, "We use Caller ID or quickly ask the customer their phone if they call from OutOf-Area. We also keep the website http://www.freeality.com/finde.htm open so we can quickly
establish the state the customer is calling from by their area code."
Pay to Read Traffic
Mary Says:
I don't know how many people know this, but I pull in leads and get good responses to banner ads,
email ads...etc... by going to some of the larger Paid to Read E-mail sites and buying small ad packages
with them. Like if your wanting people to sign-up to your free News Letters they are some of the best
places to go.
Mary http://www.star2000online.com/ GET 100 PAID MEMBERS & CoQ10 Take the tour it's Free
and Join me in a Few days.
Mary is right, you will get a good response to an ad for a free Newsletter at paid to read sites. My
concern is, it may be difficult to convert these visitors into buyers.
Traditionally it is hard to convert people who are drawn to your site for freebies or give-a-ways... you
will be able to generate a good volume of traffic, but it has been my experience that the value of this
type of traffic is very low.
But, Mary reports better results using Pay-2-Read advertisements and says it even works great with
those sites that have "paid to sign-up" sections.
She explains that for the reader to be paid they must show proof of signing up, which grabs their
attention and gives you the opportunity to keep their interest with the quality of your newsletter, tips
and links.
Making sure your Ad matches the content you deliver is very important. Just like with any marketing,
your ad gives you the opportunity to pre-qualify visitors to your site.
Mary also states that Pay-to-Read is a great way to implement a "long-sell" approach… where you
warm up the prospect to the importance of your product or service and be their advocate… while
demonstrating how your product helps solve their problems.
Another benefit of using these types of ads is their cost. Depending on how many impressions or signups being purchased, Mary typically pays between $6.50 and $24 for a campaign. In fact, recently she
purchased a solo ads to the whole member base for only $5. You will have to do your own testing to
see if that is a good deal for your site, but paid-to-read advertising costs a lot less that most other forms
of paid advertising.
Lastly, feature of paid-to-read advertising that I did not expect is the quality of the visitors and their
level of disposable income. According to Mary, a lot of people get into paid-to-read emails because of
the quality of the products being advertised. Some readers do it to make a little extra money each
month just for buying things online. Some readers get into them to make money as a business.
My recommendation would be to try it out… spend the $10-$20 and see how many sales you can get
out of it. I would definitely attempt to capture their email address and get them into a quality follow-up
autoresponder series.
Bottom line… there are better traffic options… but if you are serious about generating a large volume
of quality web traffic, maybe you should make pay-2-read sites a new part of your online marketing
portfolio.
Vehicle Advertising
In previous tips we reported on several ways to use Vehicle Advertising. From adding a "Bumper
Banner" to using a personal radio transmitter to broadcast your own website commercial, getting web
traffic from highway traffic has always been a hot topic.
Candy from Digitalicandy.com Sends:
Often overlooked and deemed as unimportant is advertising our website's on our vehicle. The thinking
is that only locals will see it and that is not enough people.
Well, here is my experience: I live and work in a small town with less than 30,000 people. However,
our entire county is over 76,000.
The highway that I travel to and from my office is a main artery, and many travelers from all over the
country use that highway at all hours of the day.
I put vinyl stickers on my rear and side windows with my web address and nothing else. I did this 2
years ago, and it has brought me a tremendous amount of work, and mostly from other areas of the
country that seen that simple address on my window.
It also has brought me local work which is fine too.
I encourage all my clients to do the same, and for one of my clients locally it has saved her business.
And many businesses are following suit, when I talk to them they are always surprised at the relevant
traffic and sales they receive from it.
Candy Rosenberg http://www.digitalicandy.com Professional Web, Graphic & Marketing Development
Working with online entrepreneurs since 1996.
From getting your URL painted on your truck to ordering custom bumper stickers, basic Vehicle
Advertising should be a marketing staple along with adding your URL to your business card or your
company letterhead.
But... once you have the basics covered use on of these tips to turn Vehicle Advertising into Vehicle
Marketing.
Add Your Email Address:
Directing people to your website where they can get more information is one thing... but if you can get
them to email you, then you can open a line of communication.
Better yet, use your vehicle to advertise a Free-Report people can get by sending you and email. Then,
automate the follow up by have the email address go to an autoresponder that delivers your report over
a series of email along with a personalized follow-up message.
Advertise on More Vehicles:
You are not limited to the Ad Space on your own Truck or Car...and Vehicle Advertising is not just for
creating traffic.
One local Real Estate Agent use Vehicle Advertising to increase their sale conversion... they offer a
free Moving Truck for everyone who purchases a home using them. The put a big Ad right on the truck
proclaiming that the people using the truck are happy customers and that you can find your Dream
Home too on their website.
That is a great idea if you already have you own truck, but if you don't then build a partnership with
someone who does.
How well this will work depends a lot on your business. For example if you are a real estate broker,
you can make an agreement with a local rental truck company stating that you will always recommend
that specific rental company if they put your URL on their Trucks. Or, if you sell plumbing supplies
you can offer a special 2-for-1 discount to ever plumber who puts your bumper sticker on their Truck.
The point it to be creative and work together to get your URL on as many vehicles as possible...and get
as many customers to your site as possible.
Drop Capitals
Jason Sent: If you start your body copy with a drop capital, you increase readership by an average of
13%
The term 'drop capital' is used to describe the large capital letters that you often see at the start of a
paragraph in books, magazines and newspapers. It's called a 'drop' capital because it literally drops
down inside the paragraph. The big letter 'T' at the beginning of this paragraph is an example of a drop
capital. The drop capital or 'drop initial' as it's also known, was originally used to add decoration to a
page. Large hand drawn and very ornate drop capitals were often used to mark the beginning of a book
or a chapter. Many of today's publishers who want to give their work a more professional looking
appearance, will often use a drop capital for that all important finishing touch. With billions of web
pages available to read on the Internet, getting people to read the pages on your website is getting
harder and harder. You will often only have a few seconds in which to catch the fast surfing Internet
user's attention. In addition to just being decorative, the drop capital has also been proven to increase
the number of people that read the first paragraph on your page. The larger than normal letter at the
beginning of the first paragraph manages to grab the readers attention. As the letter forms part of the
first paragraph, the reader's eyes are lead naturally from left to right into the text.
Jason Lewis Increase Sales & Readership by 13% http://dropcaps.trafficologyresources.com
I actually noticed renowned copywriter, Michel Fortin, uses drop caps in his sales letters. When asked
about it he confirmed an increase in conversion after adding drop caps. Creating your own drop
capitals, does require a little bit of time and effort. You can make the first letter of each paragraph
larger and bold using HTML, you can use JavaScript & CSS or you can just add an image to the
beginning of each paragraph Ready-Made Professional Drop Caps
http://dropcaps.trafficologyresources.com
Do-It-Yourself CSS Drop Caps http://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/pseudoletter.shtml Another
Drop Cap Resource http://www.frenchspot.com/WebTips/DropCaps/dropcaps.html
Handwriting on the Web
You may have noticed, I often use a handwritten signature on my sales letters and money-back
guarantees.
When people see your real signature they start to humanize you... they know a real person is behind the
site and that is important to many customers.
Also, you may want to try including other hand written comments around the PS area or product
images. You may even want to include an entire hand written guarantee. These are items are especially
important when trying to sell "self-help" information or high ticket items.
For example: http://trafficsecrets.trafficologyresources.com At the very bottom of this page you see
that John Reese provides a hand written guarantee for this high-end information product.
Another example: http://panic-anxiety.com/copy.asp?id=1706 This site sells a "self-help" anxiety
eBook. In the guarantee, they link to this pop-up hand written note. I bet most people never see the
note. It is more effective to place the note directly on the page like John Reese did above.
It is very important to "personalize" your website. One of the most important factors to selling online is
trust. The more you can let your customers get to "Know, Like and Trust You", them more your online
sales will increase.
Classified Advertising
With all the emphasis on online marketing, most people are probably forgetting one of the most
powerful means of advertising available.
I'm talking about classified advertising in newspapers. Most people are aware of what you have to do to
place an ad in a daily or weekly newspaper, but did you know there are companies that will place your
ad in literally hundreds of papers with circulation's in the millions for pennies per ad? Instead of paying
the ridiculously high ad rates newspapers charge for a single classified, you can get that very same ad
placed in hundreds of newspapers for pennies. Usually about $0.20-$0.30 per ad.
Another good thing is that many of these newspapers will accept business opportunity ads. Below I will
list several companies you can contact or visit their web sites and see the prices of their advertising
packages. Let me tell you, one ad that draws a response rate of .05%, that's 1/2 of 1 percent, on a
circulation of 4 million can bring in $10,000-$20,000 in a very short period of time. Your cost for this
type of ad. About $250-$450. These companies also offer less expensive packages if you just want to
test an ad. But this type of advertising works. You can post your URL in the ad and still sell from your
website.
Maybe you've never given much thought to this type of advertising related to your online business.
Maybe none of your affiliate programs ever discussed this with you. Maybe they just don't know about
it. But now you have a very powerful means of getting your message out that can earn substantial profit
on your investment.
Here are some fine companies you can contact to see what kind of advertising packages they offer.
Nationwide Classifieds http://www.nationwideclassifieds.com/ Discount National Newspaper
Advertising http://www.advertisingresults.com/
You can also find great packages through state or regional press associations. Each state or region has
press associations which consist of a group of newspapers. You can do a search at any search engine
for 'press association' and find this information. Many will even help you with your ad.
Submit By: Million Dollar Traffic The Peer-to-Peer Traffic Revolution has begun: Discover how to get
all the FREE, highly targeted online traffic you can handle - by clicking here:
http://mdt.trafficologyresources.com ...Start getting traffic in just 5 minutes from now!
Google Profits Toolkit
Every profession has their "tools of the trade". If you are trying to make money using Google, you
absolutely need a copy this free Google Toolkit.
Simply put this powerfully unique ebook contains all the tools you need (and more) to help you
generate "oodles" and "oodles" of targeted traffic from Google.
To top it all each Google traffic building tool also comes with an explanation on how it helps you
profit, so it's much more than just a collection of "hot" links.
Get your Free Google Profit Toolkit at: http://googleprofits.trafficologyresources.com
The second item in the Google Profit Tool Kit (that compliments this ebook) is a companion Toolbar
with the same "Google Profit Tools" name.
Brian Says:
When you install this powerful new Google Profit Tools toolbar you'll quickly discover all the tools
and resources you need to profit from the Google search engine in the biggest possible way. Everything
is included within this toolbar to help you gain a top 10 position within Google in no time flat, for just
about any keyword phrase you can think of.
You'll also gain immediate access to the very best keyword research, link popularity and Google
AdWords tools. As if it couldn't get any better you'll even get instant access to the very best search
engine optimization training online. Take my word for it when I say this toolbar is "fully loaded" with
the best SEO research tools around.
You'll love this next feature... this toolbar is 100% "dynamic" so it'll be regularly updated with newest
and most effective Google Profit Tools, just as they're released. This ensures you get to keep your
finger on all the important SEO changes as and when they occur within the Google search engine,
ensuring you maintain your highly prized search engine position.
You know it doesn't matter if you're a search engine optimization expert or a complete novice when it
comes to getting targeted traffic from Google. I personally guarantee you'll find something within this
essential toolbar to help you profit more from Google in the quickest time possible.
What Google Profit Tools toolbar would be complete without having the built in ability to search the
entire web from any web page using the powerful Google search engine. Everything you need to carry
out the most detailed, most extensive online search is included.
More than this... you can also perform searches based on Google PR scores and link popularity, you
can even use this essential search feature to view the listing of your newly created website though the
eye's of Google, before Google even sees it!
Brain Terry The Lazyman's Way to Maximize Affiliate Profits
http://googleprofits.trafficologyresources.com
Get Your Free Google Profits Toolkit at: http://googleprofits.trafficologyresources.com
Get Your Free Google Profits Toolbar at: http://googletoolbar.trafficologyresources.com
How to Have Your Own Online Party
Online parties can be a successful and fun way to build your home business. These parties are similar to
home parties except that you do not have to pay a small fortune for refreshments and snacks! ;-)
You can have your party in a free or low cost chat room or you can have your party via email. Be sure
and create a relaxed and fun atmosphere for your guests. We would recommend a chat room.
You can either recruit someone to host the party for you or you can be the host. There is also something
called 'Mystery Host Party'. This is where you draw or randomly select a guest to be the 'Mystery Host'
and receive the host benefits.
You will need to schedule your party. We have found that during the week is best unless it is winter.
Then weekends can be a good time also. Give yourself plenty of time to plan and send out invitations.
Plan your specials. You definitely want to have some items on special. Maybe some that tie in with
your theme, if you have one. Give a 25% discount on certain items, but make sure you leave enough
profit as well. You could also offer a small free gift with all orders over , for example.
When it is time to send out the invites, email groups and message boards can be a great place to start.
Send out the invitations (follow guidelines on this). Also invite friends, neighbors, co-workers. Let
everyone know they can bring a guest or two or however many you like.
Have each guest introduce themselves and tell (type) a little about themselves. This will help bring the
guests together.
You also want to make sure you have some fun and interesting games to play. And of course, for each
game you will need prizes. Below are some popular party games:
Scavenger Hunt – Make a list of several items and instruct your guests to find them on your site.
Word Scramble –Pick about 10 words from your site and see who can get them all right in the least
amount of time. Let your guests know the words come from your site/business.
Trivia Questions - Write up a list of questions about your site/business.
There are many more fun, exciting games to play at your party! Make up your own if you like as well.
You, of course, will also want to spend some time presenting your products. If you offer home decor
items, share some tips and ideas on home decorating with your products. If you offer aromatherapy
items,
explain the benefits of your products. Make your presentation fun, informative and relaxed. Let the
quests ask questions and always be clear and candid with your answers.
The idea here is to relax, have fun, show your items and make new contacts/customers. If your guests
have a good time and enjoy themselves, they will sure to come back to your next party! ;-)
Terri Seymour No-cost, non-MLM home business opportunity Take advantage of the gifts, resources &
more provided for your home and business at: http://www.seymourproducts.com
Sponsor or Host and OFFLINE Event
Earlier this year I decided to host an offline event and promote it by sending a couple press releases to
the local media. It was easy to do, very inexpensive and drove a lot of traffic to my website.
In fact, this is how I got most of the traffic to my site in the first couple of months.
I held the event at a Public Library, which was free to use :)
The event, which was free to the public, cost very little to produce.
My main method of promotion was a press release which I sent to several area newspapers. The local
weekly paper published a front-page news story, the others added the event to their calendar.
It was surprisingly easy to get media coverage. Basically, all I did was email the press release to the
editors, and then follow up with a simple phone call. They would typically ask me a few additional
questions about the event and one reporter even came out and took my picture.
I also submitted a notice of my event to a couple free press-release websites.
An example press-release I used is here: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2004/7/prweb143122.htm
I have conducted two events so far this year. Each event resulted in plenty of web traffic plus a several
hundred new, targeted, hot prospects that I was able to meet in person and can now follow up with via
newsletter or autoresponder. These events also allowed me to build valuable business relationships with
more than 20 local vendors. Carrie Lauth http://www.hatelatefees.com
What Your Visitors Really See
This you DO NOT want to miss: The newest report out on 'seeing' what people look at when they
browse through your site and how they react to certain layouts, headlines, images, and text formats.
Do you really want to know what people see when they visit your site? You think you're ready for the
harsh reality?
The project managers of the EYETRACK III team, Steve Outing and Laura Ruel seem to have done
quite a bit of work and I want to thank them for their findings.
So how do we utilize this new found information ? Knowledge is only power, unless it is applied.
Applying Knowledge: Homepage Layout
Quoted From: http://www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/main.htm
'The eyes most often fixated first in the upper left of the page, then hovered in that area before going
left to right. Only after perusing the top portion of the page for some time did their eyes explore further
down the page.'
It is mentioned all throughout those articles that the people they tested and had the EyeTracker III track
their movements, and they repeatedly looked towards the upper left hand corner first. The logical
reason for that would be because many people in the world read left-to-right. Only certain people can
read right-to-left.
That would be another explanation why they even tested sites that used their menu on the right and why
most of the people tested, seemed to be drawn to the menus on the right.
Pay Attention As To What You Add On The Top Left Hand Corner!
Msn does this so perfectly, here's what you can find at the top of MSN, MSN Home, My MSN,
Hotmail, Web Search, Shopping, Money, People & Chat .
The study shows that with having important links at the top, people will gravitate to those links first.
First impressions are huge, even more than most of us consider sometimes.
Things you can add at the top to maximize the space:
- Add a link To Their Favorites button - Tell a friend link - Search function - Company specials Site Map - Contact Us - Log-In - Print Page - Newsletter Subscription - Daily News Report
How To Improve Your Content For More Exposure:
If you have information or news that you want read right away, try to implement and position that
information near the top. The study shows that by adding a small 'caption' of the article, people will
generally read the caption more than if there were only a headline to the article.
On the other hand, it doesn't mean that people will read the entire article more but ... You may attract
readers to that article that may have just brushed the headline off.
The key to your content is flow:
If you want people to scroll down and view the content that you have near the bottom of the page, make
sure that ALL of your content flows towards the bottom. Try not to break it in any way. The more flow
you have, the more people will browse down.
Many aspects of web sites functionality is sub-conscious. Implementing more and more tested
strategies will increase your chances at a successful and powerful website.
Does mimicking newspaper formats help your content?
Not really, the EyeTrack III didn't show a more positive response to websites that did mimic
newspapers and their content. In fact, the reaction to the content was approximately the same as any
other column online.
'It is very easy to get people to visit your site once, It's even harder to keep them there and/or get them
to come back.' MRL
Can you increase the time spent on your site?
With the EyeTrack system, they also tested 'time' factors into their findings. What they found wasn't
too shocking since most humans react the same way when browsing and & learning online.
Our attention span online is very limited, you need to grab their attention right away. If you don't grab
someone's attention at first glance, they will click away on the spot.
What kind of design layout is the best?
Nothing too flashy seems to be the winner. It was stated that the individuals that were tested with the
EYETRACK III didn't even look at many of the graphics online until the end. People seem to gravitate
to text and headlines before they take a look at specials with graphics. This is such a turn around from
newspapers and magazines.
So does this prove that content is king? I would think so.
Image & Graphics, can they really work?
Its was stated that, the size of your image/graphics did make a difference. The larger you can go, the
better. So it may be wise to make sure that your advertisers within your site, have the largest graphic
visible to the eye to gain the most exposure for your advertisers as possible.
If you don't have advertisers on your site don't worry. Try to implement large images for your
company's services/products and specials. Please also keep in mind that not everyone is on high speed
internet or cable. Make sure to test your site for download speeds and keep your download time to a
minimal. You don't want to lose your visitors because it took more than a minute to download one
page.
Everything has it's purpose:
Like mentioned before, internet marketing success is not one thing all the way, it's 100 little things
coming together. Implementing these findings from the EYETRACK III will increase your chances at
winning your visitors hearts and getting them to come back time and time again.
Sitting around, reading articles like these and not creating new strategies will bring you the same results
you have now. It's the people who take information like this and really try to implement them on their
site that will achieve better results online.
Do yourself a favor, if you haven't read the EYETRACK III report, take some time out of your
schedule to read the report right away.
http://www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/main.htm
Martin Lemieux Affordable Web Design & Web Site Marketing http://www.smartads.info
Nitro Incubator's Top 3 Advanced RSS Tips
(NOTE: To learn the asics of using RSS to get your site listed in Google & Yahoo Search in 48 hours
or less, listen to our interview with Nitro Incubators Ric Thompson at:
http://www.trafficology.com/getlisted.html )
If you are using RSS to drive traffic to your site, here are Nitro Incubator's Top 3 Advanced RSS Tips:
Advanced RSS TIP #1 When creating your RSS pages, make sure to use sound Search Engine
Optimization techniques. At least do some of the most basic things to your Blog... things like using
your keywords in your title, in the body and most importantly make sure to use keywords in the "link
text" of the links that point's back to your website.
Advanced RSS TIP #2 In your Blog, make sure to post a link to every single page on your site. You
can either copy&paste you enter site map, or even better, you can post a link and a brief description of
what that page is about. Remember, make sure to use your keywords in the link, in the link text and the
description you post in your blog.
Advanced RSS TIP #3 When you add content to your site make sure to make a posting with a link in
your blog about the new content. Then use the free service shttp://www.pingomatic.com to alert all the
RSS Feed Directories & Search Engines that you have a new content on your site.
BONUS RSS TIP: It is possible to place affiliate links & Google AdWords directly onto your RSS
Feed. By thinking a little outside the box and getting creative, you can produce a nifty little revenue
source using RSS.
The submitter continued, "We started this in August and enjoyed over double the number of sales this
August compared to August in any of the last 5 years. (Our traffic has increased only 8% compared to
last August).
While this won't necessarily get you more traffic, it will get you more sales from the traffic you get. We
believe that this technique works extremely well because it isn't known - so don't overdo it!"
AUTOMATING "METASPY" MARKETING
Here's an interesting submission by a long-time subscriber...
"I was intrigued by an idea that appeared in Trafficology a few months ago, that involved searching for
your own website on the various "search voyeurs". But I figured it was a rather tedious/time consuming
way to get traffic... unless of course, you could automate it.
The thing is, I'm not a programmer. But with a little searching and HTML knowledge, I found there IS
a way to generate Metaspy traffic automatically.
Here's how I got it to work:
Go to download.com and grab a free program called GhostSurfer. This is a program that simulates web
browsing while you're away from your computer. Although its stated purpose is to keep internet
connections alive in idle moments, most people use it to artificially surf "hit exchange" programs.
Go into the Options area, uncheck the 'Visit Ruttiger' option and 'Use online database of URLs' options.
Then click the edit websites.txt button so you can add your own URLS for it to 'ghostsurf.'
Now, add an URL that looks something like this:
http://www.metacrawler.com/index.html?general=www.trafficology.com
The ?general= term will drop 'www.trafficology.com' in the Metacrawler search box.
Now, play with the rest of the options in this program so that the program will click the Metacrawler
Search button semi-regularly. This will involve setting a 'hotspot' for clicking, and playing with the
'random' movement patterns of the GhostSurfer. This takes a bit of patience, but it is possible.
Then... let it run overnight, or whenever you're away from your computer. Add other Metacrawler
URLs with your search teasers at the end, or unrelated URLs to your websites.txt to avoid sending too
many obvious teasers through to Metaspy."
Exploiting Google's Image Search
Google is the #1 search engine in the world. So new ideas and new opportunities to take advantage of
all that traffic are worth listening to.
And here's an idea that may turn out to be bigger than we first thought.
Most people obviously search Google in "Web" Mode, but there are several other "modes" including
Images, Groups, Directory and News. And while all of these
are popular, searching for "Images" holds a lot of promise.
Image searching is interesting because, just like the regular search engine, you enter a keyword and
then you get a selection of images that are related to that keyword.
Let's take an example keyword... "internet revenue".
If you type that into the Google "Image" searchbox... http://images.google.com/
... you'll see a list of images that contain "internet revenue" either in the name of the image or the name
of the website or in the text of the site.
Although we don't know specifically what the algorithm is for determining which images appear at the
top, it seems like images that are named exactly the same as the original search phrase do pretty well.
In fact, on the top line is an image called "internet_revenue.gif".
Presumably, people search for images in subjects they're interested in, so here's how you might be able
to exploit this:
Create small advertising images that contain your URL and the reason why people should visit your
site. Name them in such a way that people might search and find them. In other words, if you're
running, oh...a web marketing newsletter, you might call your images things like...
online_marketing.jpg or internet_promotion.gif
Words separated by underscores (_) seems to do better than those without.
Then, just upload them to your site and submit those pages to Google.
Now, when anyone types in those phrases, your image will show up in the listings, and if anyone clicks
on it, Google will place your image on top, and your website in the bottom.
Seems like a pretty good deal! We can't guarantee any exact traffic figures, but after all, it IS Google,
and if you get a good listing on popular searches, you'll undoubtedly benefit.
This is a loophole that virtually NO ONE knows about. Tread softly.
Convert Your Promotional Material for Handheld Users
If you've got an ebook, you should consider formatting it for handhelds and then offering
it fre_e on handheld sites like...
http://www.handango.com/ or http://www.palmgear.com/ ...and about a million more.
Owners of Palm and PocketPC handheld devices are avid and devoted users and love downloading all
sorts of things, just for the sake of doing it.
People who would never take the time to download your ebook to their desktop will
download it, just so they can read it on their handheld!
And it's really simple to do. You can either download the do-it-yourself software (OverDrive's
ReaderWorks, cost = $120), or hire someone to do it.
For details on doing it yourself, check out this page...
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/products/pocketpc/default.mspx
It tells you how to convert a .txt file into a .lit file that is handheld-readable.
Or, you can pay about $40 to someone on elance.com, and they'll deliver a finished product to you.
Whichever route you go, I think you'll find a ready market for quality ebooks on handheld sites.
Exploiting the "Reprint Rights" Phenomenon
Everywhere you turn, ebook creators are selling reprint rights, resale rights, resell (sic) rights, Platinum
Reprint Rights, Master Resale Rights, etc.
The bottom line is, lots of internet entrepreneurs are attracted to the idea of having the right to publish
and distribute someone else's material, without having to do any of the work themselves.
If you own the reprint rights to a certain work, not only can you freely sell the work and keep all the
money, you can bundle it with other similar books and offer it as a premium or bonus on other deals.
This is getting to be such a phenomenon that some newbie ebook buyers ASSUME they have reprint
rights whenever they buy a product! It's crazy!
You can exploit this tendency and get quite a bit of traffic in the process.
Create an ebook about some subject that you think may have popular appeal, and one that
covers the topic of your website in some way. Then, mention your website throughout the ebook. Try
to appear as objective as you can, but lace the book with references to your site, or URLs where
additional information can be found.
Then, release this out into the world with FREE, unlimited reprint rights. If it's any good, it will be
snapped up and put in all kinds of "...and if you act now" bonus bundles. It will be copied onto CDs and
sold on eBay. It will be everywhere, and everyone who reads it will likely visit your site.
If you pick the right topic, and do a quality writing job, you may literally never have to
worry about traffic again! And, don’t forget to post your create on all free ebook sites.
OFFER AN AFFILIATE PROGRAM GUARANTEE...
Go Above and Beyond What Everybody Else is Doing.
If you've got a successful website that consistently converts x% of visitors into customers, AND you've
got an affiliate program, you've got a scalable business that you can approach other webmasters with.
You already knew that.
But human nature being what it is, whether it's sloth, indolence or skepticism, you will not be able to
convince every webmaster that he can make money by promoting your
program, even when you've got the historical figures to back it up.
But you might convince a lot more of them if you give them a guarantee.
Something like this...
"If you promote this to your list and don't make at least $3,000 within (a certain time frame), we'll pay
you $3,000 out of our own pockets."
The idea that they're guaranteed to earn (in this case) $3,000 - no matter what - will get a lot of people
off their lazy you-know-whats. And since you've got the data that allows you to confidently predict the
outcome, it's not that big of a risk to you.
Nevertheless, you might want to add a clause in the agreement that says the guarantees is contingent on
the list responsiveness being within 3% of average. That way, if the guy has a hugely inflated
membership or a list that's sick and tired of hearing from him, you don't get hurt.
One thing we have had good success with is rewarding our affiliates for doing desired actions.
The lesson to be learned here is to ALWAYS do more than your competition when it comes to working
with affiliates. Just offering a good program is not enough anymore.
You have to go above and beyond what affiliates would normally expect if you want to get above
average results.
Our EXCLUSIVE "User Agent" Bot
Here's a cool application we developed. I think you'll have fun with it.
When you check your logfiles, you'll notice a section at the end of each entry in parentheses. This is
called the "User Agent".
Here's an example...
80.177.9.199 - - [29/Oct/2004:03:02:41 -0800] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 17775 "-" "Mozilla/4.0
(compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)"
In this case, the User Agent data is: "compatible; MSIE 6.0;Windows NT 5.0".
Attached to every webpage request made by every web surfer on earth, is this ubiquitous User Agent
information.
The surfer's computer tells the browser what information to send, but thanks to our "bot",
this is fully customizable by you.
In other words, instead of your User Agent information being something like compatible; MSIE 6.0;
Windows NT 5.0", you can change it to anything you wish, like "www.nitromarketing.com".
All you have to do is run the "bot", change your User Agent information, and begin surfing the web
normally. Every log entry you create by visiting pages will have your URL attached to it, and some
webmasters who check their logs will likely be curious
enough to check out your site.
The "bot" is self-explanatory and easy to use. Sorry, but at this time it only works for users of
Microsoft IE browsers. You may download it here...
http://www.trafficology.com/useragentbot.vbs
SPONSOR" BOKEN BONE CASTS
A French website has decided to "sponsor" all the broken bones in one particular city.
If you break your arm or leg, such that you require a cast, this company will pay you to have their logo
printed across the cast in large letters.
It's actually done by an in-house artist with just 3 different-colored magic markers.
Most people who are willing to go along with this probably just do it for fun, and usually accept a
pittance... something like $20-30.
Virtually any website can afford 20-30 such casts and while the exposure to that logo is fairly limited,
it's such an unusual idea, it's probably a very simple matter to get some media publicity for it.
I've not heard of this being done anywhere else, so it might be worth trying, particularly for a site that
benefits mostly from local traffic.
SIGFILE AND P.S. SPACE OF "PROFESSIONAL
FORWARDERS"
The most read section of any marketing letter is always the "P.S."
Why? Who knows?
Maybe it's the white space. But while we don't know exactly why... this is something every direct mail
marketer (worth the title) knows, so this is the spot where he reiterates his sales message.
(The second most-read section, incidentally, is the caption under a photograph.)
So the submitter of this idea recommends going through your emails and finding people who are
prolific emailers and who are NOT using P.S.'s or SigFiles in their emails.
It may be possible to buy/rent/lease this space for pennies, and the benefits could be huge. Here's what
I mean...
By now, SigFiles are old hat. Everyone knows that it's a pretty effective device to include your SigFile
at the end of your emails. Best of all, most email programs can be configured to include this
automatically so you don't have to even think about it. As emails get passed around and forwarded and
replied to, etc., lots of people see your SigFile and those interested may actually click-through.
Here's an example of a SigFile:
---------------------------------------- Trafficology: The Science of Web Traffic *****
http://www.trafficology.com/ ***** ---------------------------------------P.S.'s work the same way. Perhaps they're even more effective. Check this out...
... well, say hello to your wife for me.
Later, John
P.S. I don't know if you've seen it yet, but there's this really strange marketing newsletter called
"Trafficology" that I think you'll like. The URL is http://www.trafficology.com/
If you think about all the millions of emails floating around the world today and all the wasted
marketing potential of the messages containing no SigFile and no P.S., I'm sure you'll see the
possibilities.
There are certain prolific emailers who send out cartoons and jokes, mpegs and greeting cards, and all
the latest web rumors. You know the type - right? I call them "Professional Forwarders." The irony is,
they send out so much stuff to so many people, their messages get forwarded to friends, friends of
friends and so on... exponentially.
These type of people are perfect for this idea. You can approach them and offer them something in
return for the simple act of attaching your SigFile or your P.S.
If this is successful, you might consider posting advertisements for this on some of the various online
classified and money-making sites. (If there's one thing the internet has proven... there are millions of
people out there who will do amazing things for a few cents.)
The submitter of this idea said that he convinced a guy (who works for a Fortune 500 company and
who sends out probably 100 business-related emails/day) to add his P.S. message AND SigFile for an
ENTIRE YEAR for a certain music CD. That's the type of leverage we're talking about.
The main challenge, it seems, is finding people willing to go along. The guy who submitted this says
that he thinks the best bet may be to first, start with your own inbound emails, then try Paid-to-Surf
message boards, Lottery message boards, free classified ad sites and chatrooms.
Marketing to the HumanClick'ers
If you've got more time than money, this is a way of generating some high-quality traffic with zero
expense.
HumanClick, in case you don't know, is a service that offers real-time chat on websites so that wouldbe customers can interact with webmasters or Customer Service reps while they're online.
There are many thousands of websites that use HumanClick and probably several thousand sites within
your website's main field of interest.
You can get a list of them by visiting...
http://www.humanclick.com/
and then following the appropriate category, such as Finance, Computing, Entertainment, etc. Once you
drill down to the appropriate category, you'll be shown a list of websites whose owner is online right
now, ready to chat.
This is NOT a complete list, but a good place to start. You can find thousands more by going to
Lycos.com and using this search expression:
ml:humanclick.com - url:humanclick.com
HumanClick webmasters tend to be bleeding-edge technology buffs who are, by-and-large, very open
to new ideas.
The submitter of this idea says that it's easy to strike up a HumanClick conversation on the pretext of
looking for assistance, and then plug your own site in a context that's friendly and non-threatening.
I found that to be pretty much the case.
I did a tiny experiment with this, and of the 10 HumanClick sites I interacted with, 7 of them visited
Trafficology and 5 of them subscribed. So, this obviously does work - IF you've got lots of time on
your hands.
"Inflating" Your Traffic
Here's a cute idea I received last week...
For about $.06 each, you can buy balloons custom-printed with your URL and have them filled with
helium for less than a penny more. At $70 cpm, it is a bit more expensive than banner ads, but the sight
of 10,000 helium balloons being released into the air at once is probably worth a little peripheral
publicity from your local newspapers and tv stations.
In addition, nearly everyone who finds one of your balloons will undoubtedly visit your site!
The submitter of this idea said that he's known balloons to drift as far as two states away. (Which may
result in some added local publicity in the areas they're found.)
A bit more cost-effective idea would be to buy regular, unprinted balloons (which are much, much
cheaper) and attach your business card to each one. Now you're down in the $10 per thousand range.
I don't expect this to drive a huge wave of traffic to a site, but it would be an interesting experiment.
GEOCACHING
Since the popular adoption of the internet, lots of new hobbies have been invented that would have
previously been impossible.
One such hobby is called "Geocaching".
"Geocachers" use their GPS (Global Positioning Satellite) device to find hidden "caches" all over their
area. These caches consist of a container that has been hidden somewhere and the idea is to find it by
using your GPS unit.
Once you find the "cache" you can take an item from inside it. People typically leave little trinkets like
CDs, software, books, and other things that they don't mind parting with as a little prize for successfully
finding the cache.
The only rule is that if you take something from the cache, you should place something in there in
return.
The submitter of this ideas said, "Geocachers are typically 'techies', who use the internet a great deal.
These are the types of people who would appreciate things like t-shirts, mousepads, etc. with your logo
on them."
Of course, you've got to find the caches first in order to put your goodies in. But there are dozens of
geocaches being added every week.
For a simple explanation of geocaching and locations of caches, visit...
http://www.geocaching.com
... and do a search for your area.
I don't know how much traffic you'll get, and even so, the ratio of work-to-traffic is outrageous, BUT as
the submitter says, "it's a fabulous way to have a little fun while you promote."
Add Book Reviews!
Here's a very clever idea that's so simple, it'll make you say, "Why didn't I think of that?"
1. Make a list of books that are relevant to your website's topics.
2. Review them and dedicate a whole page to each one.
3. Each page will be naturally "optimized" for the book title and the author, but make sure you add the
book title and the word "review" in your
Legitimate Way to Add Keywords To Your Site
This is yet another way to get a few more relevant keywords into your pages without cheating the
search engines, it's called the link title tag.
In IE, if you format a text web link this way, a small pop-up will appear when you hover over the it, in
much the way "alt text" will show up when you hover over an image.
To use, just format a textual link the way you normally would, then add the following before the "href":
title="whatever text you'd like, in quotes".
Here's an example:
< a title="Find out how I got every site I've ever
promoted in the top 100,000 in Alexa and/or in a
top 10 semi-popular keyword spot in under a month,
spending less than $3 a day."
href="http://www.freetrafficdirectory.com/ftd/index.php?trafficology" >
Must we pay for ALL Our Traffic?< /a >
I've used spaces after I open and close tags so you can follow along- delete those spaces when you use
it on your site!
I find the best place to use this is in the navigation section of your website and as a
bonus it can be helpful to your visitors as well by giving them a more detailed explanation of that link.
You can read more about its technical implementation here.
http://www3.bc.sympatico.ca/educatedweb/ge-dec28-99.htm
Submitted by: Tinu http://www.freetrafficdirectory.com
Find out why free traffic ISN'T a dead concept.
INVENT A WORD
This is a powerful twist to "branding" that really aps into the power of the internet. This has a lot of
potential... if you can make it work.
Come up with a word or phrase that describes a certain new thing that hasn't been properly articulated.
Then, buy the domain (or several domains) or even the trademark
related to that word or phrase.
Here's what I mean:
It is so much easier to discuss things when they've got a name. Can you imagine how difficult it would
be to talk about peer-to-peer, pay-per-click or 2-tier affiliate programs if those phrases didn't exist?
In the early days of "scumware", people tried to describe it in various ways: "software that puts other
people's links on your site" or "a PPC program that converts your text into outbound links without your
knowledge or control", etc. But as soon as the word "scumware" started being used, that became the
"de facto" term.
A Real Life Example:
A hot topic awhile back, and one we pushed to the fore-front several years ago was "stolen affiliate
commissions".
You can read more about this at:
http://www.NameStick.com/protect.html
Well, here at Nitro Marketing one of our first ventures into the "Internet Marketing" world (previously
we mainly focused on other niche markets) was a site called www.NameStick.com It allows you to
register a benefit focused domain name to forward to your affiliate links.
One of the benefits is when you recommend something you use your domain (that secretly forwards to
your affiliate link).
Since the actual affiliate link is hidden you end up with more sales because they are not "stolen" by
other affiliates as well as a general increase in sales.
Many people now say "NameStick It" when referring to hiding an affiliate link via domain forwarding.
We have done very little promotion of that site the past year, yet traffic and sales keep coming in day
after day by creating that "brand awareness".
LEASED ACCESS ON LOCAL CABLE
One of the biggest secrets in the marketing business is "leased access" on local cable television.
You've probably heard of "public access", where cable companies are required to give the public a
forum for various purposes, as long as they are not commercial purposes.
There's also "Government Access" and "Educational Access".
These are not provided by your cable company because they're such nice, generous people. They are
mandated by Federal Law.
And under Federal Law, local cable companies also have to set aside a channel for "leased access",
which allows anyone to come in and "rent" a cable channel for anywhere from 1/2 hour to 24 hours a
day.
You can do anything you want with this leased access time. You can re-sell it, you can run
commercials, do your own talk show, etc. As long as its not obscene, you legally have complete control
over the content.
Here's the amazing part - leased access is CHEAP!
The rate is federally mandated, based on number of subscribers. Half-hour blocks can be purchased for
as little as $25 in some markets, and even in huge markets like New York and Chicago, you can buy a
half-hour for $200 or so.
But almost NOBODY knows about leased access. Even television marketing pros.
If you're just starting out, the best thing to do would be to sell off half of your time to some advertisers
to recoup your expenses.
Most advertisers are used to paying $100 for 30 seconds. They'll be happy to pay you $100 for 15
minutes! (Or you can get 10 advertisers to pay you $10 and they each get 90 seconds.) The rest of the
time is yours to market yourself in any way you like.
When you approach your local cable company about leased access, they're going to try to sell you
advertising at their regular rates. They HATE leased access because they don't make much money on it.
But they are required by law to offer it, so don't let them bully you.
They try to get around their legal obligation by pretending they don't know what you're talking about,
or by requiring you to provide a unnecessarily complex insurance policy.
But if you're willing to follow through, you'll be amazed at how much television
air time you can buy for virtually nothing!
DISPOSABLE WEBSITES
Here's a unique idea that we've been toying with for awhile. Website owners seem to be reluctant to
promote other people's products and services, even when it's in their own best interest. Here's a way
around that... Create a new website with a real domain and with real hosting, but use it to sell what
you're already selling on your main site. Then you can approach reluctant would-be affiliates with this
offer - promote this new site for six months, and then after that time... they can have it! For six months,
you'll get the same traffic from this affiliate that you'd get if they were linking to your main site, but
since they know that they'll be owning this site within a few months themselves, they'll probably be
much more aggressive in promoting it than they would be ordinarily. I don't know anyone doing this,
so you'll be a complete guinea pig on this one, but I think it has potential!
WEBSITE URL AS USERNAME
When registering for affiliate programs, contests, etc. that ask for a login id I use my web site
"therapeuticchilddotca". I first started this when I started using ebay a short month ago. I would bid on
items and now I am getting hits without any 'referral' links attached. I have done no other marketing to
warrant this increase. I think it works so well on ebay because if you're into it, you always checking
on items of interest and seeing 'who is this person who has the highest bid'. If I got outbid by this
person, I would likely follow the link to see who does this person think they are. Submitted by: Ken
Trenholm, Founder http://www.therapeuticchilld.ca Free tools and techniques to help children
NEW CYBER CAFE IDEA
This idea has been submitted several times. The basic idea is to change the homepage of all the
computers at a cyber-cafe, library, or college computer lab to your site.
Where I live, there are not many cyber-cafes and I am not sure if people using a library or college
computer lab will pull out their credit card and make a purchase - but maybe you can find a way to
make this work.
Here is the idea as it was submitted:
--------------- Llewellin says:
Any city has many Internet cafes/icafes/cybercafes. One I know in Cape Town South Africa has 500600 people passing through per day. Some icafes have their own home page others do not have any.
One way of generating free traffic is to ask the owner (after you have become a regular customer of
course ;-) if you may make your website the default home page on a few or all computers. This is a
wonderful branding opportunity.
One of the new icafes that has opened up recently near my work has agreed to put a link to my page
with a short description on their homepage which has links to the most popular sites visited by
browsers like hotmail and yahoo.
This particular icafe will give me 500 x 30 computers = 15 000 page views for FREE per month.
If they are not willing to do it for free, you can negotiate a monthly fee that both parties find
acceptable. Now imagine doing it at every icafe in any city.
That could be 500 x 30 x # of icafes (say 10) = 150 000 per month x 12 = 1! 800 000 page views per
year!
Admittedly some views are repeat views but the repeat view creates BRANDING because of constant
exposure. With a CTR of 2% and a CVR of 3% that means 1080 unique sales of whatever it is that you
sell
Submitted by: Llewellin RG Jegels The Amazingly Simple Cutting Edge Internet Marketing Formula
that guarantees online success
--------------Now, here is a twist on that same theme. This week, we went into a mobile phone store.
We were amazed to find several phones on display that you can actually use to make a call, surf the
web and take pictures. I am not saying that the phone had the capability, I mean I could actually pick
up the phone that was sitting on the shelf and make a call, surf the web or take a picture.
Think about this, everyone who is using these display phones are people already looking to make a
purchase. Unlike library or computer lab users, they are ready, willing and able to spend money.
What if you could get in touch with them, or bring them to your website.
You can. Take advantage of these demo phones by programming your phone number, email address
and URL into all these phones.
Now when someone picks up the phone and looks in the address book, they will see your address with
a little blurb about your company. When they try to use the phone to access the Internet, your website
will appear. When they go to make a call your phone number will be programmed into auto-dial and
they will call you or your answering machine.
Also, for the phones that have built in cameras, take a picture of your logo, URL or business card. Then
when a mobile phone customer wants to checkout the phone's image gallery feature, they will be
exposed to your marketing message.
Also, people don't try just 1 phone. They try several of the different phone models. If you program your
information into every phone on display, the shear repetitiveness of seeing your website over and over
again is bound to build curiosity and create traffic.
THE MAGIC OF THE FISHBOWL
The submitter of this idea says...
"Here's a simple idea that I've employed at trade shows and other events where tables can be had, such
as at 'Business After Hours,' etc.
Along with your table display, put a bowl for business cards with a sign explaining that, by dropping in
a card, people can enter a drawing for a prize, and be signed up for a "free newsletter."
Lots of people will drop in their cards, especially if the prize is a physical object you display on the
table (Palm Pilots, Dilbert books, gift baskets, etc.)"
"After the event, subscribe everyone to your ezine, and make the first email you send out a nice one
thanking everyone for visiting your table and announcing the winner.
If you don't have an ezine, you can just send everybody a one-time email that begins with "Thank you
for visiting our booth. The lucky winner of the Widget is...."
Then, of course, you'd follow that up with an ad, preferably with some sort of consolation prize, like a
special discount or a free download from your site."
"This is a very low-tech tip, but you'd be surprised how many people who would NEVER give out their
email address online will turn into business-card-dropping freaks when you put a fishbowl in front of
them."
ANOTHER OFFLINE IDEA
There are several barriers to offline advertising for an online site.
#1 is that the client is seldom sitting at a computer when they see your ad and probably won't remember
it later. #2 is that the viewer cannot take the ad with them.
This idea goes a long way toward solving these problems:
The submitter says...
"We produced very basic ad copy to be put onto regular throwaway bar coasters and had them
produced in quantity.(You can get some great rates on these with production costs well under a cent
each.)
"The simpler the text, the better. We have successfully used things like 'Free Membership at
www.yourcompany.com'.
"For very little extra, you can also have the back side printed and make it fun like we did with a certain
client.
The top side said..."Don' t flip this over"
The bottom side said..."The bad news is that you don't take directions well. The good news is that we
like rebels. Get a FREE something at www.mycompany.com".
"Like every other company, beverage distributorships like to offer freebies to their client
establishments. Client establishments like to get freebies, especially of items that they use every day.
Patrons are intrigued by the ad and it is uniquely placed at a time when they are probably more carefree
and open to suggestion.
"They can take the coaster with them since the waiter will probably toss it anyway and the coaster is
small enough to fit into the pocket of a sports coat or handbag.
Even if the patron has forgotten the coaster or the message, guess where that patron is the next time
their hand slides into that coat pocket or pocketbook? Probably at work and in front of a computer."
CREATE TEMPLATES
Another quick way to generate traffic to your site is to develop a slightly-generic version of your own
site design and create some comments in the HTML so that people can easily adapt your design as a
template for their own site.
Also leave your logo in the template and write "change this to your own logo".
To get even more traffic for the site, place a graphic of a product that you are selling or a free ebook
that you are giving away and write underneath "change this with your own image".
Then link the image to an order page or to a free download of your book. Now, every time someone
downloaded the template to modify it for themselves, they will be tempted to download your ebook as
well.
Submit your template to www.freelayouts.com...and all the other template directories that get
MASSIVE TRAFFIC.
Apparently, template directories are quite popular now. To find more, just type "free website
templates" into your favorite search engine.
All you need is a good html design that can be easily customized.
Turn your Affiliate Program into "Commission Employment"
By re-characterizing your affiliate program as a "job" that pays on a commission basis, you can place
free ads at your local job centers. Nearly every state, county and municipal government on earth (it
seems) has a clearinghouse office (or website) for available jobs.
And by saying "No experience necessary" and "full training provided", you'll get your share of job
seekers who may decide to promote your site in exchange for a cut of sales.
This idea was submitted by a gentleman in the UK who had successfully used this idea to drive traffic
to his affiliate program.
"What you will find is that many people browse the local jobs section and will look up your url just
from curiosity," say the submitter.
"It's not extremely targeted but it is aimed at people looking for extra income, and several of them will
sign up for your program."
BEATING EBAY'S USERNAME RULES
Ebay no longer allows you to use a URL as your username, but here's an email from a Trafficologist
who has figured out how to beat this...
"Ebay no longer allows URLs as ID's but with a simple change, it's perfectly fine to get your domain
name out there.
"All you need to do is place an asterisk (*) in front and at the end of your URL and you have what the
ebay system thinks is NOT a URL. For example, your ID on ebay could be *www.trafficology.com*.
This would be perfectly "legal" and would get your URL seen by hundreds and even thousands of
people.
So how do you go about changing your ID? It's very simple. When on eBay, just click on "services"
and changing your user ID will be one of the options.
By the way, here's one more effective traffic tidbit. When listing any kind of auction, list your URL in
the location field instead of your city and state. You can put anything you like there so why not your
website URL. For that section you don't need asterisks.
This idea was submitted by Jay Villaverde of http://www.allnaturalalternatives.com Get back what
life takes out Put an end to stress, anxiety and weight problems
THE MAGIC OF FUNNY PICTURES
Aside from jokes, funny pictures and photos of funny signs are the most forwarded emails in America.
I receive one from family and friends almost daily.
If you were a boring clod, you'd grab a camera and drive around looking for something funny.
But since you're not, here's an even better idea... make your own!
With some stock photographs and a simple graphics program, like Paint Shop Pro, you can do a pretty
good job of creating say, a realistic-looking traffic sign. Anything funny or clever will get passed
around, so just keep thinking, "what kind of things would people forward to others?"
Once you're finished, add your URL to the picture.
The link would take them to a website that you created listing a bunch of funny pictures.
From this page, you could link to your "real" website.
You can be sure you'll get THOUSANDS of visitors.
CONSIDER DIFFERENT "FLAVORED" NEWSLETTERS
This idea was submitted by a man who has one primary marketing site, but who produces 4 distinctly
different newsletters for 4 different business niches.
Since you can recycle a lot of the same material, it gives you more bang for your buck.
Here's how it works...
On Mondays, he sends out "Container Marketing Tips" to his readership base involved in the beverage
container industry. Inside every newsletter are five tips, two of which are container-specific, the others
are general marketing advice.
On Tuesdays, his plastics-oriented customers receive "Plastics Marketing Tips", again - two plasticsspecific tips, the others general marketing advice. (Generally the same info dispensed to the container
crowd on Mondays.)
Wednesdays, his drink manufacturing customers receive "Beverage Marketing Tips", a mixture of the
previous days' marketing advice (again, including the common material).
Thursdays, his bottling plant customers receive "Bottler's Marketing Tips" - mostly the same as
Wednesday's content, but tweaked where necessary to relate to the bottlers' industry.
On Friday, he takes the day off.
The result: he builds a relationship with four completely different sectors, with highly-relevant
material. BUT - and here's the important part - he only has to come up with a handful of original
articles each week since he recycles the bulk of the material from the various newsletters!
I believe any newsletter would benefit from being segmented in this way. For example, I could spend
30 minutes a month and easily re-write these articles for the specialty food industry or the locksmith
industry. And people in these businesses (who would never subscribe to a newsletter called
"Trafficology") would probably subscribe to " Online Gourmet Marketing" or "Locksmith Promotion
News".
Is there any way YOU can benefit from a similar concept?
FREE PPC IDEA
Using Pay Per Click Listings For Free
Pay Per Click Search Engines are just like any other search engine except you have to pay for each
click someone makes to get to your site.
To use them for free deposit the minimum required, then only bid .01 on the keywords related to your
site that cost much more for top positions.
What this will do is list you in their massive database but due to the fact your listing is so far down the
list, nobody will ever click through to your site. If they do click on your ad, it will only costs you .01.
How Does This Help?
Many free search engines use the Pay Per Click Data Bases to improve the quality of their own search
results. The settings I use get me about 1 months advertising for $25 resulting in a 10% increase of web
traffic.
Your results will vary based on whether you want to try and ride it for completely free or use a small
advertising budget as I do.
The PayPerClick search engines that gives me the best results is Findwhat.com .
It only costs $25 to get started. The FindWhat.com Network is comprised of hundreds of high quality,
high traffic destination websites and search engines like: CNET's
Search.com, Excite, Webcrawler, MetaCrawler and Dogpile,
So just by being listed in Findwhat you also get listed with these search engines through database
sharing. I have not tried other PPC listings as it does require a deposit and most want $100 up front.
Submitted By: Glenn Madden - American TradUR Company http://www.tradur.com Internet Business
How To Start Guide
Adver-Games
Computer & Video Games are big business. In fact, some recent reports have said that the video
gaming industry is now larger than the movie industry.
Plain & simple... people like to play games and are willing to pay for it.
One idea that is used by one of the online travel sites, Orbits, has been to include games in their popup
ads... especially on their ESPN.com ads. They have a flash version of
Dunk-the-Dummy, Miniature Golf, Homerun Derby, or Longest Drive games.
This works because they combine the natural sporting tendency of their audience with uniquely
designed ads for plane tickets, hotels and rental cars.
In one case they have a 3-hole mini-golf course, with one hole shaped like a plane, the next whole
shaped like a hotel and the last hole shaped like a car.
While very interesting, I did not find it relevant until I received this tip from Sandra Jackson regarding
"Advergames".
She claims that having an online golfing game, has “brought over 25,00 players a day to my site".
Not sure if that was 2,500 or 25,000... but it's a good number of visitors in either case.
The key here is the site that had the Golfing game also sold Golfing related products... so the people
coming to play golf online were good prospects for the products the site sold.
Also, the longer a visitors stayed on the site playing golf the more products the site was to able
advertise. More exposures translates into a higher likely hood that the site will display a product the
visitor may be interested in ...and the longer a visitor stays on a site, the more likely it is they will come
back to the site in the future.
Not all businesses can easily combine a game that is related to the topic of their site, but you can adapt
traditional games such as hang-man to use words relating to your subject.
In addition to advertising your own products, you can also use the Google AdSense program to increase
the revenue generated from game generated traffic.
You can find a few cool games to offer on your site for free at:
http://games.trafficologyresources.com
AdWords Images
Using Images In Google Adwords:
As you learned in the free Trafficology eCourse PPC is the cheapest, best-quality traffic you can get.
In fact, if you take the time to learn PPC your visitors will actually pay you to use it.
Google has just made PPC Advertising even more powerful.
They now support images with your PPC text advertising at no extra charge!
It's just like having a banner advertisement without paying a site owner banner ad rates. To help you
take advantage of this great new opportunity, long time Trafficology reader and professional Internet
Marketer Laura Childs answers our questions and gives a few tips about how to use images to make
your Google AdWords campaign more successful:
How does it work?
Image ads are served up in the same manner, targeting the same keywords, as your normal Google
Adwords campaign. You are responsible for creating the graphical ads yourself in one or all four
different sizes: leaderboard, banner, inline rectangle and skyscraper.
Which Size Should We Use? Current market tests reveal skyscraper ads are working best right now.
Why?
Well, people just don't seem to notice banner-sized ads anymore, and inline rectangles and leaderboards
aren't widely used by webmasters.
How do You Create Image Ads?
If you've used banner ads on sites other than your own, you'd create a Google Image ad in the same
manner. Images must be in .jpg, .gif, or .png format in the following sizes: Banner (468 x 60),
Leaderboard (728 x 90), Inline Rectangle (300 x 250), and Skyscraper (120 x 600).
Your top two criteria in creating a Google Image Ad is to get noticed and to entice the click (i.e, put
some text on your image ad that says click here, visit now, etc.).
How Effective Are Google Adwords Image Ads? I have been using Image Ads for the past 3 weeks
and have noticed no difference in conversion or click through. To be honest, my images are displayed
only 1% as often as my text ads. I'm certain however that the reason for this is due to the newness of
the program. Webmasters using Google AdSense haven't yet discovered the option of displaying
image-based advertising on their sites using Google. Once this program becomes more popular with
site publishers I believe it will greatly increase clicks and conversion.
When Should We Get Started? Even though the program is new and your image ads may not be
displayed as often as your text ads, I still suggest you start using image ads whenever possible. As
we've seen with banner-sized advertisements losing their effectiveness with internet readers, such will
come the day when people barely notice Google text ads on a website. Using an image ad (where
people expect to see a text ad) gets your advertised noticed - read - clicked - and we all know what that
means....SALES!
Read more about Google Adwords Image Ads here: https://adwords.google.com/select/imageads.html
(Adwords Image Ads is currently in beta-test phase.)
Check it out by:
1) Logging into your google adwords account
2) In the campaign management screen you'll see a NEW button (green arrow)
3) Just follow the prompts to create your image ad... three size formats are currently supported.
Laura Childs http://www.smartzville.com Niche Marketing for Newbies A simple step by step
approach... stop in today
After Hours Customer Service
Banks found that providing ATM Machines enabled them to improve their service.
Customers can now perform several banking tasks themselves at more convenient locations, 24-hours a
day. In fact, many people would rather use an ATM instead of a bank teller.
Now, the obvious equivalent of an ATM for most businesses is a Kiosk that features their website. This
would certainly create more quality web traffic, and would definitely improve customer service... but
most businesses probably don’t want to send the money to set this up.
One way the cost is to partner with one of the companies that put Kiosk’s in malls, and share a Kiosk
with several companies. I have done this successfully, especially with gift certificates...but if you think
a little creatively... there are a few better options.
1) Place a couple computers at your location that are specifically for customers who want to order from
your website. This is especially effective for catalog companies or companies that do not have a sales
floor for all their products.
For example, a small jewelry store may have a few pieces on display... but have a much larger selection
in their catalog or online. If you have a comfortable computer desk and chair where customers can
search your site online... you will be able to convert more customers both online and offline. Now you
will be able to show customers more of your products and will be able to answer any of their questions
in person.
This is also effective for anyone that provides custom products, multi-part kits or special product
options. And remember, many times what you are really trying to do with your website is help the
customer and get their contact information.
An example of custom products would be a small contractor or a caterer. They usually do not have a
large sales floor or a professional sales force. They can easily use their website to walk prospective
customers through the sales process and help them pick out the options they are interested in.
Yes, most customers will call and can be referred to their website over the phone... but they will also
have "walk-ins" and usually are not able to show their full product line on the spot.
By providing access to their website, they will help build a stronger connection with the visitor and will
have a better chance of winning that person as a customer...as well as find out exactly what they want
and collect their contact information.
Now you can be proactive and follow up with them... this is much better than just giving someone a
business card and hoping the find their way back to you in the future.
A good example of using your website to sell special options is a catalog or clothing retailer. Many
times we have gone into stores such as the GAP or Abercrombie and found that they do not carry
"Long" jeans. Then we are often referred to their website... but finding what we want has been a
complete hassle... resulting in many returns.
If they just had a computer connected to their website in the store we could easily log in...find what we
are looking for... and ask for help if we needed it. Then we would be able to order exactly what we
want.
But, they don't have a computer there, so instead we don't get the jeans we really want... and they lose
an easy online sale.
OK, letting people access your website in your store is a good way to drive traffic to your website
during the day... but what about after hours?? You can't leave your computer outside.
No... but with a little imagination... you can take advantage of both old and new technologies to provide
ATM like service 24-hours a day.
Think about this... have you stopped at a restaurant and found that they were closed? Every time that I
have, I have always noticed a copy of their menu in a frame or in the window.
Any business could easily print out their website and post it in the window for people to read (unless
you have 200 products). This would give people after hours access to information about your company,
FAQ and even a listing of the products you sell online.
Ok...so they can read the website ... but what good does that do.
Well, first of all... it provides the prospective customer with more info about your company. Secondly,
it gives them access to the FAQ. Third, now they can "Window Shop" your website and will have a
reason to visit your site when they get home.
But... if that was the extent of the idea I would not have published it.
Here are 2 ways to quickly improve it.
1) Turn your site into a PowerPoint presentation. 2) Enable customers to order the product on the spot.
First... have you ever seen a TV posted in the window of a store? I bet it caught your attention. Just the
fact that it was bright and moving probably made you stare for a couple moments.
Seriously... some businesses use neon lights to stick out. If you create a PowerPoint Presentation of
your website and post it using a computer monitor in the front window of your office... you will be sure
to get the attention of a couple people passing by.
(Of course this will work best for businesses who have a storefront ... if you have a office on the 54th
floor this may not work as well... but if you get people trying to visit your office after hours, then you
still may be able to make it work.)
Second... it seems that everyone now-a-days has a mobile phone and is addicted to text messaging
(SMS). If you combine the power of mobile phones, text messaging and the wireless web, you easily
can create a ATM like 24-hour self-service system.
There is so much opportunity here, and so much we still have to learn about mobile e-commerce, but
here are a few simple ways that you can complete the transaction.
1) On the website display special text message addresses for each product.
Then, when someone finds a product they want to purchase, just have them send a text message to the
special address for that product. Since their text message "from address" is the same as their mobile
phone number have an autoresponder send a confirmation text message, and tell the customer that
someone will call to collect payment information during normal working hours.
2) Create a special wireless web version of your website order form.
The customer will look at the print-out or PowerPoint Presentation of your website in the window or
your store. Then, they will just enter the SKU number and payment info into your wireless order form
using their mobile phone.
3) I don't know how soon this will become a reality, but a few wireless providers let customers use
their mobile phone like a credit card. Purchases are authorized with your phone and the charges are
automatically added to your phone bill.
This ideal solution is often referred to as "micropayments".
Micropayments are a reality outside of the US... but my research was unable to find an easy way for
website’s to offer their customers a micropayments option such as icePay, T-Moble’s Simpay or
Cingular’s Direct Bill.
I am not a m-commerce or micropayments expert - but if you have good info on how they work, be
sure to pass it along. This is definitely the future... just how far in the future is anyone’s guess.
The Loss Leader
One basic concept offline businesses use to get more people to visit their store is called the "Loss
Leader". A loss leader is a product that is being sold at a price less than cost - for the sole purpose of
drawing more visitors into the store.
Yes, you may be losing money on that product, but if it "leads" people to the store... and they purchase
other products too... then you actually come out ahead.
For example, this week your local Supermarket is selling a 2-Liter bottle of Coke for only 99 cents.
And, next week they will be selling 2-Liters of Pepsi for 99 cents. Almost every supermarket sells soda
much cheaper than you can buy it at any gas station.
The point is, people do not just purchase soda... they also purchase chips, dip and other snack items...
and since people have such a preference for either Coke or Pepsi... it is a good way to lour people away
from other grocery stores.
Therefore, it is worth taking a slight loss on soda, if the result is more business in the future.
This concept can very easily be adapted to bring highly qualified traffic to your website.
First, the obvious example is to reduce the price of a popular product that you have a lot of competition
for. This will enable you to gain the business of a price conscious customer and then try to upsell them.
Additionally, you will also have the opportunity to build a long term relationship with that new
customer and earn that difference back over the many other products that they purchase from you.
But, if you use a little imagination, you can find a few more very effective ways to use the "Loss
Leader" concept.
For example, one local Maple Syrup producer has an agreement with a Country Inn / Bed & Breakfast.
The Maple Syrup producer provides Pure Vermont Maple Syrup at a very reasonable rate and the Inn
places a free Pint of Maple Syrup & a Maple Syrup Flyer on the pillow of each guest (instead of a
Mint). Both the pint container and the flyer have a sticker with a website coupon code.
The Maple Syrup Company takes a loss on the syrup it provides to the Inn, but they easily recapture
what ever was lost with the new sale it creates on their website.
Another example using a loss leader to get create more traffic and complete more sales is to offer free
shipping. The key here is to know your current "Average Order Size" and then offer Free Shipping if
someone orders more than a specified mark-up above that level.
No one has done a better job of this than Amazon.com... who offers free shipping on all orders over
$25.
They determined the average order size was around $21. By requiring customers to purchase more than
$25 dollars to get free shipping, they make you purchase another book. Now your order total would
average somewhere around $34.
Therefore Amazon collects 13 dollars they would not of had before... just for paying the $4-$5 shipping
cost.
So, it is obvious how this tactic can make you more profit... but how does it create more traffic?
Well, I have found that many online shoppers like to "bargain hunt". And they are especially receptive
to a product with free shipping. Therefore, when trying to decide which website to buy from, if the
product is similar... most customers are willing to pay a little more if they don’t have to pay for
shipping.
In one case of this principle in action... our average order size was 4 items that cost $4 each for a total
of $16 in sales, plus $3.20 in shipping.
By changing the price to $5 each and offering free shipping for all orders of 5 or more... we had a 26%
increase in the number of sales... and also raised our average orders to 6 pieces @ $5 each for a total of
$30 per order (minus $3.65 shipping).
By taking a loss on the shipping, we more than doubled our profits, had more orders (even with higher
prices) and hit a new record for monthly sales - all during what was traditionally the slowest time of the
year.
Local Traffic
Many businesses struggle to drive traffic to their website because their business is limited to a specific
geographic market. This is especially true for professional service providers such as doctors, dentists
and lawyers.
Doctors and Dentists traditionally need to see a patient in their office, and a Lawyer is limited legally to
states where they have passed the Bar Exam. Location also limits other businesses that cannot easily
ship their product such as grocery stores or restaurants.
"Expand Your Horizons"
The best way for these companies to increase web traffic and web sales is to add new products or
services that can be easily sold online and shipped to a customer who is not in your local market. This
resolves the problem of a limited online customer base.
For example: Doctors can create & sell ebooks and information products relating to their medical
specialty. Doctors can also sell non-prescription health related items such as vitamins, braces or even
alternative health items. For Dentists they can sell tooth whitening kits and special tooth cleaning
devices.
This may seen more of a challenge for restaurants, but they can sell recipe books and packaged version
of their house specialty. As for Grocery Stores - a few large chains have had success with online
grocery services... but even the hometown mom and pop can get into the act by adding to there website
such things as wine or locally produced specialty foods.
They key here is use some imagination... and use your knowledge or unique circumstances to improve
your web sales.
Big Fish - Small Market
Be the Big Fish in a Small Market
Another way to approach local traffic is to take advantage of the fact that you are a local company.
Most people have a connection to their hometown and want to purchase products from locally owned
companies...even online.
Combine that with the fact that in most city’s, hardly anyone is targeting the "local" market... and you
have a interesting online opportunity.
Yes... you should include your city and state as keywords for your SEO process. If there is enough
traffic, I would even set up special pages of my site talking about the local area and any special events
that your community holds. But... that is not where the real traffic is.
The real way to be a Big Fish in a Small Market is to target people in your area who are looking for
what you sell - but are not using the city or state in their search explicitly.
For example, if you are a Lawyer from Cleveland, you want people to find you who are in Cleveland
and have a legal problem, but are not using the term Cleveland in their search.
For example Bankruptcy; when someone is first thinking about filing for Bankruptcy, they are just
searching for information... not necessarily for a lawyer. Their online search will be for "Filing
Bankruptcy", not "Filing Bankruptcy Cleveland"
If you have a website that provides information specifically about Bankruptcy in Cleveland... and if
people can find your site without using the word Cleveland... then you will have many more people
from Cleveland visiting your website... and contacting you for an appointment.
The same thing goes for Dentist, Mechanics, Barbers, Masseuses, Restaurants. This would be a
bonanza for practically any business that requires people to visit your location... or business that require
you have to go to the clients location.
The problem with this is that 85% of all web traffic comes through one of the major search engines.
How can someone from Cleveland find your website about bankruptcy in Cleveland when they just
search for the term "Bankruptcy"?
Until recently, the only way that was going to happen was if you had a top 10 ranking for the term
"Bankruptcy"... and with over 8.7 Million other sites about bankruptcy... that was not an easy task.
Theoretically, you could have used PPC - but you would be paying for a lot of clicks for people who
are not in your area and therefore could never be your clients.
Now, Google has created a solution to this problem. Google AdWords, their PPC program, just started
to let you show your ad only to people in your city, state or region.
You still have to bid the same as someone who is advertising nationally, but you will have a much
higher click thru rate...and because of Google’s relevancy multiplier, you will pay less and have a
higher position.
Then think about the fact that you will not be paying for as many bad clicks and also the fact that local
visitors will result in a much higher conversion rate.
The result is a great way to turn local searches into your online customers.
In addition to Google - here are a few more ways to get local traffic
1) Get your site listed in all the local "portal sites" 2) Purchase ads on the local newspaper’s website 3)
Purchase ads from the local ISP’s
BTW - You don't have to be a doctor or a lawyer to use location specific AdWords. Just think about
how even bookstores and clothing stores can use this to compete with and triumph over online giants
such as amazon.com.
Sponsor a Petition
One way to support a cause you believe in and get more traffic to your website is to support a petition
or a charity.
While at first this will drive local traffic to your site, if done correctly it could be the start of an
effective viral marketing campaign...especially if you sponsor a cause that people are extremely
passionate about.
For this to work properly, you need to consider 2 factors: (1) How to get the petition started; and (2)
How to keep it rolling...(get people to pass it on)
The best way to get started is to approach a group that already has a cause and is already spreading
petitions. Offer to sponsor the petition and put up a page on your site where people can get more
information about the cause.
For about 9 bucks you can register a catchy, topic specific URL and have that re-directed to a page on
your site. Include things on the site such as a simple explanation of what the cause is, why people
should support it and how to get more involved. Also, make sure to provide contact information for the
people in charge.
(And don’t forget to sign your name at the top of the petition... including your website URL. For
maximum effect, write your URL with a bold, red, felt-tip pen. )
For example, I know a State Senator who has made his whole career by doing a door-to-door survey
every year. He and his volunteers go to every house in the county, ask their 5 questions and leave a
flyer.
This is the perfect opportunity for someone to sponsor his survey and get more traffic to their website. I
suspect the Senator already has a website... but I am sure you can find other groups who are not online.
If you don’t know of a group that is already spreading petitions, then you can start one yourself.
1) Pick a topic that people in your area are very passionate about or a group that already has many
active members.
2) Register a URL and put up a page on your site about the topic
3) Create a Petition using MS Word (don’t forget to include the URL)
4) Pass it around to relatives, friends and businesses that support your cause.
Now that you have your petition started, you need to think about how to keep it going:
First, if you don’t already have a group of supporters, you need to start there. Get as many people as
possible passing out the petition and related handouts. Also, make posters with your URL written on
tabs that people can rip-off and take home with them.
Next, make a website that offers a clear and compelling case for your side... the key is to make you site
so good that people will want to tell everyone they know about it.
Lastly, encourage people to pass on your message with a Tell-a-Friend script.
Obviously... sponsoring a cause that has a large and active base who goes door-to-door would help
spread the word about your site very quickly... but there are other ways to make this successful. You
will benefit from any cause that does telemarketing, direct mailing or even holds public gatherings. If
the group is passionate about their cause, they will find a way to spread their message ... and your URL
if you are helping them.
Here are a few more thoughts on how to make your petition successful.
If there are a lot of supporters and opponents... sponsor both sides of the debate.
Make your site compelling: add audio clips to create a virtual online debate; have a side-by-side
comparison table of the major issues; create a real-time counter of petition signatures; make your site
interactive & give visitors a voice with a forum, a chat, audio testimonials...you could even have a
couple online polls.
But... what ever you do... don’t forget the "tell a friend" script... that is what will really help your site
and your cause gain online supporters.
Use another viral tool... Set up email addresses for supporters of the cause with a signature file that
directs people to your site and thanks you for the support. You may even want to consider passing out
free email accounts using one of the services we talked about in a previous tip.
Also, think seriously about creating a mailing list and using an auto-responder to periodically keep in
touch with other supporters. Smoothly inter-weave your URL or things about your business into the
messages supporting the cause. This is a very good way to create traffic over longer periods of time.
OK, I got people to my site... but how do I convert them into customers?
Obviously, this is most effective if the petition is somehow related to your product or service. For
example, if the cause is about saving a 100-year-old Maple Tree and you sell Maple Syrup or Maple
Sugar Candy... then there is a natural connection and conversion is easy. Just place a couple links down
the left side of the page or on the bottom and you will be certain to create sales.
But even if your site has nothing to do with the cause... you can easily expand your product line to
offer related merchandise and donate a portion of the profits to the group.
For example, if the cause is about saving Sing-Sing the Giant Panda... then you can sell "Save SingSing" hats, "Save Sing-Sing" mugs...and yes, "Save Sing-Sing" stuffed animals. The key is to make the
products "giftable" and connect the purchase with supporting the cause (by donating a portion of the
profits).
People who believe in the cause and visit the site will appreciate your support. They will be inclined to
find more about your company (some out of curiosity and some because they feel "a connection"). If
they have need for your product or services, they will be more likely to make a purchase because of
that "connection".
Finally, you could always make a few bucks by selling advertising space to other people who want to
support the cause (don’t forget to say something about the ad-space on the petition & flyers).
FREE PPC TRAFFIC
One of the best sources of highly targeted web traffic is pay per click search engines.
I have made the case of why you should be using pay-per-click and how pay-per-click turns your web
traffic from an expense into an investment... with a return much better than real estate or the stock
market.
I normally recommend people start with Google and Overture, these are the major PPC Search engines
that any serious web traffic investor should be using.
But the fact is there are over 2000 PPC Search Engines with many of these focusing on very specific
niche markets.
In previous tips we discussed how to get free traffic from the PPC Search Engines. Now, Joerg
Wichmann reports that you can get free PPC traffic at the meta search engine Multimeta
(http://www.multimeta.com/).
He goes on to explain that they will double the amount that you pay for their PPC listings. The
minimum bid at multimeta.com is $0.01 per click, which means that you can get traffic for $0.005 per
click.
Compare that to the $0.05 that you will pay at Google or Overture and you can get 10 times the traffic
for the same price.
True, I prefer the tools and volume of traffic from Google & Overture better... but after you have
started using them maybe you should take a moment to check out multimeta.com.
Beer Traffic ???
We have often shared ideas about offline advertising and we have also discussed the benefit of Joint
Ventures... but it is not often when both these concepts combine.
Here is a tip for getting more traffic and building public awareness of your domain for the users who
are running a general purpose portal and need a lot of local traffic in order to survive (like classified
website or city specific portals).
1) Go visit a restaurant or pub in your locality and ask them how many coffee / beer cups they
require per month.
2) Tell them you will give cups to them for free but it has to have your domain or logo on it. If
they don't agree add some free advertisement for them on your website to make the offer
irresistible.
3) If you get the deal - Bingo ! Now you will get hundreds of people sipping coffee and getting to
know about your domain. Soon you will start getting more traffic.
4) Call these owners frequently to ask if they need more cups. Don't hesitate to send the
replacements.
Idea Submit By: Mukul Gupta http://www.eurbanz.com Custom Web Design for Small Business Fast,
Effective and Affordable Web Design
eBook Raffle
One of the best techniques for building a highly targeted emails list is what Alex Mandossian calls
"The Ethical Bribe".
The basic idea is that people are afraid of spam and to encourage visitors to give you their email
address you must first give them something of value.
This Principle of Reciprocity was made famous by Dale Carnegie and Robert Cialdini. They explain
that in order to get what you want, you need to make the other person want to give you what they have.
To do this, you give the other person something of value first.
Then, they will feel obligated to give you something of value in return.
In practice this principle translates into the technique of offering a free report or a free eBook to a
visitor in exchange for their email address.
And, since they want your free report you know they are interested in the topic of your site... which
means they are very good prospects for your product or service.
You are able to convert the traffic into paying customers because have their email address and are able
to follow up with them... send them offers based on their specific interests.
Trafficology reader Jeff of Mastainc.com has a new twist on the "Ethical Bribe"
-------------------------------------------------When a visitor subscribes to my newsletter by giving me their name and email, I will give them a free b
e-book and a raffle ticket for a weekly drawing.
The prizes include pens, mouse pads, T-shirts and other merchandise with my company's logo on it.
Or I could raffle off e-books.
The idea is to get the visitor to subscribe to the newsletter and get him to keep coming back to my site.
Jeff of Mastainc.com http://www.mastainc.com/ Mastainc.com is a new site about investing money.
There are many banner and text ads available.
-------------------------------------------------Jeff's method of combining the raffle with the free eBook is an excellent idea.
With the prevalence of sites using the " Ethical Bribe" it is important to find new ways to adapt tried
and true techniques. Not only does Jeff's offer stand out and place his site above that of his competitors,
but he also has a great way to draw customer back to his site.
One of the keys to successful online business is the building a trust based relationship or a "bond". The
more a potential customer visits your site the more familiar they become with your name and the more
comfortable they become with your company... which will mean more repeat customers for you.
One things I would recommend is to tie the product being raffled back to the original topic of the site.
You have done well by building highly targeted email list by using an eBook that will appeal to a
specific group of people, keep the momentum going by providing a prize that will be considered truly
useful to the contestants in a raffle.
Sure, a T-Shirt or a Mouse Pad is fine... but people will more likely to come back to your site if you use
a custom built software program a more advanced eBook or a physical product that will complement
the topic of your site. You can still place your URL on the prize, but now the prize will have a higher
received value therefore people will be more eager to sign up for the raffle and come back to see if they
won.
(NOTE: If you use a digital product you can give many more copies of the product than if you use a
physical product. You can easily have someone from eLance make a custom program or you can write
a special report on your topic... and now you can be sure everyone is a winner!)
NASCAR Web Traffic
Bill Writes: I was at the races last week and realized that the NASCAR is one of the most popular
sporting events. I had never been to race before but was given tickets to a NEXTEL Cup race in New
Hampshire last week.
Three things struck me:
1) The tickets were more than $100 Each
I had never realized that going to the races was so expensive. In addition to purchasing tickets fans also
have to pay for meals, lodging and travel costs.
2) There were a lot of people there… I mean a real lot of people.
One of my friends that follows NASCAR said most races have 100's of Thousands of people in
attendance… and some of the major events have over 1 million fans at the race.
3) The fans have a lot of gadgets
Radios, Scanners, Cell Phones, PDA's, Handheld TV's & Laptops… these people are "wired"…or
maybe I should say "wired-less".
Put those three things together and you have a lot of people with a significant amount of disposable
income that can be easily reached….and that is just the people at the race (never mind the people
watching on TV or following the race results in various sports websites).
Not only is this potentially a good niche market… but since fans know drivers by their sponsor as much
as by their name or number… then this also provides a great advertising opportunity.
Now I realize that sponsoring a NEXTEL Cup racecar is well beyond the budget of most websites, but
there are a whole group of local & regional racing series. A website could easily sponsor one of those
cars, build immediate brand recognition and connect with this fastest growing segment of sporting fans.
Bill Wright Get More Web Traffic Now! I actually grew up not far from a very popular regional
racetrack myself. Ironically, they call themselves "The Nation's Site of Excitement".
Initially, I thought this idea had potential. It seemed logical that placing your URL across the hood of a
local racecar could be a good investment and generate a fair amount of web traffic.
But, then I started researching the idea and discovered the facts.
Racers sell Full or Partial sponsorships.
A full sponsorship guarantees your name is the only ad on the car and costs approx $40,000-$60,000
per season.
For partial sponsorships you can have your URL on a fender, a quarter panel, the hood, or the back of a
car. Each of those spots costs between $10,000-$20,000 per season.
Never mind how much exposure you can get or how much web traffic it could generate…there are
much better ways to spend that amount of money.
But, if you have your mind set on sponsoring something… then maybe you should try sponsoring a city
bus or a taxi cab. Prices will vary from city-to-city, but I found where I live it costs about $100 per
month for a "Taxi-Top" or a "City Bus Banner".
In fact, if you get creative you may be able to get something cheaper. For example, I talked to a taxi
cab that has an ad for the local car wash. They worded out a deal. The carwash gets an ad and the taxi
gets 1 free carwash a day.
Another thing that people may not have thought of is in-car ads. I am sure everyone has seen the new
trend of placing ads in public bathrooms. You could easily put something similar in a taxi or in a bus.
This can either be in the form of a flyer on the wall or take the idea 1 step further and have the taxi or
rental car give each client one of your flyers when the get in the car (that way the have something to
read while sitting in traffic… and they can take it with them).
Lastly… don't think that you have to sponsor a vehicle. Remember that carwash I just mentioned…
they do special charity carwashes every weekend (as fund raisers for Boy Scouts and things like that).
Anyone could team-up with the carwash company, make a tax-deducible donation to that weekend's
charity and be considered the "sponsor" for that weeks carwash.
Then every car wash customer will receive a flyer with your marketing info on it…or you could just
pass out business cards.
I agree that regional racing seemed like a great advertising opportunity… but I recommend you spend
your marketing budget elsewhere.
If you can't beat'em…. Join Dmoz
When working on SEO, you need to consider both Search Engines and Directories.
Search Engines are automated programs that go out and find sites and links automatically. An example
of a search engine is Google.com
Directories are sites where humans physically review sites that are submit to them or go out and find
sites to add to the directory. An example of a directory is DMOZ.org
The main difference in directories and search engines is the quality of the results. Before Google
developed the PR, it was generally accepted that directories were superior to pure search engines. That
is because directories contained far fewer websites…because they only contain websites that a real
person judged to be relevant to the topic.
Anyway… DMOZ.org is unique because it relies on volunteers to be editors… and just about anyone
who has a legitimate expertise in any topic can be an editor. All you have to do is find a category that
needs an editor and volunteer to take charge of (or help out with) that category.
Every SEO expert wishes they could be on the inside of a major Search Engine like Google. While that
is not likely to happen anytime soon, you can gain creditability and PageRank by becoming a dmoz.org
editor.
Every editor gets links to their own home page from dmoz.org
Also, now that you are an editor you can add that to your bio or article resource box. Being recognized
as the expert on that topic by a major directory will give you instant respect and your articles more
creditability with your readers. Remember one of the keys to online sales is trust. Your online
customers must know, like and trust you…before they will make a purchase.
Another way that you can use this to your advantage is to keep an eye on your competition. Since you
will be reviewing the sites that are submit in your category, you will know immediately what other
people in the marketplace are doing.
Lastly, how about building some strategic partnerships. Since you are reviewing a topic that you are
already knowledgeable in, you can find sites that complement yours. Add them to the Dmoz directory,
contact the webmaster and workout a separate advertising JV.
Sponsor a Highway
Sponsor a section of highway and a clean up the litter on a 1-mile strip of highway (or have it cleaned...
teenagers are good for this!).
1st: You get your name displayed on the signs showing you sponsor the highway. I recommend that
you use your URL for the company name on the sign!
2nd. When you are actually out there cleaning up, wear t-shirts or sweatshirts with your URL in big
letters :) You might have to put your URL on the Orange Safety Vests instead or in addition to your
shirts/hats.
3rd: Have the plastic garbage bags printed with your web URL (Or use stickers on regular bags) and
face the URL towards the road so drivers and passengers can read them as they go by. They will sit
there for several days until the highway department comes by and picks them up!
There are probably a couple of other ways to take advantage of this method, but I thought this would be
good to help the environment and advertise at the same time.
Make sure to be careful on the side of the road too!
Teri Mramer http://epublishing-seminars.com Learn Ebook and Ezine Publishing Live Free
Teleclasses held biweekly. Sign Up Now!
Ragged Ann & the Bat Van
Here is a cleaver home-made “Vehicle Adverting” idea from Christine.
Christine Sends:
I own an old 89 ford van. Recently, I decided to use it as a moving billboard.
My website is a folk art site, and I am the primary artist...so I decided to paint the billboard myself. I
painted the side of this huge, ugly van with bright, vivid colors to attract attention, and painted the url
of my website in bright yellow.
I gave it the feeling of a "sewn in" look (it's primitive art) and painted a huge "Raggedy Ann" doll and
various patches with sewing marks.
I live in Long Island, and it's crowded on the highways. The smiling "Raggedy Ann" grabs everyone's
attention, and they have no choice but to look over and see the url.
It's worked very well. It has even started conversations with strangers in parking lots, and
I've met several people this way who have ties to the industry I'm trying to get into.
And my favorite part of it is, it makes everyone smile!
Christine Corsa http://www.dollmakerscloset.com Primitive Folk Art Dolls & Custom Holiday Gifts
Don't wait to order for Christmas!
It was actually a bit ironic that Christine sent in this idea, because I was working on a tip very similar
to this one. Earlier this month Amy and I were sitting in traffic and had a close encounter with the "Bat
Van".
No - not that "Bat Van"... this was a large brown Ford Van covered in sticker that explaining the details
of the 9 different types of bat species that inhabit our town.
This brought to our attention two interesting thoughts:
1) Vehicle Advertising does not have to be just your URL. In fact, it does not even have to be as basic
as billboard advertising. You can in fact communicate ideas and create curiosity with the words you
print on the side of a van... and that will drive many more targeted people to your site than a simple
bumper sticker or just your name, number and URL.
2) Since I was not able to finish reading the info about all 9 species of bats, curiosity has been created,
but since the van did not have a URL I have no way of finding the answer. In fact, I have no idea what
the Bat Van was advertising except for Bats.
Now, I don't care about bats at all... but on my way home just the other day I saw the Van going the
other direction. Since the curiosity had been activated, I was actually tempted to turn around and follow
the van... just to see what the rest of the van said (and to get a picture of the "Bat Van" for you). I did
not turn around, of course...but just then I did think that he could turn his info about bat's into a 9 part
mini-course...
Instead of just putting your URL on your Vehicle, you may want to consider also including an
autoresponder email address...that way you can create your own list and continue to follow up with
them.
The Cardboard Windshield
Here is an amazingly simple idea that everyone can do in only a few minutes:
Kathie Says:
I covered a cardboard windshield sunscreen with white paper, then stenciled
"FREE COLORING BOOK" on it with colored ink.
At the bottom put my URL in black ink.
Now every time I park in a store parking lot I make sure to face the driveway so everyone coming and
going sees my "billboard".
Kathie Freeman http://www.catbook.biz Catwalk, A Feline Odyssey The (second) best cat book you'll
ever read.
This ideas is not only easy, but it is also good marketing. Instead of just using her URL, Kathie
provides an attention catching benefit.
All you have to do is use the headline from your website or you could also try using an offer for your
free newsletter or eCourse.
One thing I would recommend is, try to tie the attention catching benefit to the product or service that
you sell.
For example, if you sell Coloring Books, then "Free Coloring Books" will work... but if you sell cat
related merchandise, then you may want to try "Free Cat Coloring Book".
Another option you may want to consider is writing a headline that will create curiosity (related to your
product) ...and can only be answered by visiting your website. This will not only grab their attention,
but will also encourage them to visit your site.
How to Force Your Visitors To Order Immediately
This may comes as a surprise to you but, if you're using popups on your website (which you should),
then chances are you're using them all wrong.
Almost everybody is.
Did you know, for example, that top marketers are using HIDDEN techniques that make any given
popup VASTLY more effective on their sites than the VERY SAME popup could be on yours!
In fact, Stephen Pierce has actually admitted that one of these hidden popup techniques increased his
profits by a whopping 50%!
Here's how that technique works...
Let's say Joe Bloggs has visited your site but has decided (for whatever reason) not to order just yet. He
closes his browser (or clicks to another site) and then BAM!
Up jumps a window that makes Joe a special offer he just CAN'T refuse. On top of that, Joe has only
got x number of minutes to make up his mind. There's a countdown happening right before his eyes. If
he doesn't react before the time expires, he loses out on the special deal -- forever.
Suddenly Joe is back on your site and placing his order.
I call these 'Pressure Popups' because they really put your visitors' backs to the wall and practically
force them to take you up on your offer.
For pressure popups to be completely effective they have to be 'conditional'.
In other words, they should only pop up when certain conditions are met.
You don't, for example, want the pressure popup to show if your visitor is about to order your product.
After all, the idea behind pressure popups is to pull back those visitors that were leaving your site
WITHOUT ordering.
In short, if your visitor is ordering, leave him/her alone. However, if your visitor is clicking away, hit
him/her with an offer that's too good to resist (like a special discount, an extra bonus, etc.)
Make sure there's a live countdown on your popup. Remind your visitor that, once the countdown has
ended, the popup will disappear and will never be displayed again.
It's easy to see how this kind of popup will make the visitor seriously reconsider your offer. This is
particularly effective with those visitors who like your product but decided to order later (and usually
never come back). This is the incentive they need to place the order instantly -- and guarantees you a
sale that would otherwise have been lost.
In the four months since I first added a conditional pressure popup to one of my sites, sales have
increased by just over 20%. It's a good feeling to know that every single extra 'pressure' sale I've made
is one that would never have happened otherwise.
Adding conditional pressure popups to your is simply a question of placing a piece of javascript on
your pages. You could go to a site like ScriptLance.com and hire a programmer to create the code. Or,
you could download point and click software like Dynamic Popup Generator to make them for you.
Whichever approach you decide to use, go ahead and add these powerful popups to your website today
and start putting your visitors under pressure!
Michael Hopkins The world's most powerful popup generator software. Download it now at
http://Dynamic-Popup-Generator.com
The principle of sacristy is one of the strongest psychological motivators of all.
In fact, I can recall a couple times where I myself have been promoted to make a purchase based on the
possibility that it might not be available tomorrow.
I personally don't use "countdown scripts", on occasion when I make a special offer with a deadline I
always honor the deadline strictly.
It would take a little bit more work, but you could easily add a real deadline countdown script to your
pressure-pops.
You could also take a tip from QVC and have a "number of products left" count down.... tied to the
actual number of products you have left to sell. (In fact, on shopping cart I use does this automatically
via their inventory control script).
Fake Your PageRank
Recently, a new technique of faking the PageRank number of a web site has become popular. For
example, a rather dubious adult web site managed to get a PageRank of 10.
How did this web site get this high PageRank number? The web sites used a relatively simple
trick. A known loophole in the Google algorithm is that a web page that redirects to another web page
will get the PageRank number of the redirected web page. A web page that redirects to Google.com
will get a PageRank of 10 because web surfers that go to the redirection page will actually land on
Google.com which has a PageRank of 10. To get a high PageRank number, a web site must just
redirect to Google.com (or another page with a high PageRank) when the Google spider visits the site.
This is a technique called cloaking. Does this technique help my rankings on Google? No, it
doesn't. It doesn't help your web site rankings at all. Actually, it prevents your web site from showing
up in Google because Google thinks that the content of the redirected web site is the content of your
site. The only effect on your web site is that the green PageRank bar will be longer. What does this
mean to your web site? Don't try to get links (or even buy them) from other web sites just because
these web sites have a high PageRank. PageRank numbers can be faked and if a web site is not related
to your site, it doesn't make sense if that web site links to you. It's better to focus on links from web
site that are related to yours. Links from related sites will increase your search engine rankings and
you'll get targeted visitors from these sites. Focus on web surfers, not on search engines.
ARELIS can help you to find related sites that could link to you
http://www.axandra-link-popularity-tool.com/
Copyright Axandra.com Web site promotion software tools.
http://www.axandra.com/
A Simple Technique to Maximize Your Page Rank
There is no need to give away valuable Page Rank to affiliate programs. You signed up to make
money, not to increase their search engine rankings.
Most Internet Marketers today add affiliate links to their sites in order to generate additional revenue
which helps offset the cost of running the site.
It has now become necessary to cloak affiliate links because some web savvy surfers seem to have a
sour taste in their mouth at the thought of some webmaster making money as a result of their purchase.
Cloaking There is a number of ways to cloak affiliate links. The most popular include displaying
affiliate pages in an encrypted frame and the very simple "mouse-over" technique. While displaying
affiliate sales pages in a frame is a good way to cloak the link, it is not reliable because some, (not all)
affiliate programs cannot track correctly if the affiliate URL is displayed in a frame.
Willie Crawford:
The mouse-over technique will display a URL of your choice so that the affiliate URL is hidden. This
too in not reliable because the right mouse menu can reveal the real URL in an instant. This technique
will also drain your valuable Page-Rank (PR) because the link points directly to the affiliate sales page.
Short term, it depends upon where your article is published. I’ve had articles… I ran, submitted one
article that was published in, among other publications, Site Pro News. Site Pro News has a huge
audience of webmasters and I, in like four days, got over 700 new subscribers and most of those were
from Site Pro News, not all of them.
Not cloaking your affiliate links will also drain your PR and reduce your click-through rates. So
because it has become necessary to cloak affiliate links, I have decided that I may as well keep all the
PR at the same time. And then, I’ve run articles that promoted a multi-level marketing company I’m in
and, inside of a week, I had 20 new members, 20 new paying members, under me who earned me over
$800 that first month, just from that one article. So, I spent an hour writing an article and it made over
$800 in a week’s time, really, and then it’s still out there in circulation.
Another way
So, a very good return on an investment. But, the whole key is to make the article of high enough
quality that people will want to run it. That, when they look at your article, they know their subscribers
will appreciate it being shared with them, that their subscribers will get genuine value from the article.
The redirection page is no secret but still many Internet Marketers do not set this up and yet it involves
about the same amount of effort as cloaking the link into an encrypted frame.
Dearl Miller:
There is a couple of places Online where you can create a redirect page instantly for free and you need
not upload the page to your own site. This is an excellent way to cloak links within the body of emails
but if you use this on your web pages, it will still drain your PR. It will pass the PR along to the
redirection service. For Site Pro News, did they just pick it up off of a phantom writer distribution, or
how did that work out?
http://www.compacturl.com and http://www.tinyurl.com are two sites that I know of that provide
this free service. How to create your OWN redirection page and keep all the PR! Willie
Crawford:
It was Ezine Trends. And, you know, I was quite surprised because, again, they’re a fairly large
publication, as online publications go. I mean, I’m accustomed to the ones with 3,000 to 5,000 running
my articles. But, they just received it as a part of a mass distribution, and I have some name
recognition I suppose, but they liked the article and ran it. It, and it pertained to a topic that they were
interested in presenting to their subscribers.
Create a new HTML document.
Add the following line of code to the "head" of the document: <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;
url=http//www.youraffiliateURL?yourIDnumber"> Dearl Miller:
Replace "http//www.youraffiliateURL?yourIDnumber" with your affiliate URL. Do you recommend
people write their own articles, or should they hire someone to write the article for them?
Name the page to reflect the affiliate program and upload this page to your site and point that particular
affiliate link to this page. Willie Crawford:
It depends upon whether or not the person feels comfortable writing articles. If you’re at ease writing
articles and enjoy that type thing, then I certainly recommend writing your own articles. That’s what I
do. And, if you’re not comfortable with it, there are so many writers out there who are at these sites
you can go to, such as www.Elance.com or www.RentaCoder.com, some of those sites.
If you have joined a number of affiliate programs, you might like to create a new directory and add all
these redirection pages to this new directory.
Some of these people will write an article for you for as little as $20 and give you all rights to it. So, if
you’re, especially if you’re pressed for time, $20 is certainly a small amount to pay for an article that
you have all rights to, and you can put your name over and distribute to the world. You just have to
make sure that it fits your style.
I have set this system up at my site and then one day discovered that some of these pages had a Page
Rank of 3 or 4 with no outbound links. This is a waste. So now I have added a link back to my home
page on these pages. This now serves to direct all my valuable PR to pages that I choose. I do this with
all outbound affiliate links.
Benefits Dearl Miller:
What kind of quality can you get out of a $20 article from Elance?
1. The Affiliate Link is not displayed. 2. Keep all the PR. 3. Target different keywords with
the outbound links.
More about how tinyURL.com came into being: http://tinyurl.com/yuq6b
There is more info about how Page Rank works here: http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html
To discover how much Page Rank a particular page is, you'll need the Google Toolbar:
http://toolbar.google.com/ Submit By: Ed Zivkovic http://www.ezau.com His website contains
articles with all sorts of tips for work at home webmasters.
And how can you get them to buy from you during this Holiday Season?
GIVE THEM AN IRRESISTIBLE OFFER THEY CAN'T REFUSE
Few businesses use Special Offers during the Holidays. You can attract attention and increase your
sales during the Holiday Season by promoting Special Offers.
Make your Special Offer as attractive as you can afford. The greater its value to customers the more
sales it will generate.
Here are 5 different offers you can use for almost any product or service.
1. SPECIAL HOLIDAY DISCOUNT: People don't expect discounts during the Holidays. Surprise
them with an unexpected Holiday Discount Offer. It gets attention -- and motivates many prospects to
buy.
2. SPECIAL COMBINATION PRICE: Combine several products or services for a price that's lower
than the total cost of buying each item separately. A combination offer increases the number of orders
you get and the size of your average sale. It increases the number of sales by generating orders from
prospects who were only "shopping around". It increases the size of your average sale by motivating
buyers to spend additional money to get the "good deal" of your Special Combination Package.
3. FREE BONUS: Offer to include a free bonus with each purchase. It doesn't have to cost you very
much so long as it has high perceived value to your customer. For example, I recently visited a web
site offering special interest travel books. They offered a map of any country as a free bonus with each
order. I'm sure the map cost the site owner much less than its perceived value to the customer.
4. FREE FAST DELIVERY: People want to receive something immediately after buying it
...especially during the Holidays. You can motivate them to buy by offering free fast delivery. For
example, a company selling personalized desk accessories offers free overnight shipping during the
Holidays.
5. BILL ME LATER or BILL MY CREDIT CARD LATER option: This offer generates many
sales you normally wouldn't get during the Holiday Season. It removes the customer's concern about
spending too much money right now.
6. Always include a deadline for your offer. Prospects are more likely to take immediate action when
faced with the risk of missing your offer.
7 Tips to Increase Online Holiday Sales Dearl Miller:
7. Announce your Special Holiday Offer prominently near the top of your home page. Something as
simple as the words, Special Holiday Discount, will grab your visitor's attention and draw them into
your web site.
Everybody wants to get a "special deal". Most people don't expect to find one during the Holiday
Season. Surprise them with a Special Holiday Offer. It will motivate many hesitant prospects to buy.
Submitted By: Bob Leduc BobLeduc@aol.com help small businesses grow and prosper (702) 658-1707
Ten Hypnotic Sentences To Increase Your Sales
Tell your readers what they are probably thinking, feeling or doing as they read. This strategy will
trigger their own subconscious mind to bring out these feelings or actions.
You can add these sentences into any ad copy. You may have to change one or two words so it relates
more to the product or service you're selling.
1. As you keep reading this ad copy, you are feeling more and more compelled to experience all the
benefits of our product.
2. The more you understand just how valuable our product could be to your life, the less you think
about delaying this important purchase.
3. After you read this short ad you will feel like your problems are almost completely solved, all you
will have to do is order.
4. As you're skimming through this, you're beginning to think you have nothing to lose and everything
to gain by trying out our product.
5. As you're scanning over this ad copy, you are beginning to imagine using our product and enjoying
all the benefits it brings.
6. The more you keep reading our ad the more you feel it would be a waste to let this opportunity slip
by.
7. The more you review our ad the more you begin to find yourself getting very excited about our
product and starting to feel the urge to buy now.
8. You don't know it yet but, at the conclusion of this ad, you will feel driven to order and experience
all the benefits of our product.
9. You don't realize it yet but, in a few short minutes you'll realize that you can't put off this vital
purchase and then you'll be yanking out your credit card.
10. As every word you read travels from this ad to your brain, you start to understand just how much
our product could benefit your life.
Submitted By: Scott F. GeldError! Hyperlink reference not valid. Targeted traffic starting at 10
cents per visitor and links starting at just $10 per month.
Flash - Deadly Sins that can kill your Online Sales
Looks like every client wants a Flash site these days but the reality is...as flashy as these sites may look,
there are many negatives you may want to consider before delving into Flash.
Deadly Sin One - Long Load Times
This is the most obvious problem with most Flash sites. Flash files can get large in a hurry and if the
page takes too long to load, your visitor will move on without even seeing your site. Ideally, you would
want your Flash web page to load just as fast as a 'regular' page with text and images. And yes, it can be
done! Problem #1 - Images The whole reason why Flash was developed was to be able to use vector
graphics on web pages. Vector Graphics are infinitely smaller than pixel based images, they can be
resized to any size and animated without creating large file sizes.
Unfortunately, many designers use regular pixel based graphics like photos in their Flash design and
end up with huge files. Rule #1 for good Flash design should be...Use Vector Graphics only!
Problem #2 - Sound
What is a good picture without sound? Once you have this great Flash animated page, you want to add
sound to it. This is the #2 culprit resulting in large file sizes and slow loads. The trick here is to use
loops. Flash Music Loops are ultra short slices of music, that when looped in Flash play great
background music sound tracks that load fast and sound great.
You can find Flash Music Loops at http://www.flashmusictracks.com These loops that are near CD
quality and most are only 15k or less in size. They also offer a free Flash Music Player that allows for
the music to continue playing even if the visitor switches to another page, you can even select a
different music track or stop the music at any time while browsing, totally impossible with any normal
Flash implementation.
Another thing that helps keep file sizes down is to use low-res MP3 files for button effects and sound
effects. You don't really need 128k MP3 quality when most computer's speakers will sound just as go!
od with 24k or 32k MP3s. Another easy file size saver...use mono!
Deadly Sin Two - Missing Links
This fact is often overlooked. When you use Flash Buttons and Links, search engines will no longer
find your links on the pages. This can be extremely disastrous for your search engine rankings. Search
Engines need to be able to follow links to successfully index your site. Plus, the more well placed links
the robot finds on your site, the higher your ranking will be. When you use all Flash, you won't have
any visible links and you effectively kill any chance of being found on search engines.
What's the answer here? Use a Flash/HTML hybrid page. Even if you have Flash links, still try to
duplicate those links on the bottom of the page in HTML code so the search engines can find them.
Deadly Sin Three - Compatibility
This factor used to be important but today it's no longer relevant. In the early days of Flash, many web
users didn't have the Flash plug in and they moved on to another site rather than to download and
install Flash just to visit your site. This is no longer an issue.
99% of all web users will have browsers that can 'see' Flash pages and you no longer have to design a
Flash and Non-Flash Version for your site. If your visitors run for the hills rather than stick around to
visit your site it's the load time, not compatibility that is to blame.
So what is a man to do? You want Flash but you still want quick load times and good search engine
rankings. It can be done but you need to design your Flash site with all these factors in mind. It is
possible to design Flash Pages that actually load faster than many 'regular' pages with lots of graphics.
A good hybrid design with enough HTML elements can get you ranked well with the search engines.
The FlashMusicTracks website mentioned above is a perfect example. It uses Flash Banners and Logos
only, everything else is HTML. The site looks good, sounds good and everything loads very fast.
So, you don't have to be afraid of Flash killing your web business if you use Flash wisely.
Submitted By: Alan Steward http://www.musicleads.net/ The coolest tools for audio, music, multimedia and video production all in one place
Website Usability Checklist
FACT: 85% Percent of People ABANDON a new site due to poor design
FACT: 50% of Visitors are LOST because visitors can't easily find content
FACT: 70% of People who are ready, willing and able to buy online - don't complete the sale...
because they can't figure out how to use the website.
These numbers are staggering, but the worst part is they are all easily remedied...your profits will
dramatically improve when you understand how people use your website - that is called Usability.
This 20-Point Checklist will ensure your site isn't driving away potential customers:
Web Site Usability Checklist
If you get people to your web site, you want them to USE it. How it's set up can make the difference
between customers that stay, find your information and products and take the actions you want (call,
buy, etc.) and customers who click away. Here are several criteria to look at before signing off on the
final design. For all sites:
• Can visitors find information easily?
• Is the navigation clear and consistent throughout the site?
• Does the back button always take them back to the preceding page?
• Can visitors bookmark individual pages?
• Do the pages load quickly (10 to 20 seconds) on standard modem connections?
• Can visitors easily find out who runs the site?
• Can visitors easily find an email address to contact if they have difficulties using the site?
• Are the most important elements of your site visible without scrolling up and down or from side
to side on screens set to 600 x 800 size?
• Does the site look good and work from both Netscape and IE browsers (4.0 versions and up)
• Do you have alternate text tags under graphics (to allow visitors who are blind or who have
graphics turned off to find important links)?
For ecommerce sites
• Can visitors tell immediately what you sell?
• Can they quickly find products and product descriptions?
• Are there links to related products (accessories to wear with a ladies suit, for instance)?
• Can they tell what to click on to place an order?
• Can they find your phone number from every page in case they have a question?
• Can they find your name and address, fax number and email address?
• Can they find price information?
• Can they find information about the company and its management?
• Can they find any other important information you want them to have?
Submitted By: Janet Attard email at attard@businessknowhow.com Provides editorial content, online
community and web development services. (631) 467-6826
Getting Started with Google AdWords
The step-by-step process to set up a successful Google AdWords Campaign.
1) First, you need to generate a large list of keywords. Look at your site and write down every keyword
that you can think of. Focus on what problems your customers have and what questions they would ask.
2) Visit your competitors site and see what keywords they are using that you are not. You may even
want to look at their Meta Tags - just to see what keywords they thought were important. 3) Enter all
your keywords into www.synonym.com and www.thesaurus.com - add every even remotely
relevant term to your list 4) Go to http://www.trafficology.com/research/ and use one of the free
software research tools. I personally like to use Wordtracker (free trial), but I have heard a lot of good
things about Jon Keel's PIPE software (Free Trial). It has the added benefit of being able to estimate
how much profit you can expect to make (I will be using it for a case study next month). 5) No matter
which tool you use, the point is to create the largest list of keywords that are in anyway related to your
product or service. You should also try to focus on the terms that have the most amounts of traffic with
the least amount of competition. If you do not have at least 200 terms, keep adding. 6) Go to
http://adwords.google.com and sign up for an AdWords account. The process is fairly simple - just
follow their instructions step-by-step. 7) When creating your ad, use a headline and description that is
fairly conservative. The point is to get your ad up and running, and it will do you no good if you get
rejected. Make sure to include your main benefits in the headline and I also suggest mentioning your
price in the description. 8) When you are entering your keywords, use the Google Keyword suggestion
tool. Make sure only to pick out the terms that relate to your product or service. 9) If during your
research you found that many people are searching on a term that is related but not relevant to your
product, then make sure you use Google's negative keyword feature. For example if you are selling
"Tennis Balls" and you found many searched for the term "Golf Ball", then you would want to include
the term "-Golf" in your keyword list. This will ensure that your ad will not be displayed for people
looking for golf equipment. 10) Try to make your terms as specific as possible. If you have a phrase
that needs to be matched exactly, then make sure to use the "" or the [ ]. Using the same example from
before, if you use the term Tennis Balls, then you may want to also use the term "Tennis Balls" and
[Tennis Balls]. This will provide you more exact matching. Later you will be able to determine which
combination converts better. 11) When setting your bid, set it at the minimum. Then slowly increase it
until you have an average position of a little less than 3.0 - this will ensure you are syndicated to all of
Google's partners. 12) Think about how much net profit you are making from each sale, and then make
a conservative estimate of your conversion rate. Multiply the two together and use that as a rough
maximum bid estimate. For example, if you make $10 profit per sale, and you have a 3% conversion
ratio - then make sure you do not bid more than $0.30 per click. Bidding anymore will result in a
negative cash flow. Once you have established a firm conversion ratio, then you can re-calculate this
number. 13) Using the instructions that Google provides, place their conversion tracking code on your
order confirmation page. 14) Set up a second ad that is only slightly different than your first ad. For
example, change the capitalization or use a slightly different title. Once you have had around 200
impressions, look at the click thru rate of your 2 ads. Delete the ad that has the lowest click thru rate
and then create a new ad that is slightly different than the first two. After the next 100+ impressions
repeat the process of deleting the losing ad and creating a new one. You will want to continue this
process for the duration of your campaign. 15) Review your keywords periodically. Once a term gets
to around 100-150 impressions - if it does not have any click thrus then delete it. Once a term gets
around 80-100 click thrus, if it has not had any sales, then delete it. In a couple weeks, you will have
whittled your original list of 200-300 keywords down to the 30-40 keywords that create sales. 16)
Review your new conversion rate and multiply it by your profit per sale. For example if your profit per
sale is $10 and your conversion rate is 10%, then you can increase your max bid to $1. This will give
you a better position and increase the amount of traffic that you will receive. 17) If you do not see a
significant increase in sales, then revert your bids back to their previous level. There is no reason to pay
more for a higher position if it is not going to produce more sales. There is much more you can do with
Goggle AdWords - but following the above steps will get you started right. Also, don't forget to use
those 30-40 final keywords for your search engine optimization.
How to Turn Traffic Into Sales: Intro to Web Conversion
Let's spend some time learning about conversion and discussing why you may want to learn more about
it.
Why Do We Need to Know Conversion?
When I first studied the concept of conversion, a light bulb went on in my head. For the very first time
the principles behind successful online marketing were illuminated. I quickly learned that there is a big
difference between bringing visitors to your site, and getting those visitors to actually purchase
something. It's true.... getting people to your website is the easy part; getting people to give you their
money is where the real "heavy lifting" occurs. Some people spend all their time on traffic creation.
They think of it as a numbers game and believe that the more traffic you get, the more sales you will
have. This may be true. If you have more visitors to your site, the better chance you have that someone
will buy something. But, I don't want to leave my business and my financial future up to "chance". I
like to take a more scientific approach. I want to know why people are visiting my site and exactly
what I can do to help them purchase what I am selling.
Additionally, I have found that maximizing the value of each visitor I already have enables me to
receive a significantly better return on my investment than just adding more visitors. And when I do
create additional traffic those visitors are even more valuable. Some experts compare conversion to a
greased funnel or a leaky bucket, but the point is the same. If you start out with only 1 out of every 100
visitors making a purchase, then you make a small change to your website that improves that to 2 out of
every 100 visitors making a purchase - you have doubled your profits without spending any more
money. That's right doubled your sales... for FREE. You don't need more traffic, you need more sales.
Once you understand an internalize this concept, your business will become so much easier. And trust
me, it is a lot easier to double or triple your conversion rate than it is to double or triple the amount of
traffic you generate. Also, conversion is something that lasts. Once you have optimized your site for
conversion, then only minor tweaking is required. Whereas with traffic creation, you must constantly
work to bring more visitors to your site. You have to keep up with the changing search engines, you
have to constantly monitor your PPC campaign and you always have to be on the lookout for the next
great traffic idea. I don't know about you, but I want to make sure I am getting every last dollar out of
all the traffic I have worked hard to create. It is a shame when someone wants what you are selling but
doesn't buy anything because they can't find what they are looking for. It's a pity when someone
abandons your shopping cart or doesn't complete the sale because you can't check them out fast
enough. It is unfortunate when you waste your money on ideas that bring people to your site that never
purchase a single thing. Conversion is a money game, not a numbers game. It prevents you from
wasting your money on unproductive tasks, and enables you to determine where to spend your money
most effectively. Instead of spending your money, conversion gives you the power to invest it in your
website and ensures that you will make a hefty return.
What is Conversion?
Technically, conversion is when your visitors complete a desired action. Such as completing a sale,
joining your email list or filling out a sales lead form. The idea is that you have "converted" them from
a visitor into a "customer". But to me, conversion is much more than the "technical" definition.
Conversion is... Conversion is about understanding your customers and efficiently delivering exactly
what they want. Conversion is about bringing people to your site that are ready, willing and able to
purchase (not people looking for a freebee or trying to win a contest). Conversion is about effectively
communicating the benefits of your product or service. Conversion is about creating interest, building
desire and closing the sale. Conversion is about providing an easy way for customers to find exactly
what they want and then checking them out as quickly as possible.
How do I use conversion on my website?
When people visit your website, they will respond to its features. For example:
• If a visitor sees a headline that grabs their attention, they will respond by reading it.
• If a visitor sees a picture they like, they will respond by looking at it.
• If a visitor sees a link they want to know more about, they will respond by clicking on it.
Optimizing your website for traffic conversion is basic "Response Modification". You can use the
many features of your website to encourage people to purchase your product or service, thereby
modifying their response to increase sales. This is not manipulation. In fact, it is the exact opposite. It is
using your website to clearly communicate the benefits of your offer, using the words that each
customer will understand best.
How do I use "Response Modification"?
There are 5 basic web conversion topics that we will address in Trafficology. 1) Fundamental
Conversion Techniques 2) Website Copywriting 3) Web Usability 4) Multimedia Content 5) Metrics:
Testing & Tracking
TIP: If you remember only 1 thing from this issue of Trafficology, make sure it's "Metrics: Testing &
Tracking". Above all else, getting serious about "Metrics" is the most effective thing you can do to
improve your website conversion.
The Great Traffic Debate: Creation vs Conversion
Two long-time Trafficology Members square off and give us their take on the
"Great Traffic Debate".
Azeez contends that you live and die by the traffic you generate, while Giuseppe states that it's more
important to focus on converting traffic into customers.
Being a defender of democracy, I felt it only appropriate to put it to a vote.
Take a moment to read each of these articles and cast your own private ballot.
Then, I will tell you what the Science of Web Traffic has determined to be the real answer to the age
ole traffic debate.
SIDE #1) No Traffic, No Sales - Traffic CREATION Rules.
Azeez Akinsola Says:
Traffic is the most popular subject in Internet marketing.
It doesn't matter how good your sales copy is, you will eventually live or die by the traffic you generate
to your web site.
If you have no traffic, you have no sales. There is no way around it.
So what's the best way to generate traffic?
Everybody seems to have an opinion on the subject. Everywhere you turn there is another "Startling
Discovery" of how to drive millions of visitors your way.
For only $100 you can have 100,000 visitors sent your way...
But the question is...what kind of traffic do you want?
Do you want visitors who just pop-in and pop right out? Or are you looking to attract targeted hungry
customers and buyers for your products and services?
Well, if you're serious about making money, you want real visitors who are ready and willing to buy
your products and services.
You're simply not going to get this kind of visitors by joining the hot "traffic generation" technique of
the month.
There always seems to be a NEW thing that everybody jumps on...and you see published in a majority
of ezines. People will jump on it this month, tire of it, and then be on to something new next month.
I've been doing this business for 7 years now and although things do change quick, I'm still using many
of the exact same strategies I did way back when I started.
Some of those techniques are the ones I want to share with you today. These are the techniques which
have worked for years, and will continue to work for years to come.
They are not fly-by-night opportunities. They are real...and they can and will generate traffic for you
TODAY and for years to come.
They may not be exciting, but they work! And that's the point of this business. Who cares what's the
most exciting and most talked about? We only care about what earns our business the most profits.
Traffic Method #1 - Joint Ventures
You have a product. You find people who already have the hungry customers you're seeking.
The most common form of joint venture online is the affiliate program. You set-up the software and
you can instantly handle thousands of affiliates selling your products and services for you.
You'll find that a large number of the people who teach Internet marketing use their affiliate programs
as their primary selling tool.
Simply find large ezines or high traffic web sites in your niche market and partner with them.
Offer them a percentage of the profits varying anywhere from 10% to 75% of the selling price. It's
absolutely no risk to you whatsoever, because you don't spend a penny on marketing until a sale is
made.
A good program to use for your affiliate program is here:
http://www.netofficetoolbox.com
Traffic Method #2 - Pay-per-click Search Engines
You don't pay for traffic with these search engines unless their visitors click on and visit your web site.
So you're paying for real guaranteed highly qualified visitors to your web site.
The ones I like best are:
http://www.google.com http://www.overture.com http://www.sprinks.com
The key to using PPC search engines effectively is coming up with hundreds or even thousands of
possible keywords. You're looking for keywords which have decent traffic but very low bids.
You don't want to be spending $1 or more per visitor if you haven't tested your web site to produce that
kind of income already. So you have to avoid the most popular keywords and find a lot of less used
ones.
Traffic Method #3 - Content Web Sites
The poor content web site has been attacked, made fun of, and ignored for years. A content web site is
one with lots of content on it including: ebooks, articles, and even a discussion board.
This is the exact opposite type of site from a mini-site. A mini-site is a web site with only a page or two
and focuses just on a sales letter. A customer either buys or doesn't buy. No other choices are offered to
them.
The majority of my web sites are designed in this fashion. They are mini-sites and all they contain are a
sales letter and order form.
Content sites have a place. They can be used to draw traffic and visitors. People will link to a content
site. Search engines will index a content site much easier than they will a sales letter.
All this traffic can be produced for free (although you will do a lot of work to produce the content).
Then you can get these visitors to sign up for an email newsletter OR drive them to your mini-site sales
letters. The content site is never the purpose of your business. It is just a traffic generating mechanism
that you use to push visitors to your sales letters.
Take a look at: http://www.bizpromo.com/free/
Bonus Traffic Method - Offline Advertising
Print media has been taking a major hit in recent years from a loss of advertising revenue. Advertising
in printed publications and through direct mail just isn't as popular anymore because they weren't as
exciting as the Internet.
That's changing.
Webmasters are finding out that they can drive qualified buyers to their web sites using offline
advertising. And those visitors captured offline are worth much more than their average online surfer.
They're also discovering that sending postcards and direct mail pieces to their online buyers is resulting
in significantly more sales than simply email follow-up alone.
So you make money offline...by driving offline visitors online...and then contacting online buyers
offline.
kinbob@freeautobot.com Traffic genarating to website How to affiliate
SIDE #2) Make more money without more traffic - Traffic CONVERSION
Rules.
Giuseppe Russo Says: How to get more leads, sales, repeat business, and profits - without increasing
traffic.
Do you think that traffic is the only thing you should focus on to make more profits? Well, you're
wrong. There is one thing you need to focus on MORE than generating traffic. That is converting that
traffic into buying customers.
Are you serious about marketing online? If so, there is no doubt you should be split testing if you aren't
already!
If your site converts 1% of visitors into paying customers and you earn $50 on every sale, but spent $40
to make that sale, you got a profit of only $10.
Now, watch what happens if you could somehow go from converting 1% to 2% of your visitors into
customers.
You will get 2 new customers for every 100 visitors, which earns you $100. This means a 500% profit
increase!
Yes, because it costs you the same amount to acquire these 100 visitors (in our example $40), but
instead of generating only 1 customer and making a $10 profit ($50 - $40 = $10) you are now making 2
sales for that same traffic.
This means $100 but your costs are still $40, so $100 - $40 = $60. You've just increased your profit by
500%, without spending any extra money!
Do you want to know how much of an increase you will have if you have a conversion ratio of 3%? An
incredible 1,000% profit increase!
You can increase your conversion ratio and your profit only by split run testing.
The secret to increasing your sales conversion ratio is to test everything on your site not only the visitor
to sales ratio.
Each and every time you create a decision for your visitors to take, you can and should calculate a
conversion rate for each decision. Every time you want them to take some action, you should calculate
a conversion rate for that action.
For instance, as well as your visitor to sales conversion rate, you can calculate your visitor to subscriber
conversion rate, and your subscriber to sales rate.
Only when you know what these figures currently are, can you work on improving them.
And, calculating as many of these rates as possible is one of the keys to maximizing the rate that really
matters - visitor to sales.
Test new headlines, guarantees, graphics, different bonus, opening paragraphs, popups, popunders,
long copy vs short copy. Just test one element at a time on your page then track and analyze your
numbers because you need to know exactly what result each change on your page had.
Did the change that you made on your page generate more leads or sales? You need to know what
happened with that new headline, guarantee, bonus etc.
Think about this: if your site converts 2% of visitors into customers, it also means that 98% are leaving
your site without buying.
This is a good reason why you should be doing split testing before you spend some time and/or money
on advertising and bringing more traffic to your site.
Are you content to let 98% (or even 99%) of your visitors leave without making a purchase? Do you
know why they are leaving your site?
By boosting site conversion rates you'll get more value out of all the effort and expense you spend
driving traffic to your site!
Now, if your site has a low conversion ratio you have to improve it. So first, improve your conversion
ratio, then aggressively seek new traffic.
Giuseppe Russo http://www.profitabletesting.com FREE 30 page pdf Special Conversion Rate
Report. Download it at: www.profitabletesting.com/freepdf/
OK, now after you read both articles... you did read both articles, right?
It was very interesting to read the arguments for web traffic creation & web traffic conversion.
But, the scientific truth about the "Great Traffic Debate" is... if you are serious about web traffic, you
must do both!
It is a fact that if you do not have traffic you will not sell anything online. But it is just as true that if
your website does not convert then you will not sell anything either.
It's not a matter of which one you should do, rather the real question is which should you do first?
Let, the numbers speak for themselves.
I have seen websites get 20,0000 unique visitors and not make a single sale. I have also seen a website
that gets only 100 visitors a day produce high 5-figures per year.
There is no question about it - if you do not work on web conversion FIRST - then you are wasting
your time & money. Why would you spend hard earned money or your valuable time creating traffic if
you don't have a site that sells?
Would you put up a site without an order button? Then why would you put up a site that does not
convert?
Just spend a few days to optimize your website for conversion before you do your web traffic creation;
and your bank account will be very happy that you did.
If you already have a site then before you spend a single dollar more on traffic, optimize your site for
conversion. You will see a significant increase in sales from the traffic you already have. PLUS, you
will also see greater profits from the new traffic you create in the future.
The most cost effective way to increase sales is to improve conversion first and then add traffic second.
You may even find that the increase in revenue from conversion is enough to take your traffic creation
efforts "to the next level".
The numbers don't lie. While you need traffic to create sales - you are working too hard, spending too
much money and throwing away a large percentage of your profits unless you working on conversion
also.
That's the facts - Case Closed
The Most Important Web Business Lesson
There is no single thing more important to the long term success of your business than Metrics. Quite
simply, as stated by Jack Welch, legendary CEO of GE, "If you don't measure it, it's a hobby not a
business."
Metrics-Schmetrics - Why Should I Care? By Chip Tarver
Why Should You Care? Some of the greatest marketers online these days are learning to be
satisfied pulling a 1% response rate (which means they lose 99% of their efforts.) That's why you
should care. If your best hopes are being only 99% inefficient, every little thing you do is paramount to
your success.
What Matters? At the initial level, three things matter: Visitor Value (VPV,) Conversion Rate
(CR,) and Return on Investment (ROI.) In addition, there are three sets of metrics: Traffic Metrics,
Onsite Metrics, and Sales Metrics. Here's an example of some basic math on these ...
# exposures
1,000
cost per exp.@ $.10
$100.00
# visitors 100
(10% click-through)
# sales @ $20 5
(5% CR1 ... 5 / 100 visitors)
sales $
$100.00
(gross)
conversion rate 1/2%
(CR2 ... 5 / 1,000 exposures)
visitor value $1.00
($100 / 100 visitors)
ROI
0
Profit
0 (could even be negative)
The Bottom Line So, it cost you $100 to make $100, so you worked for nothing. That's why
metrics are important. That's why testing is important. In the above example if you only improved your
CR2 by 1/2% ... now you made $100 because you sold ten products - not five.
As you learn all the aspects of traffic in Trafficology, knowing and improving your metrics is the most
important aspect of it all. Your traffic is going to cost whatever it costs, so you need to know how to do
your very best converting the traffic into sales. Learn something new every day to improve your
conversion.
Your copy and your offer are your team leaders. And for the skills to improve your CRs, there's no
better teacher I know than Alex Mandossian. And as you improve your other numbers, your Visitor
Value also rises with your profits. So it's surely in your best interest to pay close attention to everything
that affects your metrics.
The 7 Most Powerful Copywriting Rules of All Time
By Dr. Joe Vitale
1. Know your USP.
USP = Unique Selling Proposition = a one line statement (proposition) that explains (sells) how your
product or service differs (unique) from the competition. You can't know it unless you research your
product as well as your competition. What does Federal Express say? Dove soap? You must know your
basic offer before you can begin to persuade anyone to accept it.
2. Use layout that supports copy.
Graphics, fonts, and layouts don't sell, but they can help bring attention to your sales message. Use
proven formats. Look at the famous Maxwell Sackheim ad in my book, The AMA Complete Guide to
Small Business Advertising. Consider an advertorial style. It can get 80% more attention than any other
ad layout. You must know the form your sales message will take before you begin to draft your actual
message. Knowing you are about to write a classified ad will lead you to write differently than if you
were about to write a sales letter or a display ad.
3. Create a riveting and relevant headline.
Round-up your prospects with a headline that makes them sit up and take notice. Best place to see good
headlines is on the cover of Reader's Digest. See my AMA advertising book for 30 ways to write
headlines. A headline calls out your readers. A change in headline can bring 19 times more response.
4. Write simply, directly,and in the conversational style of your prospects.
Who are you trying to reach? Housewives, business executives, children? You must know the type of
person you are writing to. Write to one person from that group and you will speak to all people in that
group. Forget trying to impress people, win writing awards, or please a past English teacher. Good
copy often violates the rules of English but still makes the sale.
5. So that -- ?
Write of the benefits, not the features. A feature generally describes a product; a benefit generally
explains what the product does for you. A good way to write about benefits would be to keep saying
you get this...and the product does this...so that you get.... Look at Kodak. People don't buy film for the
pictures they create. They are buying memories. Look at their advertising and you'll barely see film
anywhere. What you will see are family reunions, graduations, weddings, etc. You get film which helps
you take pictures so that you get memories. Keep asking So that -- ? to dig up benefits. For example,
This computer is a 486...so that...you get a computer that is twice the speed of other computers...so
that...you can get twice the work done in the same amount of time...so that....you are free to have longer
lunches, make more calls, or focus on something else.
6. Use emotional appeal.
People buy for emotional reasons and justify with logic. Gene Schwartz wrote an ad that ran for 20
years and sold so many flowers it exhausted nurseries. It's packed with emotional appeal. It read in
part: When you put this into the Earth, and you jump back (quickly), it explodes into flowers. And
everybody in your neighborhood comes and they look. And people take home blooms because you've
got so many you could never find a house big enough to put them. And you've become the gardening
expert for the entire neighborhood.
7. Demolish the five basic objections:
· A. I don't have enough time. · B. I don't have enough money. · C. It won't work for me. · D. I don't
believe you. · E. I don't need it.
Dr. Joe Vitale is the Creator of Hypnotic Writing and Author of to many books to mention. Learn
everything you need to know to hypnotically persuade your visitors to make a purchase in his new
course, Hypnotic Selling Secrets.
http://www.hypnoticsellingsecrets.com
10 Sure-­‐Fire Methods to Generate Targeted Traffic to Any Website with John Reese John Reese:
My name is John Reese and I've been active online, marketing online for 14 long years, through a lot of
long hours, a lot of hard work, started totally figuring things out about how to get people to go to web
sites. In all that time, I've had over 1.5 billion web site visitors. I've sold millions of dollars in
products and services online. I've made myself and my family very, very wealthy as a result. I just
love the Internet. I love Internet marketing. I do this full time. I have for over 10 years.
The fact that you can just do things online, very inexpensively and see results very, very quickly, it's
just very, very exciting for me. I just really love it. The things I teach people, I use everyday to build
wealth on the Internet and to make money in my own businesses. Another guy that I had talked to
once, he was making about $6,000.00 a month online and I said, “Well, have you ever tried this?” And
he said “No.” I just gave him a few of the step-by-step things that I do everyday in my business and he
went from $6,000.00 a month to about $80,000.00 a month in three or four months.
Dearl Miller:
Hello. I'm Dearl Miller; the editor of www.Trafficology.com and this is a Trafficology special report,
John Reese's Top Ten Web Traffic Tips.
Selling a product or service online is one of the best ways to make money today. But just like a
traditional business, creating profits means generating new customers. Trafficology is all about
growing your online business quickly and inexpensively, discovering the techniques that most people
don't know about and sharing with you the inside tips that other experts won't talk about. This month
Trafficology presents renowned web traffic expert John Reese. Since 1990 John has personally created
over 1.5 billion visitors and generated multi-million dollar online profits.
A true industry pioneer, John started one of the first email auto responders and has been credited with
coining the term "ebusiness.” Today, John will share with you the lessons of his 14 years of web traffic
trial and error. The result, our Trafficology exclusive and you will be one of the first people ever to
learn John Reese's top ten web traffic tips. So, get out a pen and paper and prepare to take notes as you
listen to this info packed three-hour interview.
Hello, John, and welcome to Trafficology. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got started online?
John Reese:
Well, I started with some online marketing way back in 1990 actually with some online services like
the early days of America Online, CompuServe, and Prodigy. And then when the web started to take
off around 1994, I started setting up my own web sites to sell some of the things that I was marketing
through online services and through like their classified ads section. So, I got into setting up my own
web sites early on when the web really got going around 1994 and then of course I quickly learned that
if you build it, they will not come, kind of opposite of the Field of Dreams thing of if you build it, they
will come.
I built web sites and then I noticed no one came and so I had to figure out how to get web site traffic to
actually go to those sites.
Dearl Miller:
Thank you, John, and thank you for being here today. What is your number one web traffic tip?
John Reese:
My first web traffic tip is all traffic generation must start with every traffic source being individually
tracked. And what I mean by this is, this is basically what I believe is the foundation of everything
traffic related on the Internet and in order to do anything, whether you go out and buy traffic or whether
you spend your time to generate free traffic, all of those things have to be tracked individually so you
know where all the traffic is coming from when it comes to your site.
In other words, you know if it ends up creating opt ins for an email list or ultimately if it ends up
creating sales for a product or service that you sell. So, the first tip of mine is basically the foundation
for everything traffic related and that is just that you have to track everything individually so you know
where everything is coming from and it's very, very critical for marketers to get this right or it doesn't
matter any time that you actually spend trying to get traffic even if it's free or obviously spending your
hard earned money to generate traffic.
So, you must track everything individually.
Dearl Miller:
John, can you give me an example of that?
John Reese:
Sure. Let's say that you're placing some Pay-Per-Click ads like with Google Ad Words and that you're
going to drive some traffic to your web site, and then let’s say you're also going to pay someone, let's
say just to put a banner ad at the top of their site. Now unless you have a way to track how many
people come from that banner ad you're going to pay for and how many people are going to come from
that Google Ad Words listings that you're paying for, how do you know what traffic is creating any
activity at all?
In other words, what traffic may be creating sales for you. That banner ad could be creating all of the
sales but yet if you don't track them individually, you'll just keep paying for both ads, both ad sources
and just thinking that they're both making you money. But what you'll probably find out is one will be
making most of the sales and the other one will probably be losing you money and that if you stopped
advertising it in the place that's losing you money, you'll make a lot more money by maximizing the
profit you make from the one that's making you money.
So it's very, very important to track individual traffic sources. And the way that you track them is by
using technology that's available for you to use. There are several scripts out there for tracking traffic.
You can buy software that you can put on your own web server if you're capable to do that and it will
just track with a special URL where the traffic comes from all the way through to your site to what
result that it produces for you. In other words, if someone buys something or someone opts in to a list
or whatever the action is that you want to track for your advertising and so this software or this scripts,
these services will actually do this for you.
And then you can look at a little report. It's very simple and it just shows you where all the activity is
coming from. And then you can just look at it and you'll be able to figure out if it's profitable or not.
You just know to keep generating traffic that way from the source that is producing something or from
the sources that aren't, you just stop wasting your time and stop wasting your money on it. So, it's very,
very critical that people track every source of traffic that they're generating out there on the Internet
individually like this.
Dearl Miller:
Can you tell me what exactly people should track?
John Reese:
Sure, well, people should track, from a marketing standpoint. People should track obviously the source
of the traffic. So, where the visitors are coming from but on their end, they need to track what the
actions are that people are taking coming from each traffic source. So, the most common one are sales.
If you're selling your product or service, you want to track how many sales a traffic generation source
produces for you. That's the most critical one. That's the easiest way to say, "Hey, this is making me
money,” or “This is not making me money."
But something else people should track and it's very easy to do is just like opt ins for example, if you're
building an opt in email list and you know that the more people who you put on your list, the more
money you make, you'll want to know which traffic is actually producing opt ins for you because that
can be very, very important. So, you can track that. And then of course, you can also track how many
clicks on links on your site are being produced by different traffic sources.
In other words, if you have a big ad on a site that clicks on over to an affiliate program that you're
promoting you can actually track that. You can track that. If your driving source is from somewhere
else and it comes to your web site, how many of those people from that source go on to click on this ad
that, let's say, sells something for $200.00 where you make $100.00 commission. Something very
important to know and so it's something that you can track.
Dearl Miller:
John, what is the best way to track and how exactly does that work?
John Reese:
The best way to track is to buy a tracking script or traffic software that you'll put on your own web
server or you can subscribe to a tracking service. Now the way they work is pretty simple. You
basically take a little piece of code and you put it on a confirmation page for the type of action that you
want to track. So, if you want to track the number of orders that come from a source, you put a little
piece of code on your thank you page, in other words, that page that's only loaded to people that place
an order for a product.
And what this little code does is it just increments a counter every time that page is loaded by a unique
person. So, if ten orders come in from a specific URL that you'll use through a tracking script or
software or through a traffic tracking service, in other words, you'll take a specific URL that you know
is only specific to let's say the Google Ad Word for the keyword sports, so that specific URL will also
be matched up with this little piece of code that will be on your thank you page.
So, if ten orders are placed, you'll be able to track them back to this original URL that goes all the way
back to the sports keyword for Google Ad Words. You'll know that it created ten sales. So, it's really
simple. You just take a little piece of code and paste it on pages that are only shown on your site to
people that take action. So, if you want to track the number of people that join an email list, on the
confirmation page that's only shown to people once they join your email list, you would put this little
piece of tracking code that has the counter that increments by one every time a unique person signed up
for your list.
That's tracked all the way back through where that traffic came from. So, it's actually pretty easy to do
but it's very, very powerful and very important that people do it.
Dearl Miller:
When you do link tracking, do you have to replace every link on your page or is there any easier way to
do that?
John Reese:
To answer your question, the best way to track is, yes, to have every individual link set up as a unique
tracking URL. That is ultimately the best way to have the most control over the process and to know
exactly where people are coming from. How they are getting to the order page. How they are, why
they are ordering. Where they are coming from. So, yes, every single link should be coded with one of
these tracking scripts or one of these tracking services. Now people don't have to do this all on the
same day when they get started with setting up tracking.
I suggest to people just set up the major links. Like, just set up, at least know where sales are coming
from from each ad that you placed. But, yeah, when you're tracking the links that are within your site
and you're trying to find out where things are coming from, eventually you do need to replace all of the
links that go to important pages like that, go to order pages on your site with tracking URLs so you can
really know where everything is coming from.
Dearl Miller:
Is there an automated script or system that will go through your site and change all those links for you
or is that something that you have to do by hand?
John Reese:
You could probably hire a programmer like on Elance or RentaCoder that write some kind of script that
maybe would be able to go through your pages if you have a lot of links. It could identify the different,
like let's say if you're just trying to track links on your site that go to your order form, I'm sure it could
go in there and identify all the links that are pointing to that specific page and then tag them with code
one, code two, code three, code four for you but in most cases it just depends on how vast your site is
and how complex it is.
But in most cases, it doesn't take but a few minutes to go in and manually change them.
Dearl Miller:
Tracking will produce a lot of data. What do you do with the data after you've collected it? I mean
how do you turn that data into useful information to make business decisions with?
John Reese:
Well, most of the scripts, software, or services that you can use, at least the good ones, will create
reports for you. So, at a glance you could just look at the report and see the campaigns, for example, if
you're buying traffic or generating it from somewhere, you can see all the campaigns where all the
traffic is coming from and all the sources it's coming from. And you can see on line by line at a glance
what it's producing, how many visitors it produced, how many opt ins it produced, how many sales it
produced and you can also put into these forms the calculations, such as for how much profit you make
per order so that it will just show you how much money that exact campaign created for you.
So, the way you're able to analyze the data is that the software or these services produce nice reports
that you can quickly look at and always just be able to know and put your finger on which ones are
making money and which ones aren't.
Dearl Miller:
Once you know how much profit you’re making per visitor or per order, what do you do with those
numbers?
John Reese:
Well, once you know how much a visitor is worth to you on average, well, then that puts you in a
powerful position because if you know that the average visitor to your site is worth 25 cents, now
you're able to go out and buy traffic all over the Internet and as long as you're able to acquire it for less
than 25 cents per click and if the math stays about the same, you'll be able to generate a profit. So, it's a
very, very important thing to know those metrics of your site.
But again this goes back to why this tracking is so important because even if you know that it creates
25 cents, unless you're able to track these individual sources to know what their creating when you now
go and try to buy traffic, even for less than 25 cents, you may find some that don't produce anything at
all and they are a waste of your money, even if you are buying them for 5 cents a click. So, that's why
this tracking is very, very important and that's why all of this is very critical for making money.
Dearl Miller:
What tracking tools do you use?
John Reese:
I actually use my own proprietary tracking system that I hired a program to set up for me because I kept
seeing different limitations in tracking software that was out there and services that were out there
several years ago when I really got into all this stuff. But now there are some other pieces of software
out there and services out there that have advanced to the point where they're pretty solid. There are
several out there that are pretty good.
I don't really feel comfortable recommending any specific one because they change all the time and
people really need to investigate them for themselves and they do suit different needs depending on
how advanced your marketing is.
The best thing to do is, you can just type in ‘traffic tracking software’ or ‘tracking services’, like into
Google, and you'll find a whole bunch of different ones that you can check out. And the best way to do
is just to kind of test-drive them and see if you like the reports they create or if you like the results that
they produce for you. That's probably the best thing that I can recommend people go and do in regards
to finding traffic tracking services for them to use.
Dearl Miller:
What are the characteristics of a good tracking service and what are some things to avoid in bad
tracking services?
John Reese:
Well, a good tracking service will allow you to track everything by individual campaigns. In other
words, to really track everything by individual traffic source all the way through to an action on your
site, so you can track sales or opt ins or whatever action you want to track. The tracking services to
avoid are the ones that don't have very detailed tracking. In other words, the ones that will sometimes
actually lump multiple traffic sources together so all the data is pretty skewed so in that case those
services, you don't need to be using them anyways because you're in the same boat you were before
you used one.
So, the good ones to look for have a high level of detail for reporting. They will allow you track
campaigns on an individual level so you can really see where traffic is coming from and what that
specific traffic is producing. So, that's pretty much it. You just want a tracking service or tracking
software that will allow you to have the most flexibility to track everything individually and everything
very detailed from where the traffic clicked from all the way through to what that traffic produced.
Dearl Miller:
John, can you tell me how you learned to do testing and tracking and what you'd recommend that other
people starting out do now to learn testing and tracking?
John Reese:
Well, I learned testing and tracking basically from my background when I was very, very young and
started to study mail order and direct response marketing. And offline advertisers for years have put
little codes in their ads so they know which ads are producing what. So, tracking online was just an
extension of offline marketing and that was just to be able to track any ad that you placed or any traffic
that you produce online so you can find out what's producing what.
So that you know where to spend your time or at least where to continue spending your time or your
money on the stuff that's producing good results, then you stop spending your time or your money on
the stuff that isn't producing good results. So, the best thing that I would suggest for people to do to get
started with testing and tracking is basically just to go out there and start using a piece of tracking
software or service and just start tracking one or two things.
Don't go crazy at first and track everything because it can be a little overwhelming but just make
yourself set up a few Google Ad Words ads and track that traffic by itself and then go and drive some
traffic from somewhere else and track that traffic individually by itself and start comparing the results
just between two traffic sources to start with. And start to see the patterns and what they produce and
how the traffic really is different, how some of them produce a lot of visitors but not as many sales or
any sales at all in some cases, while others will produce just a very small amount of visitors but a high
amount of sales because that traffic is more targeted.
So, I would suggest just get started. Put the code on your pages, even if you do it wrong, just start
getting some numbers just to get your feet wet and to realize why it's so powerful to track where traffic
is coming from and what it's doing for you.
Dearl Miller:
John, any last words on testing and tracking?
John Reese:
Yeah, the last thing I would want to say about testing and tracking is testing and tracking is where all
the money is made on the Internet. It's the most powerful thing you can do for your marketing. And
everyday that you are not tracking properly you are just losing money. The technology that can be used
to track things individually and the power of that tracking is so easy for you to use and apply to your
business and it's so cheap for you to use, that there's no reason why you shouldn't be doing it right
away.
But testing and tracking I would honestly say is the most important piece of the Internet marketing
puzzle. If you can become good at testing and tracking things, you'll make more money than all of
your competitors combined because most people won't, first of all most people don't even know about
testing and tracking but if you'll go and put in the work just to learn how to do it, it doesn't take a lot of
work, but if you go and, you become disciplined to do it, you'll squeeze more money out of every web
site visitor you get to your site and you'll make more money as a result.
So, I just can't stress it enough. It's the most important thing for you to be doing if you're trying to
make money on the Internet with a web site.
Dearl Miller:
What is your second web traffic tip?
John Reese:
My second web traffic tip is Pay-Per-Click traffic should be the first source of traffic for any web site.
And I say this because a lot of people that set up a new web site, it doesn't even have to be a new web
site, it could be just a site that you want to ramp up traffic for - But most people want to go out and try
to figure out the search engines or try do all these things to get free traffic and the most powerful thing
you can do is just to go buy a little bit of Pay-Per-Click traffic that you can get now within like 15
minutes through something like Google Ad Words.
And this is for a couple of reasons. One is you can get the traffic to your web site very, very quickly
but also that traffic is as targeted a traffic as you can possibly get because people are searching specific
keywords and because your ads will be shown for those keywords, this traffic is as targeted as it can
get. And the reason why this is very important to do this first, it's because if you can't get any results
from this Pay-Per-Click traffic, you can forget about driving traffic from anywhere else. Because if
you can't get really highly targeted traffic to convert and do something that you want, the other traffic
isn't going to do it either.
So, this is a very powerful tip for people to make sure that they generate Pay-Per-Click traffic first
when they are trying to ramp up traffic to a web site.
Dearl Miller:
John, is it difficult to do Pay-Per-Click? Can you give me an example, kind of walk me through the
process of setting up a Pay-Per-Click campaign?
John Reese:
Sure. And it's actually really simple and aside from walking you through it, I'll go ahead and elaborate
on why you need to do it first, which is how it relates to this traffic tip I gave. Let's say that you're
trying to sell a little downloadable ebook on, I don't know, teaching somebody how to become a better
baseball player. Let's say it's aimed at parents of little league baseball players and you wrote a little
book on how to give them tips to improve their swing, to become better baseball players, to hit the ball
more, whatever the case may be.
So you've got this new site, right? And you want to start making some money. You want to start
selling your product. So you're thinking where do I start first. How do I get traffic? Do I try to spend
time to try to get it from the search engines, optimizing pages? Do I try to buy ads somewhere? Do I
try to do partnerships with people? No, the first place that you start is with Pay-Per-Click ads, in other
words, with Pay-Per-Click search engines. And the number one Pay-Per-Click search engine, or
actually search engine program because the engine itself isn't just a Pay-Per-Click search engine, is
Google.
And Google has this program called Google Ad Words. And what Google Ad Words is it's basically a
program where you can go in and set up an account and you can pick certain keywords, keywords
meaning words and phrases that people are typing into the search engines, in this case typing into
Google, the biggest search engine in the world. And when they type in certain words and phrases to
search for something you can have a little ad that will come up on that page.
And a part of this process, you're able to set how much that you’re willing to Pay-Per-Click anytime
somebody clicks on your ad and ends up on your web site. So, you're basically able to bid. It's almost
like an auction because the more you pay, a lot of times the more traffic you get. You pay a premium
per click to get more clicks. But you're able to set that price and the minimum price is five cents and
there's no maximum. I've seen some keywords for $10.00, $20.00, $30.00 a click, which obviously
people don't want to do if obviously they're selling a book for $10.00 or $20.00.
So, you go into their system and you set up an account. You pick the keywords that you want to create
traffic for. In this case, let's say it's for, someone types in ‘little league’. Every time someone types in
‘little league’, you could have your ad shown that says, “Become a better little league baseball player,
learn to hit, learn to raise your batting average and hit more home runs.” So, every time someone types
in ‘little league’ into Google, you could have your ad shown. And let's say, you say, “I'll pay 10 cents,”
and it ranks your ad based on all the other advertisers in their system and what they'll pay.
But let's say you'll pay 10 cents and that kind of ranks you kind of high, so you're kind of towards the
top of where these ads show up so you get a steady flow of traffic. So, right away, I mean you could go
to Google Ad Words right now and set up an account and start generating traffic literally in 15 minutes
because it's a live system. And the reason why you want to do this first is that traffic, such as that little
league keyword or improve batting average, let's say someone types in that phrase and your ad will
show up for that.
That's about as targeted of traffic as you're going to get. People are actively looking for something.
They are typing in words or phrases related to something that you sell a solution to. So, if those people
click over from your ad onto your site, and they don't buy your product, you need to reevaluate your
marketing. You need to reevaluate the product that you're selling, how much you're selling it for and
you need to realize that it may not sell at all if it's not selling. So the reason you start with Pay-PerClick advertising first is because you can get it fast and it's extremely targeted.
So, if you can't make it work from this traffic method, you're not going to be able to make it work from
getting free search engine traffic or writing articles or getting partners or doing those other things. So,
you've got to start with this first. But the benefit of doing this first is once you do get some positive
results, you leverage those results to do more things. In other words, if one out of every ten people that
clicks on your ads, in other words, ten percent is buying your product, you can then go to other people
with baseball or other little league related sites in this example, and say, "Hi, I've got this product that
sells for $20.00. I'm interested in having you market it to your web site visitors. I'll pay you $10.00 for
every person that buys it from my site. And by the way, I've run some ads promoting it myself and
here are the results.”
You can expect to sell one about 1 out of every 100 or 1 out of 20 people if your results are about what
I've gotten from my own advertising. So, it's very important that you place these Pay-Per-Click ads
first because they are the most targeted and you can get the traffic right away and then you use that as a
springboard to then go and get more traffic.
And then just spend your time getting traffic from some of the free traffic methods because you'll know
it'll be worth spending your time because the other traffic was able to produce sales.
Dearl Miller:
That was interesting how in the example using Pay-Per-Click tracking and JVs all worked together to
create a massively powerful traffic source.
John Reese:
Yes, and what people will find is once they really get going in this stuff and really become a little more
advanced, everything kind of works together like a well-oiled machine, if you will. Like me
personally, over the last ten years, I've kind of created a systematic process, if you will, for generating
traffic to my web sites. And I've created over 1.5 billion web site visitors since I started on the Internet
back in 1990 but more importantly since I set up web sites in 1994, so basically the last ten years of
doing web site traffic generation.
And I've created several sites that have become some of the most popular in the world. I've had several
sites in the top 500 in the world for traffic. But the way I generate traffic to the hundreds of web sites
that I've had across all different markets, it's following a systematic process for getting going initially
and then using those results to get more traffic and then the next step you take and then the next step
you take and so this Pay-Per-Click traffic step is basically step one of what I have found to work the
best for getting things going and getting things ramped up as far as creating traffic to a web site.
Dearl Miller:
What is the number one key to Pay-Per-Click advertising?
John Reese:
The number one key to Pay-Per-Click is not letting the cost of what you're paying for click get out of
control. A lot of people kind of let their ego take over, especially when it creates like a bidding war for
popular keywords and they just start paying more and more per click. And they just want to get their
ad shown more and get more traffic and people just need to get over their egos. This whole process is
just about one thing and that's making money from a business standpoint.
And in order to make money from a business standpoint, you have to be smart about it. And in order to
make money from Pay-Per-Click traffic, you have to be able to drive traffic cost effectively, in other
words paying less and producing more as far as the sales you produce otherwise you'll lose money. So,
the most important thing is, and it relates back to tracking, all this stuff is related that I'm talking about.
It's all one big process. So, with Pay-Per-Click advertising you have to track all that individually.
So, it's not just you're going to place a bunch of a Pay-Per-Click ads with Google Ad Words and that's
going to be one source of tracking. No, each little ad that you place within Ad Words needs to be
tracked because some will make money and some won't and you just eliminate the ones that don't. And
then you keep running the ones that did make you money. So, the most important thing is, one, to keep
control of your costs. Don't get too crazy in bidding up your own ads with how much you're going to
Pay-Per-Click.
You always have to keep an eye on what the traffic is producing on the other end, on your end as far as
sales are concerned. So, you know what you can pay and then the other thing is just to make sure, in
order to do that, you have to track it. So, tracking and not letting your cost get out of control I would
say is the most critical thing for the Pay-Per-Click advertising.
Dearl Miller:
How do you decide exactly how much to bid?
John Reese:
Well, the way that you decide how much that you're willing to bid is basically you start with the
minimum, which would be five cents, and you see how much traffic that will produce on competitive
keywords that really won't produce any traffic at all. You may get zero because your ad just isn't
showing high enough for people to see it. So, if you can't get any traffic from the low end, in other
words from bidding the minimum, kind of bump it up maybe to ten cents and see what you can
produce.
And then what's great about this Google Ad Words system, in this example, is you can constantly go in
and change your bid and you can see the results change so you can stay on top of it. But the best thing
to do is start low and slowly bump it up to generate more and more traffic, but then also to see if you
generate more and more sales. So, the best way to start bidding is to start very, very low and then to
ramp things up.
However, there is an exception to this and this is an advanced technique that I teach people and it's a
little more advanced for some people, so, but I'll go ahead and explain it. Basically what you can do is,
once you realize the certain keywords that are producing profits for your business, when you set up
new listings for them, an amazing technique is actually to overbid your keyword.
Like pay more than what the top person is paying and in most cases you're going to lose a little bit of
money when you do that but the reason why you do that is on Google, for this example, the amount of
money that you pay is a formula between how much you're paying and how many people click on your
ad, what's called your click through rate. So, by overpaying initially, your value of what you create,
your calculation between your click through rate times what you're paying will be higher than a lot of
other people and you'll get a boost in your click through rate because the ads that show higher up
actually get clicked on more as a result naturally.
So, if you over bid in the beginning for a few hours and then lower your bid way down, you'll get a
bonus boost of a higher click through rate than you would have gotten if you would have started that ad
out with a very low cost. That's the one exception but for most people I suggest just get in there and go
for the minimum and just get your feet wet with trying to get some traffic and then slowly bumping up
your cost. So, when you get used to it and you know what keywords make you money, then you can
use that advanced technique of overbidding to get that extra boost for your click through ratio.
Dearl Miller:
What are some innovative and unique ways that you use to find the best keywords that convert and
make you money?
John Reese:
Well, some of the best ways that I use are using several different search engines. That will actually tell
you some other related terms and phrases that people are searching for when you put in a certain
keyword that you do know of. So, that's one of the ways. There are a bunch of what are called
"keyword suggestion tools" out there on the Internet, Overture, which is a big Pay-Per-Click search
engine. They have their own. Google, they actually have their own called the Google Sandbox Tool,
which you can type in something like golf and it will tell you a whole bunch of other keywords that you
could use.
So, those are some common ways most marketers know about. But some of the other ways are you can
actually go into different search engines, like I was just explaining in the beginning when you just
asked me that, and that is they have technology that tracks different types of topics and different types
of products that people search for, which is pretty unique that a lot of times you don't see with the other
keyword suggestion tools.
So, one of the ones I like to use is called www.Teoma.com, which is T-E-O-M-A.com, and if you go
there and you type in a certain keyword, you'll see that Teoma gives you on the right hand side of their
results, I think it says refine searches, and it will give you some suggested topics and phrases and
products that you can then use to expand your keyword list to hopefully sell more of your products to
those prospects that are typing in those exact phrases for your market.
Dearl Miller:
A major complaint a lot of people have with doing Pay-Per-Click is the restriction that several Pay-PerClick companies have with pop-ups. Is there any way to get around that pop-up restriction?
John Reese:
Well, there's actually a type of pop-up that you can create that is, their restriction is actually on
spawning a new window. That is their definition of pop-up. You can actually get the effect of having a
new window shown over your main web site page that people go to, which is called a DHTMail, and
this is all geek talk but it's called a DHTMail layer that looks like a pop-up window. And there are
people, a lot of people call this ‘popovers’ because it's kind of over another page but yet it doesn't
spawn a new window.
So, that's one way to get around it is to use, and there's software out there that can create these pop over
windows that will kind of slide over the top of the main window and that's a way to get around the
restriction. They don't mind you using those because it's not spawning a whole new browser window
that can really make someone angry.
Dearl Miller:
You mentioned that one of the benefits of using Pay-Per-Click is to find out whether your advertising
campaign is going to work or not, what if you find out that your advertising campaign doesn't work.
What do you do next?
John Reese:
Well, if you find out that your advertising campaign doesn't work, you can look in the want ads and
look for a job, I'm just kidding. What you can actually do is you can kind of go back to the drawing
board and you can kind of ask yourself, well, why didn't people buy? Or why didn't enough people buy
from those keywords that I placed ads for? Now sometimes you can actually place ads for the wrong
keywords. Like let's go back to the example I used before about, let's say you had a product for little
league baseball players to help them improve their hitting to raise their batting average.
So, maybe you try to place an ad for the keyword ‘baseball’. And then maybe you’re able to get some
people to click on your ad and go to your site. But no one is buying your little ebook for little leaguers.
Well, that doesn't necessarily mean that your product is a flop and that it won't make money. What it
probably means is you're not realizing the type of traffic that is coming to that baseball keyword. That
could be just some baseball fan that is typing in baseball looking for today's lineup for a game that's on
TV later or looking for stats on major league players or whatever else.
And they may have just clicked on your ad just because they were in a hurry and maybe that's like a lot
of people are when they type in baseball, especially if your ad is showing at the top. So, that's one
thing basically is misinterpreting the type of prospects that you're getting from a certain keyword. But
the other thing is if you're driving traffic and you know that the keyword you're using is pretty specific,
let's say you're bidding on a keyword in our example here for our little product that says become a
better baseball hitter.
Now if people are actually typing in that phrase and your ad is showing up and people are clicking over
to your product and they're not buying then that's a good indication that a couple of things, but it's a
good indication that your marketing isn't working. Now there are, we can, this could be a whole
another hour interview on that whole process but just some basics of that, it could be that your price is
too high. That people deem that the benefit from whatever it is that you're marketing to them, maybe
your book is 30 or 40 bucks and they feel like it's not worth it for that but if it was $10.00 they would
have bought it.
And $10.00 maybe the metrics works so that you can make a profit and then you could go on with your
business and then try to grow it. But basically you have to look at your marketing and understand why
it's not selling enough to those specific keywords. But again, starting with the Pay-Per-Click
advertising, those visitors are going to be so targeted that if they don't buy and if it doesn't work, you'll
want to go back to your site and change it, lower your price, change some things, change your offer,
maybe add some new bonuses and just try some things.
But if it still doesn't work, from a targeted Pay-Per-Click advertising, it's probably not going to work.
It's a good indication that there isn't a market for your product and it's not going to sell. And
unfortunately that's the nature of the game and sometimes that's how it is. But you can't take it
personally. Just go back to the drawing board and come up with another idea and throw it online.
Drive some traffic to it and see what happens. And just to throw out just a little tidbit here, I think the
people that make the most money online, one of the things, one of the reasons why I have been able to
build tremendous wealth on the Internet, I've generated millions and millions of dollars and that is
because I'm willing to try a lot of things and fail very quickly. I don't take it personally if I drive a
bunch of Pay-Per-Click-targeted traffic and then I don't happen to produce sales. I'm willing to realize
that not everything I try is going to make money and so I just go and try other things.
But that's basically what you have to do if you set up these Pay-Per-Click campaigns and you're not
getting positive results. The first thing you think of is “Hey, maybe this keyword isn't as targeted to
what I'm actually selling as I thought it was. Could that be the case?” The second thing would be
what's wrong with my marketing if they are targeted people for what it is I'm trying to sell. Is my
copywriting bad? Is my price too high? Do I not get across the message of why they need to buy my
product enough?
Or at a worst-case scenario, maybe there isn't a market for the product I'm trying to sell after all and
maybe I need to go back and try and just go and spend my time working on another project.
Dearl Miller:
Can you explain the difference between Pay-Per-Click and pay per action or pay per purchase?
John Reese:
Sure. On the Internet there is something called pay per performance and that encompasses Pay-PerClick, Pay Per Action, Pay Per Sale and all these other things but all these other things actually are
individually defined by what you're paying for. Pay-Per-Click is just that. You're paying for each
person that clicks on a specific ad that sends someone to your web site. Pay per sale would be you're
only going to pay a certain amount for all the sales that are produced from that advertising.
And that would be a good example of an affiliate program. That's like a pay per sale program of
paying a commission only after a sale is made. Now there are other types of pay per performance
advertising that would be what's called pay per action and in a lot of pay per actions or pay per lead
programs, you would pay based on how many opt ins they created for you. That would be the action
because that's an action and not a sale would be lead generation. So, you would pay you know 50 cents
for every opt in email subscriber they sent to you. So, that would be an example of pay per action.
Dearl Miller:
One last question on Pay-Per-Click, can affiliates use Pay-Per-Click?
John Reese:
Yes, and most affiliate programs, affiliates are allowed to use Pay-Per-Click advertising to try and drive
sales. Now there are some Pay-Per-Click search engines that will not allow affiliates to place Pay-PerClick listings. I believe Overture currently does not allow affiliates to drive traffic directly to an
affiliate URL site that they, because they don't allow you to send traffic directly to a site that you don't
own. Now Google Ad Words on the other hand, they will allow affiliates to drive traffic directly from
a Pay-Per-Click ad to an affiliate URL.
In other words, to another site that that affiliate may not even own and there are thousands upon
thousands of affiliates, it's funny you should ask this question, making some pretty good money by just
placing Pay-Per-Click listings and driving the traffic directly to their affiliate URL and making some
sales.
Dearl Miller:
Do you have any last thoughts on Pay-Per-Click?
John Reese:
My last few comments about Pay-Per-Click advertising is just I say this to everyone, just get started
doing "X.” So, for this Pay-Per-Click advertising method, just get started doing it. But then once you
get going with it, what you'll want to do is add more and more keywords so over time, you have
hundreds if not thousands of keywords for your target market so you're able to drive traffic from all, a
ton of different keyword phrases. So, start slow and just get something going.
Just take some action to get some results and then as they start working and you start seeing those
results, roll that out more and more by placing more and more Pay-Per-Click listings for more and
more keywords.
Dearl Miller:
John, what is your third web traffic tip?
John Reese:
My third web traffic tip is that search engine optimization should be done on multiple sites and multiple
pages but not the main site that is set up to sell. And here's what I mean by that. Let's say you have a
web site that is set up to actually sell some type of product or service or maybe it's set up to promote an
affiliate product or service, in other words, that you're just earning affiliate commissions off something.
But either way, what most people end up doing, which is a major mistake is that they tweak and they
change that site that they have, maybe it's just their one site, but they change it so much to try to get it
optimized so it will rank high in search engines and bring them free search engine traffic. Now this is a
major mistake because what they end up doing is they end up changing this site and they end up
sacrificing the good marketing of how that site was put together. In other words, put together to sell
and so, by tweaking it to try and get the rank high, they end up making the page less and less effective
so it doesn't sell as many products and services.
So, the right way to go about it is to create a whole bunch of other pages and other sites that are
specifically tweaked and modified for search engine optimization that will then funnel traffic back to
the one site that is set up to sell.
Dearl Miller:
John, can you provide an example of that?
John Reese:
Sure. Let's say, again, let's go back to your little example of we have this little ebook that we are trying
to teach little league baseball players how to hit the ball better and improve their batting average. So,
the mistake that most people would make is they try to change the format of this site and selling this
little ebook to get higher rankings in the search engines. They may try to add the word hit a baseball
more times on that page or they may even put it into sentences so where the sentences don't even kind
of make sense anymore but they're just trying so hard to get that page ranked high to get more free
traffic that they are willing to have people come to their site and scratch their heads of why they've
even said that.
So, that's a big mistake people make so in this example what you'd want to do is create a whole bunch
of other pages. Don't touch your one page that's created and structured to try to sell people that ebook.
But create other little pages like with specific articles on becoming a better hitter or you know, specific
information on becoming a better baseball player and those pages can contain the baseball keywords
more throughout them to create what's called a higher keyword density, in other words to try to get
some more search engine traffic to become a more relevant page for certain keywords.
But you'd want to set up a whole bunch of other pages related to baseball and little league baseball and
becoming a better player and all those pages then link over to the one page that you’re not going to
mess with that's set up to sell your product. So, that's the example of creating multiple pages and not
messing with the main page that's set up to sell.
Dearl Miller:
Are these feeder pages set up more as gateway pages for search engines or as landing pages for
consumers?
John Reese:
Actually it's a great question and if you're smart, you'll actually create these pages to do both. You are
creating these pages to bring in some free search engine traffic but if those pages aren't designed to
kind of be like a landing page, in other words, if that page just has a bunch of gibberish on it with the
keywords included, that page may rank high in the search engines but the people visit it and the page
makes no sense whatsoever, they're not going to get very positive results from that.
So, it's a great question and these pages do kind of need to be formulated as landing pages that make
sense. So, they are optimized for the search engines but at the same time, they motivate people to take
the action, basically encourage people to take the action of clicking a link to go visit your page that's
promoting your book and selling your book.
Dearl Miller:
I've seen software that claims they produce pages like this. What do you think of those programs? Do
you recommend people set up pages up manually or use a software program to create thousands of
pages that would work for this situation?
John Reese:
Well, the answer is people should do both because they both have their benefits. They both can bring
in some good, a good amount of free traffic. The pages people will create manually will get, they'll
create less traffic so to speak but they'll get more people to click over and buy products because they
are formulated as landing pages, as marketing pages that will encourage more people to buy. The
pages that are created by different software products are actually good for generating a mass flow of
traffic but it's more of a challenge to squeeze value out of that traffic.
But even if you could route some of that traffic over to your site with just random links throughout
these pages that the software creates, that's traffic that you didn't have in the first place and it's pretty
much free, so I do recommend and teach people to do both, because both of them have benefits. Both
of them have value.
Dearl Miller:
How do you optimize the feeder pages? What are some techniques that ensure that you get both search
engine traffic but also high click through?
John Reese:
Well, the key thing to keep in mind is that the content on the page is relevant to the theme of whatever
it is that you're trying to sell and whatever it is, the types of keywords and phrases that you're trying to
optimize the page for. So, step one of all this in this whole process, and again this relates back to the
system that I have for doing all this, but the initial process of this is doing keyword research to find out,
to find the phrases that people are typing into search engines, that are looking, whatever it is that you
have to sell, something that's targeted.
So, once you do your keyword research and you know these phrases, you'll actually set up these feeder
pages, these little landing pages for specific groups of these keywords, like hit a baseball, or best minor,
I mean little leaguer, whatever it is like for that example, but you'll set up these little pages, but the
most important thing to keep in mind is that they need to be highly relevant to a specific keyword.
So, if you're setting up a page that is optimized for become a better hitter, like if that's the keyword,
become a better hitter, then having an article that says, “Become a better hitter,” and optimizing it for
the [inaudible] is having that keyword used quite a few times like become a better hitter, here's how
you can become a better hitter, here are 12 ways to become a better hitter and mixing that throughout
the page without going overboard.
But the fact that the article and the content is themed and related to the specific keyword that you're
targeting in this search engine, that you're trying to get traffic for, in other words that's the most critical
key is that it's relevant and that it makes sense and that it obviously uses the keyword throughout the
page.
Dearl Miller:
Here's a question I get asked all the time. Do you recommend that people optimize a page for multiple
keyword terms or only one? I've always told people to just focus one or two keyword phrases at the
most. Would you agree with that or how do you feel about that?
John Reese:
I would absolutely agree with you. There's no reason why you should try to lump a whole a bunch of
keywords on a given page when you can just make ten pages for just ten different keywords. And if
you make the ten pages for ten different keywords or like you said, maybe for one or two keywords,
you have more control over the page to do what I just said, was to make sure the content was relevant
for that specific keyword. So, one it makes more sense. Two, the search engines will like it better and
three, it will get better results in getting people over to your main site that sells.
So, yes, you're absolutely correct and I share the same opinion that you want to set up these little pages
for only one or two specific keyword phrases and not just a whole bunch.
Dearl Miller:
You mentioned that people often sacrifice good marketing for search engine optimization. What is the
number one mistake that you see when people try do that?
John Reese:
Well, the number one mistake that I think people do is that they just try to, they tweak their content so
much to try to have so many of the keywords that they are targeting the search engine for, used so
many times, this kind of goes back to what I said before, it kind of starts making the content not make
sense. And people will see that. It looks unnatural that you're using this phrase again and again and
again. People would be turned off by that. But I would think that the number one thing they do is they
tweak the format of their page.
They get a software product or something that may tell you that you need X number of words on the
page. So, they are trying to take, let's say a site that they've set up and tested and got to sell a specific
product, they are trying to take and it's basically like shoving a square block into a round hole. They
are trying to take something that's proven to sell and conform it to whatever the search engine wants, so
many words, certain words repeated so many times and again it just creates something that is very
unnatural and it will create something that is very ineffective.
It will hurt the selling power of that page and people will sell less product as a result of trying to
manipulate to be more towards what the search engine wants instead of being more towards what a
consumer wants to see to be convinced to buy the product.
Dearl Miller:
Thank you, John. Do you have any last words on search engine optimization and using feeder pages?
John Reese:
Just like everything else, you basically want to just get started and set up a few of these feeder pages
and get some results. But on an ongoing basis, you want to create more and more of these pages so
eventually maybe you'll have hundreds if not thousands of them because each one that you create
becomes like an asset for your business and can bring you more and more traffic. As you can imagine,
if you had ten, whatever traffic that will produce will be less than if you had a hundred or ultimately if
you had a thousand.
So, basically, my final words on setting up multiple pages to feed traffic to your site from the search
engine is to create more and more of these pages over time. You don't have to do it all in one day but
spend a little time every month to add a few new ones to your little network so that over time you're
adding more and more pages that the search engines can find and then other people can find you
through the search engine to end up on your site. You get a steady flow of free traffic that can produce
leads and sales for you.
Dearl Miller:
What is your fourth web traffic tip?
John Reese:
My fourth web traffic tip is that an affiliate program is absolutely critical for maximum traffic exposure
online. Now a lot of Internet marketers that have been online for any period of time have heard about
affiliate programs. They know that affiliate programs can be important for making money, for creating
traffic, but people really need to understand that having your own affiliate program is probably the
number one way to generate web site traffic on the Internet.
It's one of the most powerful ways to generate low cost and no risk traffic because you end up getting
hundreds or even thousands of people from all over the Internet and all over the world that will link to
your web site and send you traffic at no risk or no cost to you where you'll only pay a commission if a
sale is made. So, an affiliate program is the most powerful thing you can do.
Not only to generate a bunch of free web site traffic, but to create a bunch of steady web site traffic that
will be predictable and stable on a day-to-day basis, which will also bring in predictable and stable
sales on an ongoing basis. So, an affiliate program is absolutely critical to reach maximum traffic
exposure online.
Dearl Miller:
Can you give an example of how you can use an affiliate program to create traffic?
John Reese:
Sure, it's really easy. Let's go back to our example of selling this little ebook that teaches little league
baseball players to become better hitters. Let's say you go out there and you find, you would set up an
affiliate program and you'd have software that runs the affiliate program and it basically allows other
web sites out there, in this case, other like baseball related web sites to link to your site that promotes
your little book in this example that teaches people how to become a better hitter and whenever
someone clicks on that link and comes over to your site and buys, the originating site gets paid a
commission on the sale that is generated.
So, as you can imagine, if you had a thousand sites out there linking to your site promoting your
products and they'd be promoting your product because what? The incentive is that they get paid if
somebody clicks the link and goes over and buys. But from a traffic standpoint, if you had a thousand
web sits across the Internet linking to you via your affiliate program to promote your product, you can
just get traffic from all those different sites, that will be funneled over to your site on an ongoing basis.
Every single day, as people go across those other partner sites and see those links and click on them,
it'll generate traffic for your site. So, it's very, very powerful because you could end up with tens of
thousands of affiliates bringing you thousands upon thousands of visitors to your site a day and you’re
not even paying for that traffic. You're only paying a cost for it after someone gives you money. So,
it's basically like how many times would you pay $10.00 for $20.00 in return?
So, you would do it all day long and that's exactly what an affiliate program is and that's exactly how it
works.
Dearl Miller:
And again metrics comes into play when doing affiliates too.
John Reese:
Yes.
Dearl Miller:
What's the best way to set up an affiliate program?
John Reese:
Well, the best way, I guess I could answer this two ways, the easiest way and then along with the best
way. If you happened to sell digitally downloadable products like a little ebook, an information
product or software product, which I say this because that's about probably one of the most common
and most popular types of products for entrepreneurs that are trying to sell things on the Internet.
So, if you are doing one of those things, selling a little ebook, information or a software product, the
easiest way to get going I would recommend is to you use ClickBank at www.ClickBank.com because
they have a system where they will actually collect the payments for you and then they actually have a
built in affiliate program for you ready to go and ready to use. So, you sign up with them, you become
a merchant in their system and whammo, you're ready to go. You're ready to take payments. You don't
even need a merchant account. They handle it for you.
They'll even pay your affiliates. They have all the tracking software that tracks your affiliate program
traffic. All you do is just give out the URL to potential affiliates. They put it on their site and their
system manages everything. So, if someone's new to this and they want to get going and they are
selling like a little ebook or piece of software, I highly recommend ClickBank, the easiest way and the
fastest way to get going with this. Now as far as your question, what's the best way, if you sell nondownloadable stuff, you cannot use ClickBank.
You'll need to use other types of methods for running an affiliate program and basically you would buy
a piece of software or you can subscribe to an affiliate program service that will manage your affiliate
program for you. And then you'll use that software or that service to basically do what ClickBank will
do for you automatically if you're using their system. So, this is a wide ranged question because there
are a lot of different types of software out there and it kind of goes back to the tracking question about
tracking software.
And I don't mean to make it a copout answer but the best thing for people is just to type in, you know
like ‘affiliate program software’ in Google. Go and try out; a lot of these softwares have a free trial; go
try out the free software. See if it meets your needs for your business and then make a decision based
on which one you're going to use because a lot of the softwares, they have different functions and they
have different things that certain business need and other ones don't.
So, for me personally, I just ended up having a programmer design something custom for my own
needs. So, the best way to do it is to make sure you get a piece of software that you like and that you’re
happy with and meets your needs. But the fastest and easiest way to do it if people are selling
something downloadable is just to sign up for an account with ClickBank and just get going with their
system because that is the easiest way.
Dearl Miller:
What are some characteristics of a good affiliate software program or service?
John Reese:
Some of the best things to look for in an affiliate program management software is that they have
detailed reporting to the affiliates and again, amazingly, all the stuff comes back together. And what
I'm getting to is it allows tracking for your affiliates to track individual campaigns and ads they set up
to promote your affiliate program. So, it's just like the first traffic tip I talked about and why it's so
important to track traffic sources individually. Well, it's important to find an affiliate program software
that allows your affiliates to do exactly that and some of them have it and some of them don't.
So, that's one of the most important things to look for and affiliate program software is pretty simple.
All it's doing is it's giving special URLs little accounts in the system to your affiliates that will track the
traffic they send and ultimately track the sales. So, the biggest and most important thing that separates
these different types of programs are the ones that allow what's called campaign tracking, which is to
allow the affiliate to track individual traffic sources, campaigns or ads that they run so they can figure
out which ones are working best.
Otherwise, the ones that don't offer it all the traffic is just lumped together. The affiliate won't know
which of their efforts are producing more sales. So, that's the key thing to look for when trying to
evaluate affiliate program software. The other thing to look for is kind of reliability and kind of the
only way to do that is to do a little research and see if you can find some reviews on software or
feedback from other people that have used it. And you may want to email them and ask them what
kind of volume they are used to and how much traffic their site gets if that is a concern for you. So,
you can kind of investigate the reliability of the software to make sure it's stable.
Dearl Miller:
People have the option of using both affiliate services and affiliate software. I've noticed that some of
the affiliate services have a high setup fee and take a percentage of your sales. Would you recommend
that people use a service or a software?
John Reese:
Yeah, what you said is exactly true and I would recommend for most entrepreneurs that they just use
software. Anytime that you can have something that is on your server and that you'll be in control of,
you're almost always much better off then using some kind of third party service and you’re exactly
right. The third party services charge thousands of dollars in set up fees and sometimes they do take a
cut of your sales. So, yeah, the best thing for entrepreneurs and for marketers is just to use your own
affiliate program software.
And again, that is if you have to use your own software and your business model won't allow you to
use just like ClickBank and use their entire system. So, but yeah, you would be much better off using
affiliate program software than using one of those expensive services.
Dearl Miller:
Creating an affiliate program will develop steady, predictable and stable traffic and steady, predictable
and stable sales. Can you explain why that is so?
John Reese:
Sure. Once you're able to get a lot of affiliates in your affiliate program and they set up links on their
web pages linking back to your site, the affiliates are kind of, basically, forget that they've even done it.
Because it becomes a very passive affect so to speak. They don't need to stay active. It's not like they
are constantly promoting it. They put links on their pages and if their visitors happen to click over
from those links and buy your product they get paid, which is often what happens in the process.
So, once you have tons of people that have actually set up these links, it kind of just set it and forget it.
They kind of set up and forget about it and go on and focus on other things. But what happens is, you
have eventually have hundreds if not thousands of pages all over the Internet linking to your site
through your affiliate program and just on a day-to-day basis you just get a steady flow of people that
see those links across different pages, that click on it and end up on your site checking out your
product.
And what you'll find is that those links produce a steady result. You know since those thousand links
out there, let's just give an example of a number, they produce X amount of visitors usually in a month
and those numbers are pretty stable. They change if the affiliate starts getting a lot more traffic, then
you'll start getting more traffic or if in some case, if an affiliate starts getting less traffic, you could get
less traffic. But it's pretty stable once you get, anytime you do anything scientifically that involves
more and more numbers that usually produces more and more stability.
So, affiliate programs are no exception. The wider distribution you can build with having more and
more people linked to you, the more stable the incoming traffic will be and the sales that that will
produce and so it produces a stable flow of leads and sales for you through your affiliate program.
That's why affiliate programs are the most critical element, I believe, of doing business online and
being able to generate traffic through the help of other web sites.
Dearl Miller:
Can you explain why affiliate programs are the most low cost, risk free traffic?
John Reese:
Sure, affiliate programs are the most low cost and free traffic method just simply because of kind of
what I explained before when we started talking about affiliate programs. You're getting all this traffic
from affiliates. You don't have to pay them for it up front. There's no risk to you because if they don't
convert to sales, it doesn't matter because you're not paying for it. And it's low cost because that's all
calculated into the fact that you’re paying a commission only after the sale is produced.
You're paying out the $5.00 only after you've got $10.00 in your pocket. So, I cannot stress enough
how powerful an affiliate program is for generating traffic and when you get more and more people;
here's the most critical thing to an affiliate program; it has a viral effect to it. That as more people link
to your web site and you can have a link. Like the best thing to do is put a link at the bottom of like
your home page that says affiliate program where you promote your affiliate program.
Well, as more and more people link to your web site, more people are exposed to that link and they
learn about your affiliate program and then a small percentage of those become affiliates and then start
linking to your site and now you get more people coming to your site and then more people end up on
your affiliate program page and then a few other people join. So, it has this viral growing effect of just
producing more and more and more traffic over time. Now I've run affiliate programs for a bunch of
different products that I've sold on the Internet and over time I always see that effect, more and more
traffic, more and more sales, more and more affiliates.
It's just like the snowball effect. So, the affiliate program is the most powerful thing you can do online
if you sell your own products and services. If you don't have your own affiliate program, you're
absolutely crazy. You're absolutely just insane because it's the best deal going on the Internet. It is no
cost to you. And it can produce thousands and thousands of dollars in sales at no cost whatsoever to
you.
Dearl Miller:
Now that we understand the importance of an affiliate program and how to physically set up the
affiliate software, how do we get people to become our affiliates? How do we recruit affiliates?
John Reese:
The best way to get affiliates is there are actually what are called affiliate directories that are out there
that you can submit your affiliate program to. So, that's one way to do it. And so they'll basically have
a listing in a directory of affiliate programs under a certain category for whatever the market is for your
product. So, you can do that. That's one thing. But the other way is just to go out and actively do joint
ventures with people.
I think we are going to talk about joint ventures in a little bit because that's one of my other tips but
when you go out and do joint ventures with people, where you basically say, “Hey I have this product
on baseball selling for $20.00. I'll pay you $10.00 for each sale you refer to me and I see that you have
a newsletter on baseball. Do you think you could promote it to your newsletter and try to send some
traffic my way? I'll track it and for every sale that's produced, I'll pay you.”
So, what happens is when you just do one of those deals, other people on that list of that person with
the baseball newsletter, might be, and this happens a lot more than people realize, might be one of that
person’s competitors that are just checking out what that person sends to his list. Well, when he sees
him promoting that book, he may say, “Well, maybe I should promote this book to my list as well and
make money because I know this guy doesn't do anything that doesn't make money.”
So, what you see is when you start doing little deals with people to kind of jumpstart your affiliate
program, more people will jump on the bandwagon so to speak and become affiliates themselves and
then it will just start rolling. But that's how you actively recruit affiliates. You just find targeted sites
in your market. You send them an email, say, “Hey look, I got an affiliate program. I sell a product.
Here's what's in it for you. Here's what you can expect if you send traffic to my site.
“I'll manage it all for you and I'll pay you month to month,” or once a week or however you're going to
do it and then you just slowly start getting people to do it. I mean you start getting people to join the
affiliate program, they'll link to your site and then again you end up having that residual effect like I
talked about before that viral effect where as more people link to you, more people are exposed to your
affiliate program, more people will become affiliates then they link to you and then it just snowballs
that whole process all over again.
Dearl Miller:
One roadblock to setting up an effective affiliate program is getting the affiliates to actively promote
your product. Do you have any recommendations of once you have affiliates, how to get them more
active?
John Reese:
Well, sure. The number one thing to make affiliates active in an affiliate program is training the
affiliates. You have to have training materials for your affiliate to teach them what they can go out and
do in order to have the best chance of success in your affiliate program. So, obviously you want to give
them ads for them to use. You want to have some little banner ads and graphics designed for them to
use to put on their web pages and you want to write articles for them to put on their site to promote
your product or you want to write an endorsement they can send to their list.
But you also want to create little training tools to kind of give them tips and information about how
they can go about promoting your site. For example, if you do a JV with somebody or you get an
affiliate to send an email to their list, let's say you and that person brainstorm what they should actually
send to the list, and you come up with let's do a review of my book and why the original person that's
sending it to their list thought your book was so great. And he picked out ten parts of the book that
were really important for an arcade of little league baseball players to become better players and the ten
tips, well, you can then take that information and leverage that to then train your other affiliates and
say, “Hey look, recently one of my affiliates did a review of my book. Here's how he went and
reviewed it. He mentioned some tips in the book and then he recommended the book and I think you
should do the same thing for your list if you have one or to your web site visitors because it's already
proven to be very effective.”
So, that's how you get your affiliates active and get them to sell.
I mean if the money isn't motivation enough, and it usually is, that's why they join the affiliate program
in the first place, the way to really get them going is to give them instructions, to give them training of
hey, go and do this, copy and paste this message and just fire it off to your list and get some activity
going. And that's the biggest thing is to make it easy for people just to get going. Give them
something where they don't have to do any work. Let them just copy and paste it. Push a button and
get going.
And once an affiliate starts to see any results at all and this is how we are anyway as human beings, and
especially as marketers, when we get any results at all for our brain, that feedback, in other words what
do you think is going to happen when an affiliate sends something to their list and starts, and they make
300 bucks. That's really going to motivate them to take some more action to generate more traffic and
more sales to your program so they can hopefully make more money.
So, just getting them going by giving them good materials they can use and giving them some good
basic training and steps for them to get started is what I would recommend for people to get their
affiliates active.
Dearl Miller:
Thank you, John. Do you have any last comments on using affiliates to create traffic?
John Reese:
My last few comments just basically kind of relate back to what I already said. An affiliate program is
the most powerful thing you can possibly do. And if you have your own products and services that
you're trying to sell on the Internet, you're absolutely crazy if you don't set up an affiliate program right
away. Just get going with it. Just get it set up. Start getting some affiliates sending you traffic and
you'll be really surprised how quickly that affiliate program will grow for you.
And how you'll see the traffic numbers start to grow on a day-to-day basis and you'll see your business
grow as a result. And running an affiliate program is actually a lot of fun because at least for me
personally, it's fun to see more and more traffic to come in and see more and more sales come in and
that's what an affiliate program is all about. It's the ultimate viral marketing tool and something people
should get going right away if they sell their own products and services.
Dearl Miller:
What is your fifth web traffic tip?
John Reese:
My fifth web traffic tip is that content is king on the Internet and because of that fact, Internet
marketers must continuously add new content to their site. And this content can be added whether they
write it or whether they buy it or whether they borrow it from someone else. Now the reason for this is
people come back to web sites and search engines also love web sites that are based on content, themed
content related to a certain market.
So, in order for someone to maximize the traffic they get from a web site, they need to continuously be
adding new content to the web site to bait the search engines, in other words to get the search engines
to come back and index these other pages or just to get people to come back to read other content. So,
there are three basic ways to accomplish this. You can write your own content, such as articles, or you
can pay someone to write content for you for your web pages.
You could pay someone to actually write articles related to your target market of whatever it is you sell.
Or you can borrow it. You can go out there and actually find that other people have written articles
related to your target market and you can borrow those articles and put them on your site. And then
basically, all three types of these methods for creating new content ends up creating new web site
visitors from people coming back to site that have been there at another time and from what you'll
benefit through the search engines when they index those pages.
They can bring even more people to your site.
Dearl Miller:
John, do you have an example of that?
John Reese:
Sure. Because people only come back to sites that have content that they are interested in or in order to
get search engines to index pages, and search engines love content laden pages. They love content. So,
in order to, and it kind of goes back to our, when we were talking about search engines and creating
this feeder pages of content, well in order to create more and more of those pages, you have to have
content to add to your pages for it. So, in order to take advantage of the traffic you could produce by
having good content in your site, you need to constantly by adding new content.
Well, where do you get the content from? Well, there is basically three ways to get the content. You
can write it yourself, which is certainly a feasible method for doing so. You can buy it. In other words,
you can pay someone to write content for you. You could actually pay someone to write articles
related to a product you sell and then add those to your site. Or you can borrow it.
And in that case of borrowing it, you can go out and find, like you can go to an article directory like
www.GoArticles.com and you can find tons of articles that people have written where they will allow
you to copy and paste them and put them on your web pages as long as you leave like a little resource
box that gives them credit that links to their site. That's the benefit and value in it for them. But you
can go and borrow that content and put it on your page, your pages, for this exact purpose.
So, there are actually people that do that, just use articles from other people and they are able to
generate some search engine traffic from it but because content is everything on the Internet, you
constantly need to be adding new content to your sites in order to generate new traffic as result from
using that particular method. So, because you need to add new content to your site and because it's so
important especially to generate thousands and thousands of visitors through search engines, you have
to kind of put together a plan for yourself to add new content on a week-to-week basis.
And even if that's just adding one new article to your site every single week or every single month, you
need to have that little plan so over time you're constantly growing the amount of content you had. It's
just like we were talking about those feeder pages. You're constantly having more and more pages over
time so you can get more and more traffic.
Now there are some really advanced methods that we don't have time to talk about but there are some
methods that I personally use to generate hundreds, if not thousands of content pages to be able to
attract the search engines that bring me tons and tons of traffic and there are some automated methods
for doing so. Maybe we'll have to talk about that in a future interview because it's more advanced and
it's a lot more techniques to get in to. But there are some more methods for adding this new content
and doing it almost automated so it doesn't take a lot of manual labor.
Dearl Miller:
Can you talk about the characteristics of good content?
John Reese:
Well, the characteristics of good content, it's very much related to the feeder pages we were talking
about because a lot of the content will be used to create those feeder pages. And that's just the fact that
it's relevant. It's theme based for whatever it is related to your target market of your product and that it
contains the keywords that are related to your market. So, and we talked about that before and so that
you'll find some of this content. A lot of this really good, rich content will create, will have multiple
keywords in it for your, related to your products or services, related to your market.
So, the biggest thing is just that using content, the number one rule to keep in mind for people is that
it's relevant content. If it's not relevant to your market and what you sell, don't even waste your time
with it because you're not going to get any value from it whatsoever.
Dearl Miller:
One thing we've debated about in Trafficology in the past is about using public domain content in order
to make search engines happy. What are your thoughts on that? Do you agree with the concept of
using public domain content or do you think that that should not be done?
John Reese:
Yes, I absolutely do. Using public domain content is part of my overall strategy in this system that I
use for myself. That would fall into the category of borrowing it. You know we just talked about three
ways to add new content, writing it, buying it, or borrowing it. And that falls into borrowing it. You
can find public domain content that is out there on the Internet and you can use it on your pages to
create these bait pages that I call them to get the search engines to come crawl and then list those pages
and it's a great way to add a large amount of content that is again relevant.
You want to make sure whatever the public domain book or article or whatever type of content it is, is
relevant. Because that's the key here, it's got to be relevant content, themed to whatever the market is
of whatever it is you sell. But yes, I think public domain in works are a powerful way to generate web
site traffic.
Dearl Miller:
Thank you, John. Do you have any last comments on using content?
John Reese:
Sure, the thing about adding content is just that people need to be disciplined about it. It doesn't matter.
You don't need to go out and add thousands and thousands of pages to your site today. But just do
something. Add a couple here and there. Add a few this week. Add a few next week and you'll be
pleasantly surprised that you grow this residual effect of content over time where you end up with more
and more of it. Because if you do just a little bit each week, six months from now, you are going to
have a lot of it.
And a year from now, you're going to have even more than that and you'll really benefit from all the
free traffic that you'll get as a result. So, and that goes right into the system I use personally. Again, I
have my own methodology and my own A to Z system of what I do first, what I do second, what I do
third and what I do for the 300th thing and I'm sharing bits and pieces of that with you and part of that
is adding this new content. And by following a system like this or being disciplined to add things in
order to get more and more traffic you must be doing things that over time build momentum for you.
And momentum is the number one keyword here to focus on. You're basically creating this snowball
effect. If you want thousands and thousands of visitors or in my case millions and millions of visitors,
you must basically start at square one and follow a process to roll that traffic up and to grow it and
grow it over time. And one of the ways to do that, the way I personally use, like everything I'm
teaching you here is things that I personally use and do in my own systematic process.
You know we only have time to cover a few of these things here today in this interview but if I could
tell you about my whole system, it's hundreds and hundreds of things but it's all a very interconnected
disciplined thing that as I do a little bit of work, each week or each month, just like I want you to do to
add new content, six months from now you'll have so much momentum from doing a few little things
here and there that you just build this snowball effect. So, my final word on content is just make sure
you add some of it period.
Doesn't matter how much you do, just do some of it on an ongoing basis and every week that goes by,
you know I have this phrase that I use that when I consult people and teach marketing and how to make
money online, and people get a lot out of it and I would like to share that real quick and basically what
it is is your goal as an Internet marketer is to give yourself a pay raise on a week to week basis.
So, if you could just grasp that for a minute, whoever is listening to this or whoever is eroding this and
you could just think of if I were able to build momentum so I'm getting more and more traffic on a
week to week basis and more and more sales as a result of my actions, that's like getting a pay raise
every single week and that's what I want every single one to do that's able to be exposed to this
information that I'm sharing.
And that is if you do things on an ongoing basis like add new content every week or even every month,
over time you are just getting a pay raise because all these little things you're doing will generate more
traffic and then more sales for you and hey you'll just make more and more and more money with your
business.
Dearl Miller:
What is your sixth web traffic tip?
John Reese:
My sixth web traffic tip is that banner ads are now one of the most overlooked sources of targeted
traffic online. In the late 1990's when the dot com boom was still in effect and everything was going
crazy, people were selling banner ads for $40.00/$50.00 cpm, which means $40/$50.00 just to have a
banner ad shown 1,000 times on a web page. And then when the dot com bubble burst and crashed and
all the ad rates just fell and all these companies went out of business, the banner ad actually got a really
bad name because it was kind of related to the dot com boom in the first place.
But banner ads can actually create a steady flow of cheap and targeted traffic for any web site. You can
now buy banner ads just really dirt-cheap. You can get them for about $1.00 to $1.50 cpm and even
sometimes those will be targeted. So, you could have a thousand banner ads shown on certain sites for
just $1.00. So, it's a very, very inexpensive deal that can end up bringing you a lot of good leads and
sales. And so, banner ads they are very overlooked and more and more marketers need to look into
using them and testing them as a viable traffic generation source.
Dearl Miller:
John, most people are fairly familiar with banner ads. They've been around for a long time. What are
some unique things about banner ads that most people might not be aware of?
John Reese:
Well, one of the things that most people might not be aware of about banner ads is that they come in all
different shapes and sizes. You can buy, you know when most people think of a banner ad, they think
of the traditional size, which I believe is 468 pixels wide and I believe it's by 60 pixels tall. It's that
long rectangle that you kind of see on top of a lot of web pages. But what is also considered a banner
ad is any shape little graphical ad that is shown on a web page and you can buy, you can get what's
called skyscrapers, which are huge vertical ads that will show down the side of a page.
Some people have probably seen some of those or little micro buttons which are little tiny rectangles.
So, there are, for one there are all kinds of banner ads sizes and you can go right now on the Internet
and actually buy those ads and have them placed on targeted sites to drive traffic to your own site and
hopefully for you to make sales. Again, you'll track that traffic and that you can make sales. But
another thing that people don't realize probably about banner ads is that, your able to buy them, using
multiple different, several different pricing models and just real quickly I'll go over what those are.
The most common pricing model for banner ads is what's called on a cpm basis and that means cost per
thousand. Don't ask me why it's not cpt. I've always wondered that myself but apparently it's a Roman
numeral thing or something that came from the printing industry. But it means cost per thousand. So,
you can buy banner ads on a cpm basis. So, if banner ads have a price of $5.00 cpm, that just means
you pay $5.00 and for your $5.00 you're banner ad will show 1,000 times.
So, that's your cost to have it, to buy impressions. Impressions is just having it shown on a web page.
So, if the page is loaded to a visitor, even if he's not paying attention to it, that still counts. That's the
most common pricing model for them. You buy it by how many. What you're going to pay for how
many 1,000 times it's going to be shown on a site or on a web page. Now another pricing model is
actually cost per click. Very much like the Pay-Per-Click advertising that you can get through Google
Ad Words or through Overture or through any other Pay-Per-Click search engines.
And that is you only pay based on the number of people that click on your banner ad that end up going
over to your web site. So, those are pretty much the two basic pricing models. There are some hybrid
models that some people have where you can kind of pay a combination of both. But those are just a
couple of things to answer your question about things that some people may not realize about banner
ads. But I just want to say this real quick since we are talking about banner ads and they are kind of
overlooked. Most people don't realize it.
Marketers that need to drive traffic to their web sites need to understand this; the only thing that matters
is for you to drive traffic. In other words this is your goal as a marketer if you want to make the max
amount of money you can from the Internet. The goal for you is to drive traffic, cost effective traffic,
in other words traffic that produces a profitable result for you. Your goal is to drive traffic from every
profitable means available to you. So, just because you may not like how banner ads look or you may
think they are goofy, annoying or stupid or whatever, whatever the case maybe.
It doesn't matter. All that matters is if you're able to use them and generate profitable traffic, you need
to be doing so. And that's why in the system I have for myself; I do so many different things. See,
most marketers make the mistake of focusing on just one type of traffic generation, a process, a method
or strategy and I would honestly have to say that the reason I have been very successful on the Internet
and I have made millions of dollars on the Internet is because I use many, many different strategies. I
don't have an ego about a certain strategy.
If I figure out a certain strategy and I'm able to get a bunch of traffic, I don't only use that method. I
don't stay so focused on that method. I don't care. I want to drive all the traffic I can to my site from
every possible place that I can find and obviously dedicate the time in doing so or the money in doing
so if it's something I have to pay for as long as it produces a profit. That's all that matters. It's all about
making money here. It's not about doing things that you think are great or what other people say.
Doesn't matter and if anyone out there reading or listening to this interview and they're focused on one
or two ways of generating traffic, they are totally missing the boat. They are actually hundreds of ways
to drive profitable traffic to a web site, hundreds of ways. And I'm obviously, we're restricted with
time here and I can't go into all of them, but I use hundreds of them on an ongoing basis because they
are able to produce profit for me and if I were only using one or two, like if I was only focused on
search engine optimization or only focused on Google Ad Words or only focused on my affiliate
program, I would only be making a small percentage of what I am able to make.
So, banner ads are another way to drive potentially profitable traffic to a web site. So, people need to
test them. That's the key people need to test every available traffic generation method that's available
to you and see if it will either return a profit based on the money you spent for it if it costs something or
if it's a free method. See if it's worth your time. You know, if you can drive some sales from a free
method but if it takes a thousand hours of your time in order to make $10.00 it's probably not worth
your time.
So, there is no such thing as completely free traffic. Everything has a cost associated with it. Whether
it's money you spend to buy it or whether it's your time you spend to generate the traffic, there's still a
relative cost associated with to it. But anyway, not trying to get off topic here but, so, banner ads,
they're a very overlooked source of traffic that more and more marketers really need to investigate and
test out and I've had certain sites that I have set up on the Internet to sell different types of products and
I'm not going to mention which ones because I'm very guarded about a lot of the sites that I create and
so anyone doing business online should be guarded about their business.
And I have this saying, the minute you start telling people on the Internet how you are making money
is the moment you no longer have a business because it's so easy for people to clone what you’re doing,
so you need to be very careful about what you do. For this example that I'm telling you about, I've had
sites before where I've run some banner ads and found the banner ads for the site produced thousands
upon thousands of dollars a month for that specific site, far more money than was produced from other
methods, such as Google Ad Words or Overture or search engine optimization or other things.
And conversely I've had other projects where other things will stand out. Like Ad Words will make
40% of the money for that one site or search engine optimization will earn good percentage of what
that site makes as that traffic strategy. But the point is people need to look into banner ads, test them
out. They are dirt cheap now and see if they can become, excuse me, see if they can become a
profitable source of advertising for their business because it's just media. It's just Internet media and
it's just another way to get exposure to Internet web site visitors.
And it can often produce sales and profits. So, people need to go and try banner ads and see if they can
make it profitable for them. Now if they can, the good news is you can buy millions of banner ad
impressions all across the Internet and it's a great way to really ramp up traffic to a business if you can
make them work for you. I highly suggest people go and test them out.
Dearl Miller:
Google AdSense has started using or allowing users to ad images to their AdSense ads to make them
look like banners. Do you recommend using AdSense or how, what type of banner systems would you
recommend that people starting out use?
John Reese:
Well, the Google AdSense images program is so new, there are not many people are running the ads on
the site yet but that's great example that you bring that up because that's all they are. They are banner
ads. So, they are basically validating the fact that graphical ads can produce sales and traffic and profit
just like text-based ads or just like Pay-Per-Click paid search engine listings can. But as far as like
sources for banner ads, if people just go to Google and type in like banner ad network or where to buy
banner ads, you'll find hundreds of places you can buy one.
One of the places you can go right now, Microsoft has a small business network called the BCentral
Network at www.BCentral.com and you can go and place ads right now and they are set up on a PayPer-Click basis. They are actually more expensive than some of the other ones. I believe their current
pricing is like 50 cents per click. But they are very, very targeted and that price can work for some
people depending on what they sell and if their conversion rates are high enough.
But that's one way you can go and buy some banner ads right now and you might be able, I'm not sure
if they do deals if you buy a higher volume. A lot of these places it's based on volume. If you buy
more clicks or more impressions, they'll give it to you at a cheaper cost. The best thing to do is go and
Google and poke around and just type in where to buy banner ads or banner ad networks and you can
just find a bunch of places that you can buy banner ads from. You can actually go to Ebay as well and
you can find people auctioning off banner ad impressions from their web sites.
Like if they have a bunch of traffic to their site and they're trying to sell advertising but they have a
hard time selling it, a lot of people will go and auction off that ad space right on Ebay. And you can get
it really, really cheap.
Dearl Miller:
What are some things to be careful of when purchasing banner ads?
John Reese:
Well, I think the most critical thing to keep in mind is to make sure that whoever you are buying it from
is going to have a tracking, like real time tracking so you can track the impressions. But the other thing
to keep in mind is you really want to ask whoever you are buying banner ads from if you can see the
pages that they'll be shown on. And I, this hasn't happened to me personally but as a sidebar I'm just
going to tell you a quick story.
Somebody that I know, another marketer, he went and bought some banner ads on a site, on a busy site
and they were supposed to be targeted for kind of like home repair type things and he actually went and
investigated where the banner ads were showing up because he was getting a lot of impressions but not
many clicks. Like he wasn't getting very good results and he found that the ad was actually being
shown on a porn site. So, you want to be really, really careful when your buying ad space.
Say, "Hey, let me see one of the pages where the ad will show up so I can actually see the experience
the Internet users what they will be experiencing when they see my ad." How it's positioned with the
layout and if it's going to actually be seen. Those are the two most important things. I would say just
to make sure that they have real time tracking that you'll be able to log in and see how many times the
ad has been shown, how many times it's been clicked on and then you can compare it with your own
stats on your web site, your web server to make sure that they are kind of matching up, that their
tracking is accurate, that you are getting that number of clicks, especially if you're paying by click. So,
accurate tracking and stats and then making sure that you're able to see where the ad will be shown
before you actually pay for it and it actually starts to run.
Dearl Miller:
What's a good price to pay for banner ads? I've heard stories where top marketers have been able to get
extremely good deals on banner ads but then after spending thousands of dollars, they were unable to
even create one sale because the fact that it was such a good deal and maybe that should have been a
warning sign to them that paying so little for a banner ad is an indication that maybe there's not a lot to
band or it's not going to create sales. What is a good price to pay for a banner ad so you can know it's
effective?
John Reese:
Sure, well, I'd actually have to disagree with you there about your comment about if it's too cheap that
should have been indication. The bottom line with all this stuff is you can never assume anything on
the Internet in regards to Internet marketing and what results can be, should be, or will be and that's
why the most important thing in all of this stuff is to test. And if you don't, the first tip that I gave
about tracking everything individually and people that know me know that I'm very diligent about
tracking. That's what I do best.
A lot of my good friends, they refer to me as the mad scientist because I'm tracking and testing so many
things all the time. But that's where the money is, testing and tracking the results. In this case with
banner ads, if you can get them really, really cheap, like you can buy them from places for like a dollar
cpm in many cases and that's really, really cheap. But it doesn't mean that that won't produce profit for
you. You won't know until you test it. So, but it's good that you raised that point because you do want
to do a low cost test before you roll out and buy more banner space.
So, before you go and spend a thousand dollars, you should be able to spend fifty or a hundred dollars
and buy just a small number of impressions, maybe 2/3/4/5,000, I mean actually you could probably do
that for 10 bucks but you want to buy lets say 50,000 impressions just to test that source, that web site
just to see if you get any clicks, just to see if you get any sales. So, the key is to test. But, yeah, you
want to look around and try to find it as cheap as possible. There are still people on the Internet that
really over charge for banner ad space.
You'll find $10.00 cpm, which is ridiculous, but in some cases, it may actually produce a profit. It all
depends on what you sell. If sold mortgage liens and every mortgage lead to you is worth $100.00 then
$10.00 cpm space on a mortgage related web site maybe worth it for you. But the key in all this stuff is
just to test. You have to know your metrics. You have to be able to test, each of these traffic sources
and see what they produce on your end. See how many dollars in sales they produce.
Otherwise, it's literally like flying a plane and literally having no gauges. You're flying blind and
you're clueless to what's actually going on. And that's no way to run a business.
Dearl Miller:
What things do you recommend people test regarding the actual design of a banner ad to increase
conversion? For example, you should test trying to make it look more text based and then test against
that to make it look more graphical based. What are your comments on that and what are some tests
that you would do to try to increase conversion?
John Reese:
Well, I am actually a firm believer in what you were just saying and that is because I'm such a student
of direct response marketing. I honestly believe that in marketing it's the words that sell. It's not a
fancy graphic or imagery or some kind of hypnotic thing. It's words that sell. So, me personally, I
design banner ads that are almost like classified ads. They are text based. They have like a little
headline and they use good direct response principals. Those words focus on the benefits of whatever
it is that I'm trying to sell.
So, if I were creating an ad for the little league example we've been using during this interview, about
the little ebook to help little leaguers become a better hitter, my ad would be based on words saying
"Learn how to hit more homeruns and be the MVP of your little league," something like that, "Learn
how to; do you want to bat .500 in your little league and impress your friends and family?”
Whatever, it would just be something like that. Something benefit oriented where it's targeted towards
the solution that I'm providing people if they buy my product and I try to express that in the ad. And
then often times in the ad I will allude to, and again these are just solid direct response principals, I
would allude to a free report or some kind of, a reason why they need to click. So, usually I'll use a
little headline, some words like I just gave in those examples, and I'll say, “Click here for a free report.”
Maybe it'll be in small text at the very bottom of like a banner ad. It'll say, “Click here for a free report
on how to hit ten more home runs next season,” or whatever will fit in that space to basically, because
that would be the call to action to try to get them to click on that banner. And so, promising something
on the other end if they do click. I'm a firm believer. I design banner ads that are text based because I
believe that it's the words that sell and that's the message I try to get across to my prospects when I
advertise.
Dearl Miller:
Why don't more people use banner ads and what would you say to those people to overcome their
objection?
John Reese:
Well, I think more people don't use them because I really believe they kind of got a bad name. I think
people think of banner ads as just some over priced vehicle that helped fuel that whole dot com boom.
But to overcome people's objections, I would just, well, I'm living proof of it. I've generated tons and
tons of money from using them. I know a lot of other good marketers that have done the same but I
would just say test them out and see for yourself. I mean here's what's funny.
If you run them, you're going to get clicks and you're going to get traffic and that's the name of the
game. So, when you see the results of getting traffic to your site, that's the mission at hand here. And
then hopefully, you'll be able to buy ads in a place that's targeted where you'll actually be able to
produce sales as well. But I would just say for people to just go out and you can literally do a test for
less than $50.00 and just try it and get some results and I think that will motivate people to then roll out
and buy more and more of it and hopefully grow their business and make more and more profit.
Dearl Miller:
How would you compare banner ads to other forms of paid advertising?
John Reese:
Well, I think it's very similar just to other forms of advertising. It allows, the one advantage to banner
ads is that they can be a lot bigger, they can take up more space on a web page than a lot of other type
of advertising like a Pay-Per-Click listing, or a text based ad on a page. And so, by having more of that
real estate to actually have your ad, you can get more of your marketing message across to prospects
before they come over to your site, which is almost what they consider preselling but you're actually
qualifying the prospects.
So, one advantage they do have is you can get a lot more creative and you have a lot more space to
create an advertisement for what it is that you sell. And so, you can do a lot, quite a few more powerful
things in using an ad that's bigger because you can use more words, you can create little bullets, talk
about different parts of your, the benefits to your product. You can do some things that just aren't
available in other advertising methods online that in some cases may be necessary in order to make
sales.
Dearl Miller:
Thank you, John. Any last words about banner ads?
John Reese:
I would just say for people to go out and just test it. Just go out there and find some banner ad space
they can acquire pretty inexpensively and create a little ad and throw it up there and just get some
results and see what happens.
Dearl Miller:
What is your seventh web traffic tip?
John Reese:
My seventh web traffic tip is to make use of viral reports, which can be a traffic method for growing an
exponential number of web site visitors to your site. Now if you have an affiliate program, this is
where it really works best because you can motivate your affiliates to give away little reports that will
be branded and embedded with their affiliate ID in these little special reports. So, that basically gives
them encouragement to pass the report around or to give it away to their list or to let people download
it from their site.
And when more and more people see the opportunities that they can brand these reports and give them
away to their list members or to people that visit their site, these reports can just get passed all over the
Internet and any one that reads it will always be one click away from coming to your web site. These
viral reports are very powerful. They can bring you a really steady and growing flow of traffic to your
web site.
Dearl Miller:
Can you give me an example of using viral reports?
John Reese:
Sure. What you could do is if you had an affiliate program and let's relate back to our example this
become a better hitter little baseball book. You can create a little report and you could say, ten tips for
becoming a better baseball hitter and in this little report, it can be like a little PDF file and in this report,
it would be just good content giving information about how to become a better hitter and obviously you
wouldn't want to give away to much information of what your product actually contains or people
wouldn't need to buy your product.
But in this report, you'd give some good content and in the report it would have a link to your site that
basically says if they're really serious about becoming a better hitter, they'll want to buy the baseball
hitting secrets book, which would be your product and then there's a link in this report that goes back to
your site. And that link actually happens to be an affiliate link, so your affiliates can take this little
report, put their affiliate link in it and then just give it away. And what happens is, this is just a tool
basically, this is really just a tool of an affiliate program.
There are some people who have done viral reports that aren't tools for an affiliate program and they
can get passed around if the content is really, really good, but the number one motivating factor to get
people to pass around stuff on the Internet is if they can get paid for doing so. So, if you can
incorporate good content that people can give away to other people that can contain their link so they
will get paid and make money off of it if somebody just clicks that link inside their report and goes to
the site and buys the product.
It's a very, very powerful thing to do and you definitely want to test it out and try it for your business.
But that's what a little viral report is. It's a good piece of content that allows your affiliates to give it
away that has a link in it that will ultimately allow other people to give it away as well. Then you just,
that thing gets all over the place.
Dearl Miller:
Can you touch on the importance of the affiliate link? Why would people want to put an affiliate link
for someone else in there instead of their own link?
John Reese:
Well, the reason for putting the affiliate link in there is to give that particular affiliate credit for giving
away this report on their site. They don't want to give it away if it's got your link in it. Otherwise,
there's nothing in it for them. So that's the importance of having that link in this report be for that
specific affiliate because that's how they will be compensated for giving it away.
Dearl Miller:
That sounds like a difficult process of putting, of creating all those reports with the affiliate links. Is
there anyway to automate that?
John Reese:
Sure, there are actually what's called PDF branders that are available or scripts that can actually,
somebody can actually put in like their affiliate ID for example on your site if they were, if this was for
your affiliate program and it'll automatically create this file for them that they can download and just
give away. It automatically puts their link in it. It's a very automated process and it's very, very
simple.
Dearl Miller:
How long do you recommend that the ebook be?
John Reese:
Well, I recommend that this ebook, this little report be not too long. You want to keep it short and
sweet. One so more people consume it and will actually read it all the way through but you want to
make it long enough to give really good information to make people really want to learn more about the
author and whoever wrote that content in the first place. And that's what this ultimately gets to, getting
them to go checkout the product that's for sale and hopefully to buy it. So, a good rule of thumb is
probably about fifteen pages, 15 to 20 pages.
It could be a little shorter. It could be a little longer but you don't want to get too much longer than
that. Otherwise it just becomes too much of a thing and a lot of people won/t read it all the way
through. They'll open it up and they'll start reading it and they'll say, “I'll come back to this later,” and
people never do. So, you want to kind of keep it short and sweet. I've seen some that are six to eight
pages that are very, very effective so they don't necessarily have to be 15 to 20 pages.
Just the shorter the better as long as you include some really good content because that's all people care
about.
Dearl Miller:
What are they key components to making an effective viral ebook?
John Reese:
Well, the key component again is it's got to be good content. And I would say just make it based on a
certain like number of tips or a certain number of strategies, like the seven best ways to grow bigger
tomatoes in your garden, something like that. Something specific and then at the end of the report, you
could basically say, like for that example, if you enjoyed these seven ways to grow tomatoes, how
would you like another 40 ways to grow bigger tomatoes in your garden.
Well, if you're really interested click here to go find out about the definitive guide to growing tomatoes
to learn 40 more ways.
If you can structure it to use a number of tips or a number of strategies that's one of the most powerful
ways that you can do it. And then at the end of it you allude to if you were really happy with these few
tips, here's how you can go and buy more tips.
Dearl Miller:
How does the ebook spread? How can you encourage people besides obviously with the affiliate ID,
how can you encourage people to pass around the ebook?
John Reese:
People pass things around really for one of two primary reasons. And one of them is we mentioned
because they get paid if they do it but the one is people pass things around if it's really, really good
content and they think someone else could benefit from reading it, like one of their friends. And one of
the other things that goes along with that being really, really good content being passed around are just
like jokes, if you've ever received some kind of joke thing in your email from one of your friends that
they sent to you, a joke is actually kind of one of the oldest forms of viral marketing. It's actually like
word of mouth.
And if you think about it, when someone tells a good joke, they'll go tell someone else, who will go tell
someone else and it just, that's kind of like a form of viral marketing.
Well, content is the same way. If you wrote something that was really, really rock solid and really,
really great, people would pass it around to people they know just because they want to be able to, they
want their friends and family or whoever they know to be able to benefit from that content.
Dearl Miller:
When you talked about content, you talked about writing, buying, or borrowing. You can also use that
technique for viral ebooks?
John Reese:
Sure you can. Any content whatsoever that's relevant, has value and that it's targeted and related to
your product, you can use. You have to think of these viral reports as kind of like mini versions of your
product. Think of it almost like a movie trailer that you'd see on TV. The trailer has some really
exciting little themes about the main movie that get people interested, that people go hey wow I want to
go see that. They got a little bit of value out of watching it. It was entertaining for 30 seconds but
that's kind of how the report is.
You want to, one of the most important things for these reports is I really learned how to master this
process of making these reports. These are part of my overall system that I've been talking about that I
use but a really dear friend of mine and he's one of the best internet marketers in the world, his name is
Jimmy D. Brown, and he has generated more web site traffic than anyone I know using viral reports
like this.
If you actually go and do a search in Google for his name, I think he's shown, I think you'll see his
name like 500,000 times or some ridiculous number because his little reports and content are all over
the Internet and they continue to spread like wildfire as people pass them around. And one of the
things that he taught me which I basically want to teach now in this interview, pass it on to other people
is that when you make reports and you set up little truncated piece of content like this to promote your
product, you want to follow one basic rule and that is you want to make it useful but incomplete.
And that's a phrase I learned from Jimmy that's very, very powerful. You want to give them really,
really good content so they get something out of reading it and they are happy with it but you want it to
be incomplete. In other words, you want to leave them in a state where they desire to learn more about
whatever it is you just taught them or whatever type of content that you used. So, I mean it's possible
that you can use other people's articles and that you use other people's content that's already out there
but you want to do it in such a way, just like with anything that you would actually write yourself.
So, that the content that you give always alludes to hey, if you're really interested about doing this, that
they'll want to go and buy the product. But also that that content in and of itself isn't complete so where
they like don't need your product. You don't want to give them too much. So, that's where Jimmy's
phrase of useful but incomplete comes in and I think it's something important for people to keep in
mind when they create these viral reports.
Dearl Miller:
John, after you've created your viral ebook, what is the process of getting the book into the hands of
affiliates and other people to start passing it around to create that viral wildfire?
John Reese:
Well, you basically want to do a kind of little promotion for it when you mail your affiliates about it.
You want to say announcing a new report that you can give away that will automatically make money
for you. And then you basically go in and explain the basics behind it that now you can create this little
report that will have your link in it and you can pass it around and basically you get across the benefits
of them doing so.
And you just basically explain how it can get spread around and become viral because some people
may actually take the report and see you can put in this report, you can put it's okay if you pass this
around to other people as long as you keep copyright information and everything else intact. And there
will end up actually being some nonaffiliate that takes an affiliate's report and then end up giving it
away on their site just because they want their visitors to have some good content.
So, the way to jumpstart the process is to announce it to your affiliates and to give them a link so they
can go check it out and also to just get across why they need to give it away, how it can really help
them make more money.
Dearl Miller:
Thank you, John. Any last words on using viral reports to create web traffic?
John Reese:
I would just say for people to look at their product and see if they can figure out how to make basically
a small report on some information that's related to their product that's almost again, like that example,
like a movie trailer, like a preview. See if they can figure out how many main benefits are in their
product and if they can give away two or three without giving away too much of their product to make
one of these reports. But again, the last words on viral reports are you really want to make sure you
have an affiliate program in place first or you can't take full advantage of the use of this stuff.
But if you do have an affiliate program, I would just say either write one yourself or pay someone to
write and do one on like seven tips on doing whatever relates to your product and just get started with it
and just get it out there and see what happens. A lot of people what they find is once they create them,
and they start getting traffic from it, they'll create a series of them. So, then they'll say, “Well, that
one's getting spread all over the Internet, now what I will do is I will go and create another one and give
it away to my affiliates and say,” like “here's version two,” of whatever.
Here's seven more tips. And then the affiliates can go and give away that one and then, but I would just
say like everything else I've been trying to get across, just take some action. Just get busy and just try it
out and get it out there and try to get some results for it and nothing's going to motivate you more than
starting to see some results come in to really get you to do more work to really get it going to get more
and more web site traffic.
Dearl Miller:
John, what is your eighth web traffic tip?
John Reese:
My eighth web traffic tip is to take advantage of the power of cross promotion. I mean cross
promotion, by utilizing multiple web sites that you may have and multiple areas of what I call virtual
real estate. Now what I mean by virtual real estate is just all different parts of a web site that make up
that web site and this would be like starting as simply from the home page but to more specifically to
things like confirmation pages and thank you pages.
Like when someone signs up for an email list, the page they are shown next that confirms that they've
opted in to a list, where you thank them for signing up, you can use this valuable piece of what I call
virtual real estate, that page to then promote another web site that you have or even a product on the
same web site to funnel those people over to another web page. So, cross promotion is something that
a lot of marketers don't do enough of where basically you can take the traffic you already get and
multiply the value you get from that traffic.
So, it's like you can take a thousand visitors and turn that into what would essentially be like ten
thousand visitors because you can send those people to multiple pages all over your site that can
produce profit for you if they either take action, such as buying an affiliate product that a link may go
off to on one of those pages or if they buy one of your products or services. So, cross promotion is
very, very powerful and very, very important. As a traffic generation method to funnel traffic from
within multiple sites that you may have.
Dearl Miller:
John, can you give an example of using cross promotions through multiple sites and multiple areas of
virtual real estate.
John Reese:
Sure, if you happen to have let's say more than one product that you sell from your web site, one of the
best things you can do, or actually let's say you have two web sites that sell two different products, but
they are kind of related in the same market. In order for cross promotion to be it's most effective, it
needs to be done for things that are somewhat related. You can't really do much cross promotion for
things that are unrelated.
So, I wanted to state that but if you have two different products, let's say, let's go back to our example
of our little ebook to helping a little leaguer become a better hitter, and then let's say we happen to sell
another ebook to that market on how to teach people to throw curve balls, like how to become a good
pitcher and how to throw a wicked curve ball, the curve ball secrets guide. On your web site that sells
the hitting guide, throughout that copy you could say, you could have a little sidebar like in a little box
that could say, “If you're interested in becoming a better pitcher, click here for our sister site that
teaches you the secrets of how to throw a wicked curve ball.”
That's one way to do it and another way to do is on the thank you page if someone orders the hitting
guide, you could say that, “Now that you're becoming a better hitter, if you'd like to become a better
pitcher you may want to check out our sister site,” yada, yada, yada and have a link to it. That's
another place to have a link to it. Then another place to cross promote that other site is inside that
ebook you could actually say the author of this book has also produced a best selling guide or whatever
the case may be on how to become a better pitcher.
Click here to learn all about how to learn to become a better pitcher. So, again, there's another
opportunity to put in a link to promote that other product. Another place would be if you had a
newsletter. If you had a free newsletter on hitting that you gave away on your site, when people signup
and they get the welcome message that says, “Thanks for joining my list, you'll get the next issue.”
You could say, “By the way, if you're interested in becoming a better pitcher,” so there's another piece
of what I call virtual real estate online.
That would be inside an email message and it could be in an auto responder series so it's automatic.
But again, this is just another way we can start funneling traffic over through cross promotion to
another site that you have that sells something. You know, now if you sell multiple products on the
same site, you can cross promote different pages between them to get people to go through more pages
of your site, and hopefully buy more of your products. Cross promotion is very, very powerful.
It's very underutilized by most Internet marketers. People just get tunnel vision and they just think I
just want to turn on the tap and open up the faucet, the flood gates and I just want more overall traffic
when in fact you can recycle traffic and cross promote it between multiple sites. Traffic you are
already getting to grow the traffic for other sites that you have. So, it's very, very powerful.
Dearl Miller:
In past Trafficology newsletters, we've talked about using the confirmation and thank you pages, virtual
real estate. Another thing we've talked about is using the confirmation email.
John Reese:
Yeah, it's very much like the example I was trying to talk about about if someone opts in for a
newsletter. If you send them a confirmation email welcoming them to the newsletter or if someone
buys something and you send them like a receipt by email, on that receipt is a great place to put a link
that can cross promote another product that you have.
Dearl Miller:
What do you think about the idea of promoting competitors products through an affiliate link on these
pages.
John Reese: I think it's great. It's something I do on a regular basis and I think it's very important
and this could be a future interview if you'd like but not to go off on a tear here but one of the things
I'm a firm believer in is thinking about how I can generate an income from people that aren't going to
buy my products and services. And one of those ways is to end up promoting, just like the cross
promotion method between your own sites, using them to send traffic to some affiliate programs that
you promote and obviously just like you said you can do it from thank you pages, from confirmation
pages, within emails or from any other pages that you have.
So, yeah, that's a great idea and a great way to make more money.
Dearl Miller:
Can you explain a little bit more about recycling?
John Reese:
Sure, recycling traffic is just basically, if you just think about if someone's going to come to a page or
site, they're either going to take an action or not and then they're just going to bail out and leave. So, by
building any recycling methods of knowing if they're going to leave, give them opportunities to at least
go elsewhere on other pages that you own and other pages that can produce income for you whether it's
affiliate programs or other products that you sell.
And so it's very, very powerful to send traffic back into sites you have or to other pages you have if
somebody is not interested in that page in the first place and they are just going to leave. So, like
giving them opportunities on that page to go elsewhere rather than just hit the back on their browser
and go to where ever they came from. It's very, very powerful.
Dearl Miller:
And a thank you page or an order page, that's the most valuable type of traffic, someone that's already
made an order, taken an action. What ways do you recommend to get those people to take another
action?
John Reese:
Borrowing a page from www.Amazon.com, one of the things they do and they do really, really well is
they have this thing where they say people that bought this also bought this. And so, that's one method
that you can use on a thank you page after someone places an order and Internet marketer Steven
Pierce, he uses this very effectively.
He was one of the first people that I saw using this aside from Amazon and he'll basically say, “Now
that you've bought the secrets for becoming a better stock trader, other people that bought our product
also went and bought this product on learning how to trade, learning how to make money with mutual
funds,” or whatever and then he'll link to like an affiliate product. So, that's one way by saying people
that bought our product have also bought this or are also interested in this.
And so if you are really serious about this, in this case increasing your trading education, you should
also consider these. You can say, “You should also consider these other resources. So, if you say now
that you've bought the guide to becoming a better baseball hitter, you may want to consider these other
baseball resources that are available,” and then on there how to become a better pitcher, how to steal
bases, how to become a coach, whatever else. But that's one way that you could do it is make
recommendations for other products and list them right there on the thank you page.
Dearl Miller:
How does recycling differ from cross selling or up selling?
John Reese:
It's pretty much one in the same but I guess recycling is just sending people back into a site. Like a lot
of people, one of the best ways to do some recycling is to use like an exit popup. If someone is trying
to leave, you can hit them with an exit popup and entice them with some kind of information or some
kind of offer like join my newsletter and I'll send you this or click here and go and get this free report.
That's one way to recycle because you're sending them back to the site.
So, cross promotion is really more about maximizing the number of pages that your visitors go to and
obviously if you can send them across to different sites that you have and if all your sites are set up to
produce income for you, that can grow the amount of money that you make. So, that's the distinction
between the two. It is very similar but there are some differences to it. That's basically it. Recycling is
more of getting a second chance at people that are going to leave and try to get them to go back into the
site and get more value out of them.
Cross promoting is just basically getting the visitors to visit more of your pages and more of your sites
so they'll be exposed to more things that you sell.
Dearl Miller:
Thank you, John. Do you have any final words on cross promoting through multiple sites and multiple
areas of virtual real estate?
John Reese:
Sure, I would just say that people need to just look at their sites and just ask themselves if they're really
taking advantage of all of these potential little virtual real estate places. Are they squeezing all the
value they can out of every page that they have be it a thank you page, a confirmation page or any
emails that they're system sends out to users. So, people just need to evaluate all the pages they serve
and all the emails they serve and see how they can squeeze the maximum amount of value from it.
Dearl Miller:
John, what is your ninth web traffic tip?
John Reese:
My ninth web traffic tip is taking advantage of the power of joint ventures to produce a steady stream
of no-cost traffic. Now every person out there that owns a web site and sells their own product or
service needs to be taking advantage of joint ventures. They need to be constantly pursuing other web
site owners and their target market to get them to do like a mailing to their email lists or just to get
them to put up a link on their web site that can link back to their own web site, in other words, the
marketers web site that can bring a steady flow of traffic and sales.
And if marketers will do this on an ongoing basis it creates a no risk and no cost flow of traffic and it
can produce a boost of sales like right away just by getting one person to do let's say in this example,
like a mailing to an email list to promote this product or service. And it's really easy to get people to do
these joint ventures. Some people try to make it out to be really complicated but it's not. As long as
you always think of what it's in it for them, in other words what's in it for your potential partner, you
reward them accordingly, in other words you pay them a nice commission of any sales referred.
A lot of people are willing to do it and this method is very, very powerful. I've used it myself to make
hundreds of thousands of dollars. I still use it on a weekly basis and everybody should tap into the
power of doing joint ventures. And joint venture partners usually just end up becoming active affiliates
if you have an affiliate program where they'll keep linking to you and promoting you for weeks or
months well into the future and that will just bring you more and more traffic and more and more sales.
Dearl Miller:
Can you give an example of that?
John Reese:
Well, sure, just a joint venture again is just like contacting a site owner and it's just very much like
recruiting an affiliate and it's just contacting a site owner and just saying, “Hi, I see you have a baseball
related site. I sell a product on baseball, would you be interested in mailing to your list? Here's how
much I'll pay you per sale for everyone you refer that buys the product.” So, that's pretty much the
basics of what a joint venture is and it's very much like an affiliate relationship. So, JVs and affiliates
are almost one in the same.
It's just when you do a joint venture it's kind of like a one shot deal to get them to do a big promotion.
Most joint venture partners end up becoming just active affiliates and they'll put up links and just do
other things to promote your product on an ongoing basis.
Dearl Miller:
Thank you, John. We're running out of time here for this interview so I want to quickly get through
this last tip. Do you have any last words on joint ventures?
John Reese:
Yeah, it's very much like I said about affiliates. If you have an affiliate program, you want to just stay
active and constantly pursue people, constantly try to get people to do a promotion for your product,
treat them really well, always keep in mind what's in it for them and get that across to them, why they
would want to promote your product in the first place.
Just be active with it. Do a few of these a week and you'll see again, it all relates back to this system
that I've created for myself and how I build momentum and so all these things I'm trying to teach
people to do here in this interview is basically to do a little bit of each thing on an ongoing basis and in
six months from now you'll see, or even in two months or two weeks from now, if you just keep doing
things, you'll see this snowball effect of huge results. So, the final word on joint ventures is just to do
it.
Just to send out a few proposals each week and then you'll end up doing just a few deals here and there
and as you do more and more deals, you'll get more and more traffic and make more and more money.
Dearl Miller:
John, what is your tenth web traffic tip?
John Reese:
My tenth web traffic tip is to get involved in online group participation and this would be for your
target market because online group participation can produce a steady flow of traffic that's no cost to
you and can produce a bunch of free sales for you. And what I mean by online groups is this could be
anything from like discussion forums that happen to be in your target market or a lot of times there are
what are called email discussion lists where a bunch of people let's say are interested in a certain hobby
will be on the same email discussion list.
And every time one person in that group or in that list wants to say something, they'll submit an email
message that goes out to the whole list so everybody can read it and reply to it. Now these groups,
these discussion lists or discussion forums where you would post messages on the web, these are great
ways to bring traffic to your web site, like to be able to promote your products or services. Then when
you get involved in these discussions, it makes you very credible and if a certain thread or certain topic
is related to actually a specific product that you sell, you have a much better chance of selling your
product.
You are going to have a much higher conversion of people that will click over from what's called a
signature line in a post that you make and you are allowed to do this on many forums and that can
produce quite a bit of sales for you, just for you spending your time answering questions and helping
people. So, that's a powerful thing that I recommend people do especially if they're on, especially if
they have a low budget and don't want to spend a lot of money to drive traffic.
This is one of the ways you can exchange your time for dollars by going into these discussion groups
and spending some time to help people and as a result people would be one click away from your site
and will check out what you have to sell.
Dearl Miller:
Can you give an example of that?
John Reese:
Sure. In our baseball example for this book on becoming a better hitter and I'm sure there are
discussion forums out there on baseball and becoming a better hitter, you could find a discussion forum
where people are talking about and trading techniques for becoming a better hitter and you could
actually go into that message forum and post messages to help people and say one thing you could try
is lowering your shoulder and whatever, but you'd give a couple of basic tips and then in that message
you could put a link to, a lot of discussion forums their etiquette will allow you to do this, you could
have a little link that says, “How to become the best hitter you possibly can in 30 days, check out my
new book, Baseball Hitting Secrets.”
And by participating in these forums and posting these messages, every time you post a message to
help someone, they'll be exposed to this link that goes over to your site that sells your product and just
mentioning this method of participating in these groups. Another thing that you could do, you see all
this stuff relates to all the other pieces. Again, it's like a well-oiled machine here.
Let's go back to the viral reports thing for a sec that we talked about that can be a good vehicle for
purchasing sales for us, well if you had a little viral report on seven tips for becoming a better baseball
hitter, you could post in this discussion forum, you could give them like one tip and say, “Yeah that's
one of the tips from this free report that's online and available and if you want to learn the other six
reports, six tips excuse me, check out this report,” and then you just give them a link so they can go
check out the free report and then ultimately it promotes the product that's for sale.
Dearl Miller:
One quick question on this, where would you recommend people go to find forums to participate in.
John Reese:
Well, it's really simple. You can go to any search engine, like Google, and just type in whatever
discussion forum. You can go in and type in baseball discussion forum or little league discussion
forum or hitting discussion forum or hitting message boards or hitting chat group, any number of those.
If you type in whatever with discussion group or discussion board or message board, you'll find 90% of
them. So, you just do searches on Google or any search engine and you can find them and there are
tons of these discussion groups and these email lists that people use for hundreds of thousands of niche
topics to talk about stuff.
Dearl Miller:
I'm sorry, John, I really have so many more questions to ask you but we just don't have time to do it
today. Quickly give me some last thoughts on forums.
John Reese:
Sure, the one thing that I would just suggest people do is just do some searching and see how many
forums there are in your target market. One of the things you could do is make the forum owners your
affiliate and do deals with them and because it's a targeted area for traffic, active people talking about a
certain topic, I mean that's as targeted as it gets, just like everything else just go try it out, just go try it
out. Go do it tonight. Find some discussion groups for your market.
Go in there and see if it's okay in the rules first before you make a post that you are allowed to include
little blurbs for your product and then go start to make some posts. The thing to keep in mind is that
you post helpful information. You don't want to just post nonsense and then just try to put your blatant
ad in there. As long as your helpful it'll have a more powerful effect for people that see you as
somebody that's credible and believable and that they'll want to go over and check out your product.
So, I would just say get started just like all of this stuff, just get started and do some of this stuff.
Dearl Miller:
I'm sorry, John, that's all the time we have. Thank you very much for sharing your traffic secrets with
us today.
John Reese:
Thank you. Thanks a lot for having me. I appreciate it. It was fun.
Dearl Miller:
And thank you for listening. The lessons shared in the past few hours will definitely help you create
and convert more web traffic. But just as John said, in order to be successful you have to get out there
and just do it. And when you do, make sure to let us know. Visit the Trafficology forum or send me an
email bragging about your web traffic success story. For John Reese and everyone here at
Trafficology, thank you for listening and make sure to check back for the latest updates and fresh web
traffic tips.
The Most Profitable Way To Drive Targeted Traffic to Your Website – Part 1 with Jon Keel Jon Keel:
Quite frankly, if you learn how to correctly use Overture and Google, you can get exposure across 85%
to 90% of the Internet.
Dearl Miller:
The Most Profitable Way to Drive Targeted Traffic to Your Website is Pay-Per-Click advertising. To
help you master this technique we have with us the author of the first book on Pay-Per-Click
advertising, the developer of the first tool for Pay-Per-Click advertising, the professor of online
marketing at Xavier University, and the undisputed Pay-Per-Click King, Mr. Jon Keel.
Don’t mistake him for an Internet marketer; he’s an online business advisor who has worked with
companies big and small, from Fortune 500 corporations to family owned businesses, Jon has shown all
of them how to generate and convert massive amounts of traffic in record time. So, take out your
workbooks and prepare to learn the science of Pay-Per-Click advertising.
Before we get started, I want to make sure that everyone has the accompanying materials. If you have
not already done so, please go to the Resource page, www.Trafficology.com/ppc.html. Then, print out
the study guide and follow along with this lesson. Also, don’t forget to watch our videos on exactly
how to find the best keywords for your business.
Now, with no further ado, I give you the King of Pay-Per-Click Advertising, Mr. Jon Keel.
Jon Keel:
Dearl, it is great to be here with you today. I’m excited about sharing with the listeners some of the
things we’ve learned over the last five or six years regarding Pay-Per-Click advertising. And, I’m going
to turn it back over to you.
Dearl Miller:
Thank you, sir, and welcome to Trafficology. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you
became involved with Pay-Per-Click advertising?
Jon Keel:
Well, Dearl, I got involved in the Internet back in January of 1997, when there were all of 72,000
websites. And, having previously owned a traditional business, it was an opportunity to help traditional
businesses use the Internet as a better business tool. And, I started doing that, having studied under
people like Declan Dunn and Marlin Sanders. So, I had some very good teachers, or mentors, if you
will.
And, in the spring of 1998 discovered, and I can’t even remember exactly how I did it but probably saw
an email, and this new type of search engine called www.GoTo.com was announced. So, I went to
www.GoTo.com, which has since become Overture, and just saw this as a pretty cool model. And,
back then, talk about the old days, you could actually buy keyword bidding, or determined keyword
bidding, at one cent, one cent per click. Of course, those days are long gone!
And, we began to take that to some of our clients, or actually I was by myself then, began to take that to
some of my clients. And, all of a sudden, we were finding that we were driving just phenomenal
amounts of traffic just very fast. And, again, got very good at doing that. Of course, back then it was
just about driving traffic.
Along the way, through my teaching at Xavier, I had some students develop some software that
actually automated a lot of what I was doing manually with clients. And, so we went commercial with
that product in, I guess, July of 2000. I wrote a book about a year later, as you referenced in your
introduction, and have just continued to do that. Of course today, in the last couple of years, we’ve
probably worked with well over 200 different companies around the world in helping them set up and
manage their Pay-Per-Click campaigns.
Dearl Miller:
You’ve been doing Pay-Per-Click for five years?
Jon Keel:
Actually, going on six and I feel like an old man in the business! But again, Go To started back in the
first quarter of 1998. And, it really wasn’t until, and I’m losing track of time but sometime back in
2000 when it really became popular, when Go To announced it’s first arrangement, if you will, a
conventional search engine, and that was with Yahoo.
And I remember we had one client, this is a real quick story, but we had one client we were working
with here in Cincinnati and, up to that people, it was just people had to go to Go To to find traffic, or to
use this tool. Because of our relationship with Go To, they announced basically a couple days
beforehand to people like me, that they were going to be implementing this relationship with Overture,
or with Yahoo rather, and if your bids were in the top three positions at Go To, you would get listed on
Yahoo. And, I told my client about this and in 24 hours, his traffic quadrupled.
Dearl Miller:
Maybe we should start off and just define what exactly is Pay-Per-Click advertising?
Jon Keel:
Yeah, the whole Pay-Per-Click search engine model is based upon this. Where, unlike conventional
search engines and directories, where you’re dependant upon either people or automated spiders, robots
they call them, to go out and find your site and rank it, with Pay-Per-Click advertising what you do is
select a group of keywords. This could be a small group all the way up to a large group of keywords
that you’re actually going to bid on, and it’s a pure auction format.
So, you actually prepare your advertisement, which is nothing more than a headline and a description,
and decide what you want to bid on a particular keyword. And then, once you get your bid accepted by
the particular Pay-Per-Click search engine you’re working with, generally your position is determined
by your bid. So, you can determine how far up, or how far down you are in the search engine. Now,
you only pay when people click on your listing; hence the term “Pay-Per-Click.” So, it’s a really
unique way of advertising, and of course it has just exploded in popularity over the last several years.
Dearl Miller:
Now that we know what Pay-Per-Click is, why exactly would a business use Pay-Per-Click and why is
it better than a regular search engine listing?
Jon Keel:
Well, let me answer that question in two parts because we believe, for everybody out there who has
websites and that’s the audience out there that’s listening to this tape, that Pay-Per-Click is just another
tool that you have in your tool box, or your tool bag, of generating traffic to your site. Our philosophy,
and what we’ve determined over the last couple of years, is that when we begin with a site, whether it’s
one of the sites we own and operate or whether we’re working with a client’s site, we just Pay-PerClick search engines first.
And, the reason we use them first is because it is a way to almost immediately generate traffic to your
site. Anyone who has done any work with conventional search engines knows that, generally, it’s a
long-term process. You can’t just decide to do it and next week, you’re going to get traffic. It’s a
multi-month process. Whereas, with Pay-Per-Click search engines, you basically can get your traffic
almost immediately to within a couple of days.
Now, I don’t really think Pay-Per-Click is better than conventional search engines, but we use it in
conjunction with conventional search engines. We just happen to do it first.
Dearl Miller:
I looked it up today, and I found out that there are over 591 Pay-Per-Click search engines. Which ones
should we focus our efforts on?
Jon Keel:
I know the site you went to, to find that out, because I’ve known Alan Gardyne for a number of years
since when he first started his resources site to talk about Pay-Per-Click search engines. At one time,
and I’ve got some slides that go back three, four years, there were well under 100 Pay-Per-Click search
engines. So, there’s been phenomenal growth.
But, going back and answering your specific question, the two big boys, the two 800 pound gorillas in
Pay-Per-Click search engines are www.Overture.com and Google Ad Words. Anyone who has been to
Google knows that, obviously I think Google is a very good search engine, but over on the right side
you’ll see these light blue boxes. That’s their Pay-Per-Click advertising program. Of course, Overture
is just on Overture itself.
Those are the two that we generally spend 95% of our time with. And, the reason we do is because
they generate the most traffic. There are a number of smaller, specialized Pay-Per-Click search
engines, which might be appropriate, depending upon what market you’re in. And, there are a number
of what we call “second tier” Pay-Per-Click search engines, such as Canoodle, and Find What. There
are probably five or six in that area. But when we first start a campaign, because we want to get the
biggest bang for the buck, we will always start with Overture and Google Ad Words.
Dearl Miller:
What, exactly, separates Google and Overture from that second tier of Pay-Per-Click search engines?
Jon Keel:
Well, I think it’s just the traffic that they bring. Number one, Overture has been around the longest,
again, going on six years now, and what they did beginning in 2000, as I mentioned earlier, is they
developed this syndication relationship, if you will, with Yahoo, where their results are shown on
Yahoo, or some of their results are shown on Yahoo. And then, they expanded that. And, they have
expanded it very aggressively to include search engines like MSN. So, the reality is, if you want
immediate exposure in Yahoo and MSN, you can do it by using Overture.
Likewise, of course, Google is a little bit different situation. Google only started their Pay-Per-Click
program just under two years ago. I believe it was May of 2002. And, given the nature of Google,
because Google is the largest search engine, it was an immediate success, if you will, and it’s continued
to grow. Of course Google, those guys at Google aren’t dumb either, because they syndicate their
results to AOL and several other search engines. But, quite frankly, if you learn how to effectively use
Overture and Google, you can get exposure across 85% to 90% of the Internet.
Dearl Miller:
Eighty-five to ninety percent? Just on two Pay-Per-Click search engines?
Jon Keel:
Yes, and again, I may be off a little bit on the numbers but, you know; how would you like to have
listings in Google, AOL, MSN, Yahoo? I mean, those are the big guys.
Dearl Miller:
Right. That’s all you need. So, as we’ve seen, Google and Overture are clearly the best. But what
exactly are the differences between Google and Overture?
Jon Keel:
Great question, because I believe it takes two different mindsets to work within Overture and Google.
And by the way, we don’t believe that one is better than another; they’re just different. And, as we
continue our discussion, maybe I’ll be able to share some results we’ve seen from using both because
we do use both on every campaign that we run. With Overture, I think the advantage of Overture, and
again I’m giving you opinion only, I believe, we believe it’s much easier to manage a large list of
keywords in Overture than it is in Google.
When I say a “large list,” I mean 100, 200, 300, 400 keywords. That, to us, and again we’ve been
doing this for a long time, and we have just found that that’s just the prime advantage of Overture.
Overture also gives you a little bit more space, if you will, in terms of characters that you can use in
your title and your descriptions. Now, if you’re verbose, in terms of you have a hard time getting your
words shortened down, that can be a factor.
Now, the advantage of Google over Overture, and we think there are a couple of advantages of Google
over Overture, and by the way, let me just make a side comment. Because these two guys are
competing against each other, we have seen the quality of both of them increase over the last year to
year and a half. Competition does that; it makes you get better.
But with Google, the key advantage that Google has over Overture is that you can bid on a keyword at
Google and, maybe in as little as 15 or 30 minutes, you can actually have your listing up on Google.
So, the speed at which you can get listings up is a prime advantage of Google over Overture.
Overture, for every keyword that you choose to bid on, you go through a submittal process and,
depending upon who you’re working with out there, it can take anywhere from a day up to four or five
days to get your listings approved because Overture reviews every listing before they actually put it up.
Now, Google actually reviews everything of the list too but what they will do is review it after it’s up.
But, the point is you can get traffic much quicker with Google.
I think the other advantage that Google has over Overture is that you can quickly modify your titles and
your descriptions, in other words, your classified ad and, in fact, can do split testing of headlines and
descriptions. So you can, you know, from an old directory response perspective, you can do A/B splits
and you can actually measure which headline and which description gives who what’s called “higher
click through.”
By “click through” we mean, if a key word or a key phrase is typed in, say 1,000 times in a day, the
click through is the number of times your listing was clicked on, or clicked through to your site. And,
the whole point of doing that is to be able to, over a period of time, optimize your title and your
description, so that you maximize your [15:18 break in tape]
Dearl Miller:
So, each of them has their strengths and their weaknesses. How do the listeners determine which one is
best for their business, and how can the listeners use them together to get the best of both worlds?
Jon Keel:
Again, you’re asking some great questions. And, I’ll tell a little story that maybe gets right to the heart
of the question. Almost two years ago we were working with a client, actually one of our few local
clients here in Cincinnati, and with this particular client, we were at that time using Overture, and we
had started his campaign with 378 different keywords.
See, our philosophy from early on, and once we developed software that we need to talk about in a bit,
we just believed that it was much better to start with a big list of keywords than a small list of keywords
because, at that point in time, originally, again, I’m going back three, four years, you could get a lot
more traffic.
But I’m having coffee with this client one morning and he says, “By the way…” and this guy had a
marketing background and some direct response background, he said, “Do you think all my keywords
convert equally?” And when we talk about conversion, it’s more than just getting traffic to your site,
but do your visitors do what it is you want them to do? Do they buy something, do they give you their
name and email address, and so on.
You know, that overall subject of conversion. And, I looked at him with this, I guess, dumb look on
my face because, at that point in time we’d been doing Pay-Per-Click for probably three years.
Nobody had ever asked me that question. And I sort of got my senses about me and I said, “You know,
nobody’s ever asked that question, Bill. But it makes sense that all keywords do not convert equally.”
And there was a, I can’t remember who made the statement, it goes back 50 or 60 years, somebody
said, “I know 50% of all advertising works. I just don’t know which 50%” and think about it, in terms
of any type of advertising, but specifically Pay-Per-Click advertising.
Wouldn’t you like to know which keywords convert and, more importantly which ones don’t?
Because, if you’re spending money, and I’m going to use the term here, if you’re spending money on
keywords that don’t convert, you’re spending money because it’s not giving you any return.
Dearl Miller:
Right.
Jon Keel:
But if you know which keywords convert, you’re investing because you are getting a return. So, all
that is background. We started doing, within about two weeks, we went out and found some third party
software. It was just basic ad tracking software. And, so we started actually measuring the conversion
of each individual keyword. And, what we found was quite interesting with Bill’s campaign. We
found that about 80% of the 378 keywords did not convert.
Dearl Miller:
Eighty percent?
Jon Keel:
Which meant that only about 20% did.
Dearl Miller:
So he was wasting 80% of his money.
Jon Keel:
Exactly. And then so we said, “Well, maybe we’re on to something here.” So, we immediately
implemented this with all the clients we were working with, and we found pretty much the same thing.
Now, the numbers will vary. We’ve seen as low as 70% of keywords not converting up to 95% of
keywords not converting. And again, we’re not dealing with five or ten keywords in a campaign; we’re
talking hundreds, generally.
Dearl Miller:
You’re saying that normally between 70% and 95% of your keywords will not convert?
Jon Keel:
That’s what we have found, and we’ve done this over 200 times on 200 different projects. Now,
somebody’s always going to ask the question, “You know, my campaign’s different. I’ve measured it,
and I find different numbers.” And I said, “That’s great. Guess what, though, that we both have done?
We’ve both measured.”
Dearl Miller:
Right.
Jon Keel:
And this whole perspective on individual keyword conversion, in fact, we have clients that call us
today, or prospective clients that want us to do outsource, they want to outsource all their work and
have us do it, but they’re not really keen about that. They’re saying, “Well, we don’t really need to do
that individual keyword conversion measurement.” Our answer is, “Great! We don’t need to work
together.”
We are that, I guess, adamant about it because we just think it’s stupid to go spend money that’s
wasted. So, that goes back to your original question, “Which one is better?” It all depends. I hate to
sound like an attorney but, when we do individual keyword measurement, or when anybody does
individual keyword measurement, they’ll be able to find which one is better for them. And, I’ll just
give you a quick summary.
We’ve gone back and, starting in January, 2002 up through to December 31, 2003, we actually did 206,
worked for 206 different clients, doing Pay-Per-Click stuff, and I’m just going to give you some
general numbers. Because we were doing this individual keyword conversion measurement, what we
found was, at least in those cases, that on about 15% of the projects that we worked on, Overture
clearly outperformed Google in terms of return on investment.
Dearl Miller:
Really?
Jon Keel:
There was about another 15% that Google clearly outperformed Overture. About 70%, a much greater
number, they both ran acceptable return on investment levels, or parameters. We wouldn’t have known
that, Dearl, unless we had tested. So, that’s a…. Everyone is always asking me the question, “Which
one’s better? Which one’s better?”
I said, “You’ve got to test them and find out for your particular market.” Now, we have found, and by
the way I’ll just, I’ll share this with you, we have probably worked in seven or eight different
campaigns with real estate oriented products or services. And, in that case we have found Overture
clearly outperforms Google. But, do you know what? The next real estate client we work with, we’ll
still test both because that one may be different.
Dearl Miller:
Right. How can we use them together?
Jon Keel:
Well, I’ll share with you the way we use them together. And again, you’ll hear different people say
different things. I’ll just share with you what we have found works well, and works well for our
clients. Because our philosophy is we want to start with a very large, and when I say very large that
might be as small as 100, maybe up to 500,600 keywords, and; again, let me back up. We presume
going in that we don’t know which keywords are going to convert on a given website.
Dearl Miller:
Right. You can’t know until you test.
Jon Keel:
You can’t know until you get out there. And, you can do all kinds of studies and things, but… I have a
friend who once told me, he said, “At the end of the day, the best usability testing is getting your site
out there and seeing what people do.” You know, that’s a real market test. So, because our
philosophy is to start with a large list of keywords, and because we have found that Overture is easier
to do large list keyword management on, we typically start with Overture.
Now, our whole purpose there is to determine as fast as we can, and we’re generally talking within
seven to 14 days, the non-converting keywords. In other words, so, we get rid of those. And, so we
take that smaller group of converting keywords, and then we go over to Google, Google Ad Words, and
start our Google traffic. And then, that’s where we start to do our testing on headlines, titles and
descriptions, to find which title, which description, gives us the best click through for that smaller
group.
Then, once we find those best headlines, or titles, and descriptions, we’ll take those titles and
descriptions back over to Overture and incorporate them into Overture. Now, there’s a caveat here.
The assumption there, and the way the question was asked to me was… well, the assumption is that the
people who are at Google and AOL are just like the people who are at Yahoo and MSN, basically,
Dearl Miller:
Which they’re not.
Jon Keel:
Which they’re not, and that’s a very good point. So, we have some flexibility here. Just because a
keyword doesn’t convert at Overture doesn’t mean that it won’t convert at Google. But initially, we’re
trying to get that smaller group, or small group, of 20 or 30 or 40 keywords that convert at both places.
Then, we go back.
Dearl Miller:
Conversion and keywords are very important topics to Pay-Per-Click advertising but before we get too
far into that, maybe we should back up a little bit and just explain some more about the nuts and bolts
of Pay-Per-Click advertising. Now, we know what Pay-Per-Click advertising is and how it can help
our business, and, we know what the best Pay-Per-Click options are. So, now let’s really get into the
details, like: Is it difficult? Is it expensive? Does it take a long time? Does it really work?
First of all, Jon, how do we get started with Pay-Per-Click?
Jon Keel:
I love starting at the beginning, and that really is a great question. With Pay-Per-Click advertising,
since we’re bidding on keywords, the first thing you need to do is to develop a list of keywords;
keywords that are relevant to content on your site. There are various ways to do that. We also suggest
to people, “Just look at your site! What are some general subject areas?”
Then, take that information and, you know, it’s as simple as writing a list of maybe 10 or 15 or 20
different what we call “keywords” or “key phrases” that describe the content that’s on your site. Then,
it’s a matter of expanding that list, and there are various tools that you can use to do that. There’s a
product called Good Keywords; that’s a free product out there that you can use to do that. Word
Tracker is another tool that we use to do that. We developed a software tool called the Keyword Bid
Optimizer that does the same, and we think does a little bit more.
But, the whole point is find a way to get that list big. And, when I say big, I mean at least 100, maybe
150 to 200 keywords. We have just been so surprised over the last several years, where a client will
come to us and say, “Well, these are my 12 keywords.” We go do our research and come back with
250 or so, and they say, “Wow! I never would’ve thought of that!” So, just, you really have to open
your mind. So again, in summary, start with your list of keywords.
Dearl Miller:
Now, once we have our keywords, we need to create the ad. When creating an ad, how do we come up
with the best titles and descriptions?
Jon Keel:
Well, again, great question. And, what I suggest people do is get a copy of the National Enquirer and
go to the back of it. Again, I know nobody in our listening audience ever buys the National Enquirer at
the newsstand, but this is a research product. Go buy a copy of the National Enquirer and go to the
back of the National Enquirer, and look at how their ads are written. Or, you can actually go to your
daily newspaper and look at how the classified ads are written.
Classified ads have a headline, and that’s basically something to get your attention, and then a little
description, which tells a little bit more. And, let’s just say, for example, that you’re selling pencils.
And again, I’m doing this on the fly, so this might not be how I end up doing it. But, as you’re selling
pencils, what’s the competitive advantage you have? Do you have the cheapest price on pencils on the
Internet? Do you have the widest selection of pencils on the Internet?
It’s something that you can put, in about 25 to 35 characters, that’s your deadline, that draws interest.
Again, not to get into a whole lot of copy writing techniques, but there are 11 or 15 different types of
headlines you can write. Just go to some good copy writing sources, and I think you’re going to be
talking about that in future sessions, but it’s all about the copy writing. The description gives you a
little bit more space, then, once somebody comes to the headline and through the headline, to talk a
little bit more.
Maybe you talk about your pricing. Maybe you talk about areas of the country. If you have a regional
business and, let’s say you’re in Southern California, it basically says “Southern California only…”
again, headline and body, and there are tremendous resources out there that anybody can go find. But,
that comprises, then, a part of your bid on Pay-Per-Click search engines, your title and your
description.
Dearl Miller:
Now, you mentioned a couple of interesting topics right there, when you were talking about the
descriptions. How can people effectively use the price in their description to make sure, price or other
things, to make sure that people that aren’t qualified don’t click on their ad?
Jon Keel:
Again, you’re asking, you continue asking these great questions, Dearl. Those are what we call
“negative qualifiers.” We have a client who has a product that sells for $4,000. Now, he doesn’t sell it
to first-time visitors very often on his website. But what we have done is we’ve actually put that
pricing in the headline because we don’t want somebody who thinks they can come and get it for
$49.95. We don’t want to pay for that kind of visitor to our site, so we use, pricing can be used very
effectively, and region and location can be used very effectively.
We happen to work with a number of dentists, and the last thing a dentist from Chicago wants is for
somebody from New York, who is never going to come to his office, to click through to his site.
Again, all this needs to be tested. Again, going back to the advantage of Google, you can test these
different variations of negative qualifiers in your headlines, and in your descriptions. And, whichever
one gives you the best click through and the best results, then that’s the one you end up staying with.
Dearl Miller:
Are there things that we can’t say in our ad?
Jon Keel:
There are things you cannot say in your ads, and both Overture and Google Ad Words have guidelines
that are on both their sites that tell you. Basically, Google is really down on things like superlatives,
“the best,” “the biggest,” things like that.
Dearl Miller:
The things you would normally see in headlines.
Jon Keel:
The things that you normally see in headlines. So, the way to get around that is just go read their
guidelines, their listing guidelines, and never get yourself in trouble in the first place. Depending upon
what market you’re in, if you’re in the nutriceuticals market, for example, we work with a number of
nutriceuticals clients, there are things that you can and cannot do. If you are competing against another
company and they’re a big company, and you want to use their brand name in your headline, you may
be able to get away with that but you probably are going to get caught, and they’re going to take your
listing down.
Dearl Miller:
If we do get disabled, what do we do? And, more importantly, you mentioned preventing from getting
disabled in the first place. What are some very specific things, besides using superlatives, that we can
do to prevent from being rejected?
Jon Keel:
The number one point is that, only use keywords that relate to content on your site. That’s something
we see over and over again. And, in talking with our friends out at Overture and Google Ad Words,
they said, “We don’t know where people’s heads are sometimes.” Now, let’s go back to the pencils
example. If you’re selling pencils from your site but you have something as ludicrous as videos, maybe
videos are hot in the marketplace, and I’m using an extreme example here.
If you had, you know, “Free Videos,” and “Free Videos” comes to a site about pencils, you see, those
two don’t go together. So, it’s using keywords that are related to content on your site. If there are
keywords that you would like to use and you don’t have the content on your site, we see this a lot of
times. Create some content on your site so that you will not be rejected. That’s probably the biggest
reason that both Overture and Google Ad Words end up rejecting people.
Now, again, we talked about the superlatives. What we see most people who do this themselves don’t
do, because we get calls from folks a lot, just to kind of help them through the process, they’ve not
gone in and read the listing guidelines at Overture and Google. It’s pretty much there in black and
white. Now, if you happen to have a keyword bid up and running, and for some reason, it gets taken
down, you’re going to get an email from either Overture or Google Ad Words. And, they’ll tell you
why it was taken down.
Most of the time, those guys are pretty much right on. Sometimes, and I won’t say it’s never happened
to us, where we feel we haven’t been treated fairly. And, I guess just given our relationship with them,
we can generally make a phone call and get it taken care of. But, for most people that maybe don’t
have that access, you’re kind of at their beck and call. You would think that they would give more
flexibility because you would that if that listing’s not up there, that can cost them revenue, but they do
have editorial guidelines that they do try to stay within.
Dearl Miller:
So, now that we have our keywords selected and we’ve written our ad, how do we determine how
much to bid?
Jon Keel:
Great question, and our philosophy is this. I’m going to go back to Overture first, and once you get
into Overture, you can see that people bid all kinds of prices. And, depending upon whether your field
is competitive or not competitive, and competitive doesn’t necessarily mean that your competitors
know what they’re doing, what we find is that most people don’t know their numbers, if you will. And,
I’m going to talk about that in a little bit.
But, initially, our philosophy is we start with the minimum bid with Overture, which is $.10 today. Our
objective is to get the listing approved and get it up on Overture. You only get the syndication
advantages when you’re in the top 3% to 5% at Overture. So, I mean you can be position 20 at
Overture, and chances are that keyword is not going to generate much traffic. So, it’s a matter of then,
if I’m at $.10, where do I need to be to be in that top 3%, maybe top 5%, at Overture?
If you don’t know your numbers, and when I say “know your numbers,” and I guess this is the other
advantage of Pay-Per-Click search engines, every business person, each of us that are in business, need
to know some numbers around our business. And, in advertising, I need to know “what’s it cost me?”
and “what do I get back?” And those two terms we call “average cost per visitor”, that’s what it costs,
and what I get back is the “average value per visitor.”
But, if I don’t know my average cost and average value per visitor, I can just say, “Well, let’s just go
out and put no limits, no spending limits on, and let’s go find out.” That’s a real quick way to go
through lots of money real fast, and quite frankly, to waste a lot of money. So, going back to your
specific question, we start very conservatively and then we kind of inch our bids up, if we’re in a very
competitive marketplace.
Our goal is to get in that top 3% to 5% but the reality is, if our numbers don’t work, if it just costs too
much and I don’t get enough return off of that, there are going to be certain keywords I probably will
never be able to be in the top 3% to 5% on. I run into the same situation at Google. Now, Google’s a
little different than Overture, because it’s not only your bid price, but it’s your click through that
determines your position.
Now, and I don’t mean to confuse anybody, where Overture is very specific, I mean where you bid,
you’re there in terms of your position. But, Google also gives you credit for writing good titles and
writing good descriptions. A good title and description will out-pull a bad title and description, even
though it might be ranked lower. So again, with Google, we try to be conservative, at least going in.
I’ve heard horror stories from clients who, again who weren’t and all of a sudden, $1,000 later, they got
some traffic, no orders, and they don’t know what happened. Again, this goes back to that point we
were talking about earlier, Dearl, in terms of the individual keyword conversion measurement. That’s
one of the ways you can help to negate that effect. So, in summary, we start conservatively, even if
we’re working with; we kind of treat the clients’ money as our money, and what we don’t want to do is
go out and waste it.
Dearl Miller:
I’ve heard that some people trick other bidders into paying too much. How, exactly, does that work,
and how can our Trafficology members make sure they’re not tricked into paying too much?
Jon Keel:
Well, both Overture and Google have a system where, and I’m going to speak more specifically about
Overture now, because it’s easier to see in Overture than it is in Google. But, if you are bidding at
Overture, an option called “auto bidding.” And, what auto bidding allows you, as a user, to do, or gives
you the option to do, is whatever Let’s say you’re bidding $.50 for position number 2, okay? Now, bidder number one might be bidding
$.55 to be in position number one. You’re bidder number two; you’re bidding $.50. Bidder number
three is not paying attention, and he’s maybe bidding $.10. Now, without auto bidding, when
somebody clicks through, the three of you… bidder one would pay $.55, bidder two, you would pay
$.50, and bidder three would pay $.10.
With auto bidding turned on, with bidder number two you can actually, and I’d never say do this but
I’m just telling you how it can work, you can bid $.54 cents. You’re going to force bidder one to pay
$.55.
Dearl Miller:
Right.
Jon Keel:
You’ve got auto bidding turned on. You pay, you bid $.54, but because you have auto bidding turned
on, you only pay $.11, one cent more than the next lower bid when you use the auto-bidding feature.
And again, it is optional. How can you know if you’re playing against smart people? Well, again, it
will generally take, I’ll just say a couple days, but if there are so-called “bidding gaps” in the bidding,
and when you bid at Overture you see the top five positions for each keyword you bid.
If you adjust your bid up with auto bidding on, and you see somebody below you come up right
underneath you, you know that they know what they’re doing. So, what you might do is go $.01 lower
than their shown bid and, if they jump down to $.01 below you, you know you’re dealing against a
smart person.
But there are, I won’t call them opportunities because I think, in business, and I believe this is ethical,
that if I’m competing against somebody who just isn’t paying attention, then, and let’s say they choose
to bid $.55, then I’ll help them pay $.55 because I’ll bid $.54, but I’ll pay close attention to what the
people underneath me are doing. Does that sort of make sense?
Dearl Miller:
Yes. That way, you save money and then, they come out of the market because they’re paying too
much.
Jon Keel:
Right. Everybody out there has competitors that don’t know what they’re doing and our attitude is; I
mean, we like competition because it makes us get better, but we also have competitors that do stupid
things sometimes and cost us money when they don’t know their numbers. Well, let’s just, as you said,
let’s just help them spend their money and maybe they won’t be around that long.
Dearl Miller:
One last question on bidding. Your position is determined by how much you pay, and we just talked
about how you can move back and forth. How important is it to be number one, or how important is it
to just be in the top three or four? How important is that?
Jon Keel:
Another great question, and I’ve heard people say “you want to be this,” “you want to be that”. We test
them all. Our general goal is to be in the top three because we want be shown across the syndication
partners but again, it has to make economic sense. Our testing has shown, and we haven’t done, you
know, a lot of this, we’ve done it probably with 20 or 30 different clients, that position; I almost always
would rather have position three because we feel that we can write better titles and descriptions.
Now, I’ve heard some people say, “Well, if somebody comes in and they click on the first bidder,
they’re automatically going to go to the second one, and go to the third.” I don’t know if that’s the case
or not. It may be. It sort of makes sense to me. I typically find that, as long as I’m in the top three,
and again I’m talking specifically Overture, I can be shown at Yahoo, I can be shown at MSN and their
other syndication partners. And, we find that, you know, if I can spend $.10, $.15, $.30 less on a
keyword and still get the necessary conversion, I’ll do that all day long.
Dearl Miller:
That concludes lesson one of the Science of Pay-Per-Click advertising. In lesson two, we’ll discuss
exactly how to find the best keywords for your business and also, we’ll learn the four things that every
Webmaster must know to use Pay-Per-Click advertising effectively.
I would like to thank Mr. Jon Keel for being with us today. I’m sure that all of our listeners are glad
you were able to join us.
Jon Keel:
Dearl, I’ve enjoyed it and I look forward to our next call.
Dearl Miller:
And thank you for listening. Remember, go to www.Trafficology.com/ppc.html. There, you will find
part two of this course, links to all the resources we discussed today, and while you’re there, make sure
you watch our video on how to find the best keywords for your website. Also, if you want to learn
more about Pay-Per-Click advertising, you can reach Jon Keel at www.Trafficology.com/ppc.html.
The Most Profitable Way To Drive Targeted Traffic to Your Website – Part 2 with Jon Keel
Dearl Miller:
Welcome to Part 2 of the Most Profitable Way to Drive Targeted Traffic To Your Website. This is
Dearl Miller from Trafficology.com and today we’ll continue our discussion with a true Internet
pioneer and the undisputed king of pay-per-click advertising, Mr. Jon Keel.
Thank you for being here with us again, Mr. Keel.
Jon Keel:
Dearl, it is great to be back with you.
Dearl Miller:
Before we get started, I want to make sure that everyone has the accompanying materials. If you have
not already done so, please go to the resource page, www.Trafficology.com/ppc.html. Then print out
the study guide and follow along with this lesson. Also, don’t forget to watch our videos on exactly
how to find the best keywords for your business.
Now, let’s take a couple of minutes to talk some more about keywords. How can people find the most
profitable keywords? I mean, how do you find the phrases that will not only get the highest clickthroughs but also bring in the most sales and the most profitable customers for my product or service?
Jon Keel:
Boy, that’s about a thirty-minute question. That’s a great question. It really covers a number of areas
because when it gets right down to it, when we’re not only using pay-per-click advertising but even
conventional search engine optimization or anything to do with keywords that people will type into
some kind of search engine. When we get to the point of selecting keywords, whether it be with payper-click search engines or conventional search engines, any process where people are going to type in
keywords or key phrases into any particular type of search engine, selection of keywords is the most
important thing.
Our attitude, and again, we’ve proven this out over the last two to three years with working, again, with
well over two hundred different clients on numbers of different, what we call “traffic tests”, is that we
don’t try to guess going in which keyword is going to be most effective. We have never found a way to
do that. Rather, Dearl, we take the approach of, let’s generate a large list of keywords and then because
we want to measure the conversion of each individual keyword, we let the market tell us which
keyword is best.
For example, if we start with a list, say, of two hundred keywords, and we can talk about how we
generate that list in a little bit, but let’s just say we have put together a list of two hundred keywords
that are all related to content on our website, then we get those keywords submitted and up and
running, and we talked about that in the last session, about how to do that, and then we – at the same
time, we insert tracking code into each individual, or with each individual keyword, so that from day
one or from minute one or hour one when traffic starts, we then can tell whether or not a keyword
converts, whether that conversion is a request for a special report or a subscription to an ezine or some
type of opt in process all the way down to sale, and there are different types of conversions that we’ll
talk about in a few minutes.
Then we let the people out there on the Internet tell us whether or not the keyword they’ve typed in or
key phrase they’ve typed in leads them to convert to some type of call to action. So again, we don’t try
to guess. What we do is let the market tell us and inherent in that, and this is something we discovered
about two years ago and I’ll just maybe quickly share the story.
We were working actually with a local client here in Cincinnati and with this particular client; we had
put together a large list. In his case, we were starting with 378 keywords and all these related to
content on his site. Now, he had given us a list of ten or fifteen and then, using some software tools
that we use, we were able to get that list to that larger size.
I was having coffee with him about two weeks after we began the project and he asked me a question
which nobody had ever asked me before and the question was, “Do all of these keywords convert
equally?” going back to, really, one of the original pieces or parts of your question.
Dearl Miller:
Right.
Jon Keel:
I said, well, you know, I don’t know, but from a direct response standpoint, one would assume no. But
we had never measured individual keyword conversion. So within about two weeks, we had come up
with a solution and what we found was that in his particular case, and I even remember the exact
numbers, twelve percent of those keywords converted to acceptable returns on investment, eighty-eight
percent didn’t.
Dearl Miller:
That’s only twelve percent of over three hundred?
Jon Keel:
Right.
Dearl Miller:
Wow.
Jon Keel:
Yeah. He only had forty-five keywords that – we’ve written this up on a case study. He only had
forty-five keywords that converted to acceptable ROIs. Now, he had other keywords that converted,
but they just, you know, we were either having to pay too much for the particular keyword from a cost
per click standpoint or the conversion was so low that we ended up paying too much. What that meant
was, there were over 330 keywords that we were just wasting money on. So we eliminated them and
refined his campaign down to that smaller list. We have found out over and over and over again, in
fact, I can say this, a hundred percent of the time, and I guess, I’m just going to say, I know we’ve done
over 150 tests since he asked me that question. It’s been the case every point, every time. But we
wouldn’t have found that out if he hadn’t asked the question and we hadn’t started measuring
individual keyword conversion.
Dearl Miller:
Jon, I’ve heard about PIPE software. Can you tell me a little about that?
Jon Keel:
Yeah. That’s really interesting. PIPE stands for “Product Idea Profitability Evaluator” and it really
isn’t my software. I’ve got to tell you, again, just story. We’ve got seven folks here and improved
results, and our attitude is with everybody that works with us, “Hey, if you come up with an idea, go
run with it and we’ll, you know, we’ll help you and fund you”, whatever. And going back now
probably a year and a half, people would come to us with either a new idea or they already had a
product or a service but hadn’t really done much with it online, and they said, “Will this idea even work
online”, and again, this is either for a new product, one that I hadn’t even begun to even think about
other than I wonder if this would work, or for an existing product or service.
So using some of the, I guess, expertise that we developed with pay-per-click, we started putting
together Excel spreadsheets and did all this by hand and two of the guys we knew, we work together as
a team here, Joe Garris and Ben Hathaway, just said, “Well, this is kind of stupid to keep doing this
thing by Excel spreadsheet”, so they actually developed some software. The only contribution I
personally made was I named it. You know, product idea profitability evaluator, you know “Pipe”,
that’s an easy thing for people to remember, is the software and I think they have a free demo, no, they
do have a free demo on their website, which I think will be in your resource website.
Dearl Miller:
Yes, it will.
Jon Keel:
There’s a demo and I forget whether it’s ten or fifteen days and there’s a special report that’s really,
they’ve done a very nice job of putting that together, I believe, and I’ve gotten a lot of great reviews on
it.
But basically, what you do is, you type in anywhere one, two, or three keywords and put in the selling
price of whatever it is you’re selling and estimate it or actual, what we call “cost of goods sold”, and
the software actually goes out and within a minute or two will return results which not only sort of
scores a ranking factor but gives you a whole table of, you know, if your site conversion is a certain
percent, you’re going to sell this much. It’s going to cost you this much if you’re using pay-per-click to
buy, you know, buy your advertising or buy your traffic and even will give you a whole list of
keywords, which you can then go in and modify. But what it does, it just saves so much time. We use
it internally because we’re always coming up with new ideas and new products, so we’re just doing it
on our own, but we use it as well with clients that call us today and now there’s a tool out there that
people can use on their own.
Dearl Miller:
Sounds like something I’m going to have to try myself.
Jon Keel:
Well, I, you know, I just tell everybody, I say, just go try it. In fact, I just had lunch with Joe Garris
and, I mean, they are just getting some phenomenal reviews from some very big names in the industry.
You know, people who have tried and said, this is pretty cool.
Now, what that does, though, it’s interesting. Pipe is really sort of the first stage, if you will, because
then you get to the point of, and I hope I’m not jumping the gun here with you, Dearl, but if I know that
my idea, or whatever, I know I’m going to proceed with this thing that’s, we’re going to use pay-perclick traffic as a method to, what we call “generate” our numbers, which we can talk about in a little
bit. We do need to generate this big list of keywords and there are a number of good solutions out
there. Of course, everyone probably familiar with the Word Tracker. That’s a subscription-based
software. Overture has its search term suggestion tool. Good Keywords is another good source of
keywords.
What we did about four years ago and this was actually the first pay-per-click software on the market.
There are actually, I think it went, we went commercial with this in August of 2000 and back then it
was bid management and all that, but it’s really not that today. The keyword bid optimizer, again, I
think that’s going to be in the resource section on your website.
Dearl Miller:
Yes, sir.
Jon Keel:
I’ll just tell you how we use it. We get a new project in and generally within about fifteen minutes, we
can generate a list of let’s just say at last two hundred keywords relative to content on the site. Now,
we do draw from Overture search term suggestion tool, but we have an XML feed from Overture, for
the software, and in addition to generating the list, generates the popularity, relative popularity of each
of the keywords, along with the top twenty bid prices so that I very quickly can look at this big array.
You can then download this thing into an Excel spreadsheet. I can look at an array and I can quickly
go in and determine of this massive list of keywords which keywords, and this ties back to part of the
conversation we had in our last session of, you know, if I got a keyword that the top ten bids are all
over a dollar and I don’t know my numbers yet, that probably tells me very quickly I’m just going to
skip over that keyword and then move on down the list. Or it might also tell me, as I go through that
analysis, that I might need to go back and generate more keywords because I just can’t find enough
keywords that are, you know, competitively priced such that I can afford to go in and start my pay-perclick test.
Dearl Miller:
Keyword bid optimizer will provide you all that?
Jon Keel:
Yeah.
Dearl Miller:
Wow.
Jon Keel:
Yeah. I mean, to us today it’s a research tool. We don’t, you know, think about using it to manage
bids or any of that kind of stuff, but it’s a great tool. Again, we’re probably the best users of it. Of
course, it’s out there available for anybody and there are a lot of people that use it, but I’m all about
saving time. I can just tell you, even with some of the solutions that are out there today, some of which
I mentioned, you know, I can get my keyword list, I can get my popularity, but then I’ve still got to
look at the bids so that I can be making intelligent decisions as I start my campaign, as I start my tests
in terms of which keywords that I’m going to be able to bid on and still get a reasonable amount of
traffic.
Dearl Miller:
So that covers how we find the most profitable keywords. How do we know which keywords not to
spend money on, the ones that are costing me a lot of money because they have high click-throughs,
but they’re not translating into any sales.
Jon Keel:
That’s a great question and I guess our answer is, we only really know that through testing and that is
why when that client asked me the question almost two years ago, how do I know which keywords
work and which ones don’t or all they all equal. Until we started measuring individual keyword
conversion, and I will share with you that there are people who say, I’ve heard people say, well, you
don’t need to do that, and, you know, I don’t argue with anybody, I just know that we do it and it works
very well.
But by measuring individual keyword conversion, and we do it with it software, any ad tracking
software will work, will give you the tools that you need to do it, but each individual keyword has its
own tracking code that then we measure all the way through, as I was mentioning earlier, we measure
all the way through the site in terms of what happens.
But here’s an example. If, you know, one might say, well, gosh, this particular keyword only costs me
ten cents and it might be a keyword that a lot of people click through on and I might get five hundred
people to click through on the keyword, okay, so I’ve just, five hundred click-throughs times ten cents,
that’s fifty dollars I’ve just either spent or invested. But if I’m not measuring the conversion of that
particular keyword, I don’t know if I’m not spending, I don’t know if it’s a good keyword or a bad
keyword. If I had zero sales, well, that’s a bad keyword.
Dearl Miller:
Right.
Jon Keel:
If my product cost or my product selling price is, say, a hundred dollars and I had two sales, you know,
that’s still, that’s not good conversion, two out of five hundred is not good, but I might fool myself by
thinking, well, I’m only spending, you know, ten cents a click, but I still would have a bad keyword.
I’d be spending too much for that keyword because that keyword’s not converting. Does that make
sense?
Dearl Miller:
Yes, sir. So by tracking the individual keyword conversion, then we can match up the costs for each
keyword along with the profits from each keyword and, therefore, we would know what we need to
keep and what we don’t.
Jon Keel:
Exactly, leads us to what we believe are the four, we call them “ratios”, but four numbers that every
website owner needs to know, and we’ve heard these talked about, but what we believe pay-per-click
search engines allow us to do is quickly figure out what those numbers are. Those four numbers that
you have to know are the average costs per visitor, or in this sense, what’s the cost per click, and by the
way, you can not only do this for the whole group of keywords, but since – if you are measuring
individual keyword conversion, you can actually do it on an individual basis. So that’s number one, is
the average cost per visitor.
The second number that you feel you have to know is the average cost per prospect or opt in because if
people are doing other things, and I know with other guests you’ve got on this program, this whole idea
of conversion, conversion is not only the sales conversion on the first time visitor, but it’s the
conversion on the back end from multi-step emailing people.
Dearl Miller:
Right.
Jon Keel:
So I’ve got to know what it costs me to get somebody to be a prospect because I then can tie then into
my conversion through email to a customer.
The third number is the cost per customer. You know, just first-time visitor, how many buy, etc., etc.,
what’s it cost me.
The last one then gets to the point where we tie in the actual site conversion and we determine what’s
called the value per visitor.
Think about it. If you know your average cost per visitor and you know your average value per visitor,
you know whether or not you have a – you know, what a friend of mine from southern Indiana calls a
“goin’ Jessie”. You know, if your average cost per visitor is twenty-five cents and your average value
per visitor is a dollar, that’s a four to one ratio. Most businesses, online businesses, should be able to
make money there.
Dearl Miller:
So you don’t leave it at the aggregate level. You actually break it down to a per-visitor level.
Jon Keel:
Yes, per visitor. By the way, then think about this. If you know that through this, and by the way, we
think that, we haven’t found another way that works as well as this one and I’m always open to listen to
what anyone has to say, but this is why we really like pay-per-click search engines, to give us these
numbers and, additionally, to, telling us the keywords that convert on our site.
But let’s just say that I know that my average value per visitor is a dollar, are there potential joint
venture or affiliate partners I can go to and tell them, and by the way, when you do this, you’ll be in the
minority because most people don’t know these numbers. But you can go to a potential joint venture or
affiliate partner and say, you know, my average value per visitor on my site is a dollar and I have a two
and a half percent conversion. What that tells that potential partner, then, is that every visitor he sends
you is worth a, you know, if it’s the same quality of traffic, it should be worth approximately a dollar.
Now, that will allow him, then, to work out or allow you to work out with him or her whatever type of
percentage payment you can work out, but let’s say it’s a twenty-five or thirty or forty percent payment,
that tells that potential partner and, you know, we get approached about joint venture opportunities all
the time. The first question we ask is, what’s your value per visitor and then what’s your site
conversion, because we want to know going in, is it going to be worth our while from a financial
standpoint to work with you. So when you know those numbers and going out to people, right away,
you’re moving to the head of the class, so to speak, and it’ll tell your potential joint venture affiliate
partner that you really know what you’re talking about. You know your stuff.
Dearl Miller:
Now, what you’re talking about is, if you already have a product and you’ve done the testing and you
know your metrics, then you can approach the joint venture partners and sell them on doing – on giving
you their traffic.
Jon Keel:
Oh, gosh, yes, yeah, it’s just, and then on the other hand, think about it. We both know some of the
bigger names in the industry, I won’t mention any here, but just think about going to somebody like
that and not knowing those numbers.
Dearl Miller:
They would laugh at you.
Jon Keel:
They’re going to laugh at you.
Dearl Miller:
What if someone didn’t have a product? Couldn’t you, if you took the information and you knew how
to calculate these numbers, couldn’t you also approach someone who wasn’t doing these calculations
and offer to calculate them for them?
Jon Keel:
Oh, yeah. In fact, we, I won’t say we approach people, but people approach us to help them calculate
those numbers. Sure.
Dearl Miller:
But that could be another way people could -
Jon Keel:
There’s a whole business opportunity right there.
Dearl Miller:
Right. Well, in a couple of minutes, we’re going to get exactly into how to calculate those numbers,
but for now, I want to just finish up with these keywords.
We talked about how to calculate the most profitable keywords and we talked about how to figure out
which keywords not to spend money on.
Now, in certain situations, you’re going to have keywords that are not profitable but that are essential to
your business, even though the testing has told you that they’re not working. Is there any way that you
can tweak the keywords, to take those non-converting keywords, to have visitors, but not buyers? Can
we fix those?
Jon Keel:
Well, I think there are a couple of ways to look at that, and this is, from our discussion last time, let’s
just say that I have a keyword and I have a title and a description associated with that keyword, and in
fact, I’ll go back to that other example.
Let’s say I’m getting five hundred click-throughs in a period of time and I’m paying ten cents a clickthrough, so I’ve spent fifty dollars. I may not be able to sell the person right away, the visitor right
away, but what if I’ve got my site set up such that I capture a name and an email address or ten percent
of those visitors, so that’s now fifty new names and email addresses that I’ve put into my database. I
might be able to sell my product on the back end through email, but you know, there might be other
products that I don’t even have, but because I’ve got them to come to my site through affiliate
relationships I have or whatever, that I could then maybe send them to somebody else and get paid for
that group of people or part of that group of people who actually maybe go to another website. Maybe
if I’ve collected a name and an email address, I’ve done my job right there, and ten percent is not
extraordinary in terms of an opt in rate. You know, we’ve seen them as high as thirty-five and forty
and I’ve talked to friends of mine who’ve seen them even higher than that.
But let’s just work on that group of fifty, which is the ten percent of the five hundred. Now, I’ve sold
them nothing, but maybe then through my backend email I offer them other people’s products, so I
haven’t sent them directly from my site, but I’ve contacted them on, again, on the back end. There’s
always a way to monetize traffic. It’s just sometimes it can be a long, drawn-out process. Does that
make sense?
Dearl Miller:
Yes, sir. Yes, sir, it definitely does. So what you’re saying is that you need to listen to your customers
and provide them with, even though you might not be selling right now what they’re looking for, if
people are coming to your site, they’re looking for something and you need to find out how to sell to
them.
Jon Keel:
Exactly. I know a good friend of mine I know is going to be speaking on one of your sessions, I
believe, on conversion and the ideas that he has come up with that I’ve learned from him, I mean, there
are all kinds of ways to find out what people want, so people need to be listening to that particular
program.
Dearl Miller:
Yes, sir. All right, now I want to really dig in here and get some really advanced keyword concepts.
How can we find out which keywords our competition are making money with?
Jon Keel:
Another good question, and sometimes you’re going to be out there in a particular market and you’re
going to be seeing people bid abnormally high, what you think are abnormally high rates for keywords
and you say, well, I just don’t know how they’re doing that, and what we have had to do, and this may
take a month or even two months of just following their bids. I mean, there’s some discipline to this.
You need to understand that many people out there who utilize pay-per-click advertising, who use it,
don’t know what they’re doing. I mean, they really are, I won’t even call them ignorant competitors,
I’ll call them stupid competitors because they’re just spending money and not knowing.
Now, depending upon, you know, if there’s, I’m making some generalizations here, but if it’s, say, a
large company or it might be involved with a major advertising agency that isn’t known for being very
smart on an interactive basis, sometimes they just have budgets that they’re going to go out and spend
and they really don’t care about results. In those particular cases, I think you just have to say, gee, I
wish it were different, and move on. But there are other times where, and we had a particular client, a
rather large insurance company we worked with several years ago, and they were selling car insurance
and our strategy was, the last five days of the month, we would go in and be in the top three positions at
th
th
Overture. The first through the 26 or 27 day of the month, we really backed off, and we had lazy
competitors that weren’t tracking and watching things very closely. These guys did about forty percent
of their business the last week of the month.
Dearl Miller:
Because that’s when everybody’s paying their bills.
Jon Keel:
That’s when everyone was paying their bills, exactly. So you have to know your market sometimes.
Now, if what if you were competing against them? If you were competing against them, you’d see that,
that over a couple of months period, they follow the same pattern and you begin to learn something
about their business and how you might then compete against them.
I guess just in general, depending upon the industry, you know, if you’re out in the, in what I’ll call the
“Internet marketing space”, you know, anyone who’s bidding there generally knows their stuff, but
there are so many other businesses out there other than Internet marketing where you can employ a lot
of the same principles that we learn and teach here in this industry, but you take them to, you know, to
more what I call “niche industries”, maybe traditional industries where people aren’t as attuned to how
to use the, for example, pay-per-click search engines, and you can actually then create opportunities for
yourself there because you’re dealing against competitors or competing against competitors that, quite
frankly, you know, it’s, I’m not necessarily a big fan of his, but Rush Limbaugh used to say, you know,
I’d fight this people with half my brain tied behind my back, and sometimes that’s the way it is.
Dearl Miller:
How do you find the keywords that your competition missed? You know, the dirt-cheap terms that no
one else is bidding on, but that we can make the most margin on.
Jon Keel:
Well, there again, I think it goes back to using software tools and I think that’s why it’s important to
generate a very large list of keywords. Now, I’m not smart enough to figure out all the keywords, but I
am smart enough to use the tools. I was just doing a study this morning, a research study this morning
for a new client, and in this particular case, we’ve come up with over seven hundred keywords.
Now, some of them I will share with you. In fact, most of them. Most of them are ten cents, in the ten
to fifteen cent range, and most of them might only be, in terms of Overture’s search term suggestion
tool, showing two, three hundred clicks a month, maybe four hundred, a couple that were up to a
thousand, but you know, if you could have a hundred keywords at that level, in the other terms for the
same client, there were a couple of terms that had, you know, I’ll just say up in the hundred thousand
range, but of course, you know where the prices were on those.
Dearl Miller:
Right.
Jon Keel:
Prices were, you know, well over a dollar. Well, because we’re generating this large list of keywords,
that’s where, I guess, we have probably found the best opportunity. This goes back several years, but
quick story. We had a client who was in the investment, let’s just say in the investment field. The
owner of this firm appeared regularly on, you know, he was published on Yahoo and CBS Market
Watch and AOL, their investment newsletters. At that point in time, and I just did this, we really
discovered this quite by accident. I just typed in Yahoo.com once, six million searches a month. Now,
you can’t do those things today, but it’s just, it is amazing sometimes the very, even very popular
keywords that people just assume, see, most people think that people go to search engines and type in,
all they type in are keywords, but a lot of times people go to search engines and type in URLs, such and
such dot com. Amazing. We’ve been involved with a couple of projects in the last year where we
would put together, and this is just a tip for people. We actually put together or suggested to the clients
that they put together a page on their website, we just call it the “competitive analysis” page. We had
all the competitors listed. It was very objective in terms of the information that was there. That
allowed us then to go and use competitor’s names and domain names as keywords and actually drive
traffic to the site that way.
Now, I will also share with you that, by no means I’m suggesting anyone do this because there can
always be legal and trademark issues that you have to be conscious of. I can just share with you,
though, that for the most part, that has been very, very successful and it’s just a strategy that people can
use, or at least look at using, rather.
Dearl Miller:
Just a couple more things on keywords. Talking about misspellings and synonyms, first of all, how can
we find those, what specific tools can we use to find those, and how do they convert?
Jon Keel:
There you have to break pay-per-clicks apart. Up to about two years ago, Overture, I loved Overture
because, I mean, we still love it, but it was really cool because you could take advantage of
misspellings. I have to live in Cincinnati and there are twelve different ways I found “Cincinnati”
spelled, so we would go and we’d bid on all those misspellings, but Overture in their wisdom a couple
of years ago developed some software that basically said, well, we know you misspelled “Cincinnati”,
you really meant to spell “Cincinnati” the correct way, so they – you don’t really get to take advantage
of the misspellings too much anymore in Overture.
However, Google is another matter, and the tool we use to define misspelling is Word Tracker. We’ll
go out and, depending upon the project, but do a fairly exhaustive research study with Word Tracker
and Word Tracker will give you the actual misspelling. Those then can be very aptly used in the
Google AdWords campaign.
Dearl Miller:
That’s the same with synonyms?
Jon Keel:
Well, actually, with synonyms I go to Synonym.com.
Dearl Miller:
Really?
Jon Keel:
Yeah. There’s a website that’s called Synonym.com. Now, there are probably other websites and
some may even be better, but that’s one that, when I’m running into a little bit of a problem, or I’ll just
go to my Roget thesaurus. That’s sort of an offline solution, but they all work.
Dearl Miller:
How do they convert? I mean, I know you’re going to tell me that you have to test to find out, but how,
what have you found in your own personal experience how misspellings and synonyms convert
compared to the actual abnormal word.
Jon Keel:
Well, you answered the question in the first sentence. We have never, and we just aren’t good enough.
I don’t know, I haven’t met anyone that has really yet to say, well, this keyword’s a winner, this one’s
not. What we have really been surprised about, and I think that maybe it leads to maybe the real
answer to your question is that when you test you find out how it converts, but what we have found,
Dearl, is that two competitive sites, Site A and Site B, they’re both selling the same thing, appealing to
the same target market.
If we start with the same group of two hundred keywords for Site A and Site B, we have found a
hundred percent of the time that different keywords will convert for Site A than will convert for Site B.
Now, there might be a little crossover, but the bulk of the keywords that convert are different from each
site, and I think a lot of that has to do with the copy, with the way the site is written, with the layout,
look and feel. I guess maybe somebody else knows better reasons than I do, but what we have tested
and been able to determine through our testing is just that, that different keywords will convert
differently on different sites. In fact, we’ve got a couple of clients who have multiple sites, multiple
domains, all selling the same thing and we’re using different keywords to drive traffic to those different
sites.
Dearl Miller:
So in reality, the only way to really know how your keywords will convert is to test. You can’t use any
other method, you can’t listen to how anyone else is doing it, you have to do it yourself.
Jon Keel:
I think you can listen to how other people are doing it and maybe pick up ideas, but whenever I hear
somebody at a seminar or somebody on a tape say, this is the only way, I just, you got to test. You
have to test. You know what? That’s not true. You don’t have to test, but –
Dearl Miller:
You’ll make more money in less time if you do.
Jon Keel:
I want to compete against you if don’t want to test.
Dearl Miller:
Right. One more question on keywords. You advocate the position of tracking individual keywords,
but you made the comment that some other people don’t have that same position. Can you provide me,
for argument’s sake, what are some of the reasons why people might not want to track individual
keywords? What’s the other side of the coin?
Jon Keel:
It takes a lot of work. I find that, and this is just a general comment, and we’re dealing with clients,
most people don’t want to do the work it entails. There’s really nothing magical about doing it this
way. It just takes work. You know, the first time you set up campaigns with individual tracking, you
know, for each one of these keywords, you know, it’d take us a couple of hours to set up a hundred
keyword campaign. Now, it doesn’t take us that long today. It probably takes us ten minutes because
we’ve automated a lot of that stuff.
But I find, and it’s just more of an opinion, that I see a lot of folks, and it’s not just in this field, but in
most fields, they just don’t want to do all the work that it takes to be real successful. I mean, I’m not
saying that’s right or that’s wrong. That’s just the way I think most folks are.
Dearl Miller:
You got to call that an opportunity.
Jon Keel:
We think it’s an opportunity. I’ll tell you what, just really, it goes to this. About a year or two ago on
the pay-per-click search engines, there were a number of companies out there selling, and they still are
today and providing very good systems, by the way, for what we call automated bid management
because you got a large list of keywords, quite frankly, you know, sharing this on the last call, that one
of the advantages, we believe, Overture offers over Google is, if you’re doing it manually, it’s a lot
easier to do with Overture than Google. Google’s more difficult, we believe, to manage a large list of
keywords.
But by doing individual keyword management, I will take a big risk and fairly quickly, and “fairly
quickly” might be two weeks, three weeks, something like that, knock that list down to ten to fifteen to
twenty percent of its original size. That’s very a manageable, for most projects and most websites, a
very manageable list of keywords to manage manually.
Dearl Miller:
Now, that’s, the automated bid management, that would knock your keywords down for you?
Jon Keel:
No, no. You still have to, at least the systems I’m familiar with, and I think I’m familiar with most of
them, you still have to go in and manually delete keywords.
Dearl Miller:
Why doesn’t someone develop a system where you can input your ROI and then just get rid of the
keywords that aren’t meeting up?
Jon Keel:
Well, there are a couple of systems out there that do that. In my opinion, they’re a little pricey, you
know, for most folks, but, and again, there may be systems out there that I’m not familiar with. I just
haven’t seen it, you know, if it’s not hitting that ROI, then bang, it’s out of there, or I know there is one
system that will take it offline. You still have to go in and actually delete the keyword, if you ever
want to do that.
Dearl Miller:
Okay. I think we’ve covered enough on keywords today. Let’s talk about testing and tracking. We’ve
touched on the basics before, but this is such an important topic, critical to the success of our listeners’
business that I really want to break this down and help our members get a firm understanding of
metrics testing and tracking.
So Jon, the first question I have is, why is testing and tracking so important? Is this something just big
corporations need to do or is this something for everyone, even the independent Webmaster?
Jon Keel:
Oh, actually, I find that, and we have some large corporate clients. They, for the most part, don’t get it,
and I think those that will choose to do the work and employ the discipline that it takes will find that if
they are competing against larger companies, in fact, I’m giving a talk in a couple of days on guerrilla
marketing and it is a pure guerrilla marketing technique where you can literally kick butt big time if
you do it and your competitors aren’t.
So again, it’s not something that is required. We just don’t not do it because we’ve had so much
success with it, you know, and our clients have had so much success with it, and I think that’s one of
the key advantages of the Internet, Dearl, is the fact that you can measure everything. Since you can,
why wouldn’t you, and not just to do it for doing it’s sake, to me, business is about return on
investment.
You know, I personally, I just hate to waste money. I was brought up that way and some people say
I’m a little tight sometimes, but if you’ve got a thousand dollars to invest in advertising, if that’s your
budget, why wouldn’t you want to get the best return you could for that money to take measuring,
testing and measuring, versus, well, here’s a thousand dollars, just go throw it away. See, I think that
was the attitude we saw back in what we call Internet One, in the dot com explosion days, people
really, here’s a million dollars, just go burn it, you know, here, go buy a thirty-second Superbowl ad.
Dearl Miller:
Quite simply, most businesses today don’t have that kind of flexibility. One of my favorite CEOs of all
time is Jack Welch. He’s quoted as saying that if you don’t measure it, it’s not a business, it’s a hobby.
If you really want to run your business, if you really want to be successful, you need to know where
you are, you need to measure it and if you don’t measure it, you don’t know where you’re going.
Jon Keel:
In fact, you know, if Jack Welch said it, boy, I’ve got to remember that because I totally agree with
that. Are you in business or is it a hobby?
Dearl Miller:
In fact, the IRS says the same thing, if you don’t measure it, it’s a hobby.
Jon Keel:
If that’s what the IRS says.
Dearl Miller:
So now everyone knows why they need to track, how tracking is very critical to their business. Can
you talk a little bit about the best ways to track? Is this something I can do by looking at my log files,
or do I really need to get more serious than that?
Jon Keel:
Well, there are two kinds of tracking overall sites. I’ve done log file analysis from scratch before and
after I spent a couple of hours trying to interpret all that stuff, I said, man, there’s got to be software out
there, and there is, you know, there are programs like Web Trends and HitBox and HitsLink. There are
a number of good, what I’ll call “web statistics programs” out there.
Just, I guess, a caution. What we have found, and depending on, many hosting, most hosting
companies will give you some basic stats packages. It’s my opinion that many of those basic packages
were developed by IT people for IT people. In other words, they really, they don’t help people who are
marketers, who are trying to measure, you know, things like unique visitors, you know, paths through
the site, how long did somebody stay on a site, how many pages did somebody visit.
One of the critical parameters we always look at, and I’m talking overall marketing stats now, are
pages, you know, on average, how many pages per visit. We’ve tracked that over a couple of months
because if you see that number going down or it’s, now, it depends on the type of site you have, but
you know, if you’ve got a five or ten-page site, you want to, I think, at least see people visiting three to
four pages on a site. You know, how did they get to your site, you know, what are called the “referral
logs”, you know, what search engines did they come from, what other sites did they come from, from
the perspective of search engines, what keywords did they type in.
By the way, this can also be another source of keywords that many times we don’t know. Let’s just go
find out if we have an existing site and we have that data available, find out what keywords people
have been searching on for the last six months that found our site. Those are what I call the “overall
marketing statistics”, but there’s a whole other level down of data, metrics, statistics, whatever that we
need to be looking at, and that’s involved with what I’ll just call “ad tracking”.
You know, if I’m going to do an online classified ad, either in one of the, like AOL or something like
that or maybe I’m going to use ezine advertising or I’m going to use pay-per-click advertising, any
method where somebody has to click on a link somewhere or there’s some transaction that’s occurred, I
have the ability to put code in, tracking code in at that point of the hyperlink and then I know then that
the, and see, we treat each individual keyword as an individual ad campaign, okay? They click on that
hyperlink on the external site, they come to our site.
Now, this is where the ad, and again, there are a number of good ad tracking softwares out there, thirdparty softwares. You know, we evaluated probably a dozen and settled on one and we’re actually
getting ready to change here again. In fact, probably going to be developing our own internally, but,
then I want the ability then to know on my site’s end, every place I have a call to action, that is, an opt
in, a sale, anything that denotes something good, you know, some response that I’m looking for from
visitors to my site, I have code there also and so I can track where they clicked and then what they, you
know, if in fact, they became a successful opt in or a successful sale.
Then I can tie those two together and I’ll know, for example, and I’ll just use a pay-per-click example.
If they typed on the word “widget” or “blue widget” on Overture or Google, let’s just use Overture in
this example, I know, then, that for every hundred people that clicked on that word at Overture, that
resulted in ten opt ins and two sales, for example. Then I can determine those numbers we were talking
about earlier.
Dearl Miller:
By using link tracking, we can track our individual campaigns and then match that up with how much
we’re spending on the campaign and then we match it up with the individual keywords to know which
keywords to use with which campaigns.
Jon Keel:
Ten-four, you got it exactly. Just think of the power that that gives you. I mean, that really is good
information, not only to have, but to use.
Here’s an example, by the way, that goes, I’ll just go back to the example we were using earlier where
we had five hundred clicks and we were paying ten cents. In other words, we invested fifty dollars, but
let’s just say that for that five hundred, those five hundred visitors we actually had a two percent
conversion or we had ten sales. At a hundred dollars each, that’s a thousand dollars of revenue. Five
hundred visitors times ten cents per visitor equals fifty dollars.
Let’s say that just for my business, I say, you know, I’m looking for a four to one return on my
advertising investment. If I get a thousand dollars of revenue, that says I could spend or I could invest
up to $250 in my advertising for that particular keyword. Well, I might be in a competitive situation on
that particular keyword, that would tell me that I could actually increase my per-click bid up to fifty
cents. I could increase it five times and still meet my ratios, still meet my return on investment. That
gives me a lot of comfort because I might have somebody that comes in and bids twenty-five cents.
Well, I don’t care. I mean, it’s going to decrease my gross profit a little bit, but I’m still within my
acceptable ROI.
In fact, we’ve done it sometimes just to blow people out once we know these numbers and using that
same example. We just go bid fifty cents and people were bidding ten and fifteen cents and they see us
up there at fifty and, again, going back, presuming they’re not doing the automated bidding thing that
we talked about last time. I can just totally subdue competitors. Now, they think I’m stupid. They tell
their friends at cocktail parties that, man, there’s some turkey out there bidding fifty cents a keyword,
but see, what they don’t is, I already know my numbers.
Dearl Miller:
More than likely, they don’t.
Jon Keel:
More than likely, they don’t.
Dearl Miller:
In a second, I want to get into the four tracking measurements, but before that, are there anything else
that we need to track that we haven’t talked about so far?
Jon Keel:
Just thinking through. I mean, there are other things one can get into. You know, one can look at
actually tracking individual hyperlinks within a page on our site. That’s very detailed. You know, I’ve
seen and you’ve seen them, I’m sure, you’ve seen long sales letters, single-page sales letters on sites.
They might have four, five, or more “order now” buttons.
Dearl Miller:
Right.
Jon Keel:
Well, it might make sense to use ad tracking on each one of those “order now” buttons to see which one
people click on because you might find one that nobody’s clicking on. Well, get rid of it. You might
find one that you want people to click on just due to its position on the page and you’re not getting a
high enough click-through, well, it might tell you, then, that you need to revise, or maybe you just say
“order now” and maybe you need to test your wording on that order button. So individual hyperlink
tracking is probably another thing. It’s more advanced, but we do it.
Dearl Miller:
Then by testing those type of things, you can also test your copy and other things like that.
Jon Keel:
No question. No question.
Dearl Miller:
So Jon, you have a whole advance tracking system with four key tracking measurements. You’ve
already explained it to us, but can you talk a little bit more about what exactly are the four key
measurements that every website owner must know?
Jon Keel:
Okay. This is probably, I think, you know, I give a lot of talks and this is the one thing I want people to
walk away with, to know that within thirty days from today or when you hear this, if you don’t know
these numbers now, you can know them within thirty days, max.
The first one is what we call “average cost per visitor” and you can look at this on a high level for all
your keywords, but then you also want to be able to look at it on an individual keyword basis. What
are you paying per click for a certain keyword. That’s really all we’re talking about. What’s it cost
you to get somebody to come to your website?
Now, why is that important? Before we even get into the others, once you know this number for this
vehicle, this vehicle called “pay-per-click” advertising, and you go out and look at other advertising
opportunities, because there are all kinds of different ways to spend or invest money to get people to
your site, you will always be able to compare. This maybe will be your base or your control, what we
call it. You can then go out and compare on average what’s it going to cost you to get somebody using
these other vehicles, so this is not only for the use of pay-per-click search engines, but it’s for the use of
comparing versus other advertising vehicles. So that’s the first one, average cost per visitor.
The next is average cost per prospect. Now, a prospect is somebody who visits your site, remember,
somebody who just visits your site is a suspect and they come from the universe of suspects, all the
people who are out there on the Internet.
Dearl Miller:
Because you don’t know anything about them.
Jon Keel:
You don’t know anything about them, they don’t anything about you. I have a good friend that says,
when people come to your site, you really want them to do one of really two, or at max, three things.
You want them to come to your site and leave because this site’s not for them. You make that patently
obvious. You want them to come and give you their name and email address or you want them to come
and buy. There are only three things. Really, there are only two, at the end of the day. It’s either do
something or leave and this average cost per prospect, then, is somebody – as my friend, Alex
Mandossian, taught me, sort of that shy yes, they sort of, I’m not sure I really like you or not, but I’ll at
least let you talk to me some more, and on average what’s it cost you to get somebody to become a
prospect, and again, you can break that also, then, down to the keyword level.
Dearl Miller:
How exactly do you measure that?
Jon Keel:
Okay, good question. Let’s say, going back to our previous example, we had five hundred visitors, we
paid ten cents each, we spent fifty dollars. I’m going to use the term “invested”. Since we’re now
measuring, it’s not an expense, it’s an investment because we’re expecting a return. Let’s say that of
those five hundred visitors, we had a ten percent opt in rate, or ten percent of the five hundred gave us
their name and email address, so that’s fifty. We collected fifty names and email addresses. Well, we
invested fifty dollars.
Dearl Miller:
So it’s a dollar.
Jon Keel:
So fifty dollars divided by fifty is, exactly, one dollar per prospect, so I’ve just invested a dollar to get
somebody to give me their name.
Dearl Miller:
To determine whether that’s good or bad, you -
Jon Keel:
You don’t know whether that’s good or bad until you collect enough of those and then you market to
them on the back end and find out what kind of return you get on that group.
Dearl Miller:
Exactly.
Jon Keel:
It might be good, it might be bad. You know, what that might tell you over a period of time is, I need
to get my opt in rate up to fifteen or twenty percent to make that source pay off. Another way to look
at this, though, because it really leads into our third and fourth numbers.
The third number is, on average what’s it cost me to get somebody to become a customer. What’s my
customer acquisition cost? Now, let’s go back to that same example of five hundred visitors and let’s
say that two percent of the people that visited out of that five hundred actually spent money with me.
Well, that’s, two percent of five hundred is ten, I believe, and if I’ve invested fifty dollars, it’s just cost
me five dollars to get a customer. Now, again, is that good or bad? Well, then I’ve got to factor in
what’s the selling price of my particular product. We mentioned in the previous example that it was
about a hundred dollars or it was a hundred dollars. Well, I’ve just spent five dollars to make a
hundred. You know, I’ve got product costs in there, but probably not a bad number.
Dearl Miller:
So you just take your net profit and compare that to your -
Jon Keel:
Exactly. It really leads into the last one and that’s my value per visitor. Now, and this is where that
two percent number comes in handy, or is required, basically. We have five hundred visitors. Two
percent of them, or ten, have become customers. My average selling price is a hundred dollars, so my
revenue is a thousand dollars. Now, there are a couple of different ways to calculate value per visitor.
You could do it on gross sales, you can do it on net profit, gross profit, whatever numbers are important
to you and your business, do it. An example I’m going to follow with in just a second is based upon
total revenue. I understand that not everybody may use it just that way.
Dearl Miller:
Right.
Jon Keel:
So I have just generated a thousand dollars in sales and I did that with five hundred visitors, so my
value per visitor is two dollars. It’s the total revenue divided by the number of visitors. That’s a pretty
good return. In other words, my cost per visitor is ten cents, my value per visitor is two dollars, that’s a
twenty to one return.
I will share with you, and again, that’s why we love to test. The best we’ve ever seen, and we work in
one particular area right now where let’s just say it’s about a hundred to one return and these guys can’t
spend enough money on advertising. Now, those are rare. Again, we wouldn’t have known that,
though, unless we tested. Typically, we find, you know, three, four, five to one, that’s not a bad return.
Again, in this example here, if you had a two-dollar value per visitor, do you think you might be able to
go to some people who have big mailing lists?
Now, here’s another way to look at this whole thing because we specifically broke out the opt in from
the sales and that’s really, it’s not fair to do it that way because what, in this little example, I’ve
generated a thousand dollars in revenue. I’ve had ten people become customers and I’ve had fifty
people opt in and I’ll just presume they’re different.
Dearl Miller:
So you don’t track those back in later.
Jon Keel:
Right. How much did my opt in cost me if I generated a thousand dollars and only invested fifty?
Dearl Miller:
Nothing.
Jon Keel:
You actually were paid to get opt ins, is another way to look at that.
Dearl Miller:
Right.
Jon Keel:
In fact, in this example, you had ten people pay you to become your customer.
Dearl Miller:
Plus those opt ins later on down the line, some of those are going to -
Jon Keel:
Oh, my gosh, yeah. It’s just, and again, knowing, taking this focus on determining what these numbers
are, and by the way, what if the numbers were not this good, because I mean, and I’m just giving you
an example where they are good.
Dearl Miller:
Right.
Jon Keel:
Obviously, every site we work with is not good. What it allows us, then, to do is to start, or allow the
site owner to do, let’s just say the value per visitor was fifty cents, that’s not very good. It allows you
then to, okay, I’ve got to go in and focus on things I can do on my site to improve conversion, maybe I
have to increase my selling price, but I definitely have to increase conversion. It gives me sort of a
starting point that I can them make improvements to my site and watch that number get bigger.
Dearl Miller:
You mentioned a minute ago that you have a client who can’t buy enough keywords. Can you talk a
little bit about the idea of scalability? How much money can you really make? How much traffic can
you really bring in from a properly run PPC campaign?
Jon Keel:
That is a tremendous question and I’ll share with you that in the last two years, we have, I won’t say
we’ve gone 180 degrees, but we definitely don’t look at things the same way that we did then.
Two years ago, when I wrote Instant Website Traffic four years ago, what I said was, you know, payper-click search engines are a way to drive thousands of visitors to your site in just days and that is a
true statement, by the way. Still true. But when you started measuring individual keyword conversion,
what we found out was that we may be driving thousands of visitors a day, but all of them may not be
good visitors. It’s our opinion today that pay-per-click search engines are the first step in a traffic
campaign, first step to allow us to determine these numbers that I talked about.
As long as my converting keywords are within acceptable return on investment or ratio, you know, that
three, four, five to one ratio over, of value over cost, we’ll continue to do that all day long. There is an
upper limit. We don’t think today that pay-per-click search engines represent the unlimited source of
traffic that we did two years ago and it’s because we’re measuring individual keyword conversion.
But think about this, what if you have determined you’ve got fifteen or twenty keywords that convert
on your site? Might that be a place, then, to start to do conventional search engine optimization once
you know the keywords that convert on your site?
Dearl Miller:
Yeah. I talk about that in some of my other things, that once you know what keywords to convert for,
then you can do your search engine optimization because if you don’t know what keywords convert,
then you’re actually hurting your search engine optimization because you’ll be optimizing for words
that don’t convert and that hurts the rank for the words that do convert.
Jon Keel:
You’ve heard them as have I. We’ve heard people say, well, I’ve got top ten ranking on Google, yada,
yada, yada, for all these keywords and my question always back to them is, you know, I don’t know
whether that’s good or bad.
Dearl Miller:
Then you see so-called “experts” who send you emails all the time saying, “Hey, I’ll give you a top ten
ranking.” I don’t call them experts. I call them criminals.
Jon Keel:
This is just another way of looking at it and so it goes all the way back to your question. Today, we
don’t, we believe that PPC has a very definite place, but it is definitely not the be all to end all. It’s just
one more tool in the toolbox. We happen to believe it’s probably the first tool you want to learn how to
use or get good at or just get somebody to do for you because once you know these numbers and you
know the keywords that convert, you know, you can go to conventional SEO, you can go to affiliate,
joint venture partners, it just opens up a myriad of other opportunities, and if you don’t know those
numbers and don’t know the converting keywords, I think most of the time you’re going to be shooting
in the dark.
Dearl Miller:
Here’s another thing you can do, because sometimes search engine optimization is a hassle. Once
you’ve maxed out your pay-per-click campaign, which you’re going to get considerable results from,
then what you can do is you can move through a different industry and then develop a new product and
a new site.
Jon Keel:
There you go, whole other way of doing it.
Dearl Miller:
So instead of moving vertically, you can move horizontally.
Jon Keel:
Yup.
Dearl Miller:
So we’ve really broken down pay-per-click advertising today. We’ve explained how to set up a
campaign and how to write your ad, how to find the best keywords, how to track your keywords and
how to improve conversion. How can a pay-per-click campaign be used to sell a very expensive
product, like a car or a boat?
Jon Keel:
Well, we actually have a client who is in the antique boat business and started working with him about
three years ago. He is, and I really should clarify. He’s more of a boat broker. He puts buyers and
sellers together, but his business has doubled each of the last two years. He already had a good
business before and it’s totally due to pay-per-click.
Now, again, a lot of the principles that we’ve talked about in this call and the previous call, Dearl,
we’ve employed with this guy, and, you know, we’re buying traffic on average of under twenty cents a
click, I’ll just share that with you. We have, in his particular case, a very large list of converting
keywords, so he, we started with well over a thousand, too, though. These are products that sell on
average for twenty-five or thirty thousand dollars apiece.
Now, again, he is not actually selling online, and maybe this is where you were going. He is acting as a
lead generator, generating leads, and then he puts buyers and sellers together and I don’t know what his
commission rate is on that, but he does pretty well and, again, his business has doubled each of the last
two years.
Dearl Miller:
But you can still, from those leads, you can still track that back with the same principles that we talked
about before?
Jon Keel:
No question, and that’s exactly what we’ve done and he just, let’s just say he’s getting a very, very high
return on investment.
Now, in terms of actually selling something online, you know, the ecommerce transaction, just my
general opinion is, and what we’ve seen over the last several years, as the selling price goes up, the
more difficult it becomes, not impossible, but more difficult it becomes to sell, purely sell, online in the
ecommerce transaction.
What we have found, and we work with a number of business to business clients who specifically don’t
sell online, but they use pay-per-click advertising to generate leads, or that, you know, that cost per
prospect, but you know, we’ve been able for each one of those to figure out a cost per sale or cost per
customer because we take their offline data, they know for, say, every ten prospects turns into two
customers and the average customer’s on average worth this much money, so we’re able to take that
same data, although we’re doing it in an offline environment and bringing it back and calculate what
the value per visitor and the cost per customer is. In fact, we’ve not found an application where these
principles don’t work.
Dearl Miller:
How about with affiliates? Can they use pay-per-click advertising?
Jon Keel:
Yes, affiliates can. There are some guidelines that both Overture and Google have relative to being an
affiliate. Here’s the thing as an affiliate that you have to be careful about, is that, you know, depending
upon what you’re being paid, you know, if something sells for a hundred dollars and you’re getting
twenty-five, thirty, forty percent, maybe as high as fifty percent, you just have to run those numbers
and understand that the more popular an affiliate program is, particularly in the Internet marketing
space, most smart affiliates know a lot about pay-per-click search engines, so you’re going to be
competing generally against a lot of people. What we have seen work really well are affiliate programs
in maybe non-Internet marketing-related industries where maybe the competition isn’t as savvy.
Again, you have to test it. I’ll never say it’ll never work. Just be understanding of some of the risks
inherent with being an affiliate as it relates to pay-per-click search engines.
Dearl Miller:
How is using pay-per-click different for business-to-business compared to business to consumers and
also professionals using, like lawyers, can they use pay-per-click?
Jon Keel:
Yeah. We specialize in a particular niche with attorneys and when I said, I was talking earlier about
this guy who says, I’ll spend everything I can. That’s who I was talking about. Again, professionals
are not generally selling, but they’re generating leads, and in the business space, things like white
papers, I mean, we can still use a number of direct response principles, but maybe not as in your face,
as in business to consumer direct response.
Again, I guess, we’ve looked in eighty, I think it’s eighty-four or eighty-five different industry
segments and we haven’t found one yet where it doesn’t perform. Some perform better. The foil
industry is very, very competitive, although we found some that work and we found some that don’t
work.
So I think you just, when we’re talking about business to business or professionals who are
approaching business people versus business to consumer, a lot of times you’ll find when you do your
keyword research, there aren’t as many people online actively in the B to B space, and I should say it
this way, in certain B to B spaces, as there are maybe in other B to C spaces.
But the research will always bear that out, that the work you do up front will dictate whether or not it
makes sense to proceed. If people aren’t searching for particular terms that are involved with business
to business, then it probably doesn’t make sense to employ pay-per-click advertising to the degree that
it might, you know, B to C or other type of business to business application. It always gets down to the
test and the research you do up front.
Dearl Miller:
That concludes Lesson 2 on the Science of Pay-Per-Click Advertising. I would like to thank Mr. Jon
Keel for being here with us today and I’m sure all of our listeners are glad that you were able to speak
with us.
Jon Keel:
Dearl, I really appreciate the opportunity and I guess the parting comment I would leave everyone with
is, in my opinion anyway, we’re still at the beginning of this whole field. I’ve heard many times people
said over the last year or two, well, it’s too late for me, relative to using pay-per-click, everyone knows
about it. I can share with you that everyone doesn’t know about it, and when I speak in front of groups
and talk about this concept of individual keyword conversion, well over ninety to ninety-five percent of
every group I talk to, they just – they sit there with their mouths open because they kind of heard about
it, maybe they’ve tried it, but I promise you, if they’ve not done it or you haven’t gone in and looked at
this concept and then the concept of learning your four numbers, you’re just beginning, and just the
vast majority of people still aren’t there yet, so the opportunities are still out there.
Dearl Miller:
Thank you for listening. Remember, go to www.Trafficology.com/ppc.html. There you’ll find all the
links and resources that we discussed today. While you’re there, make sure that you watch our videos
on how to find the best keywords for your website.
Also, if you want to learn more about pay-per-click advertising, you can reach Jon Keel at
www.Trafficology.com/ppc.html.
That concludes the Science of Pay-Per-Click Advertising.
Google AdWords: The Greatest Development in Advertising This Century with Perry Marshall
Perry Marshall:
It really is a survival of the fittest game. It really is a situation where the smartest marketer wins. Now,
if you’re going to jump into AdWords, you do need to be educated and you need to understand what’s
going on. You don’t want to learn the hard way, or learn by your own mistakes. I quickly found it to
be the most instantaneous way to get traffic.
Dearl Miller:
Hello, and welcome to Trafficology’s Spotlight on Google AdWords. This is Dearl Miller, editor of
www.Trafficology.com. Today, we’re talking about Google AdWords, and how to make money with
Pay-Per-Click advertising. We’re lucky to have with us the Internet’s foremost authority on AdWords,
and the author of The Definitive Guide to Google AdWords, Mr. Perry Marshall. So, take out your
workbooks and prepare to learn the science of Google AdWords.
Hello, and welcome back to Trafficology’s Spotlight on Google AdWords. Before we get started, I
want to make sure that everyone has the accompanying materials. Please go to
www.Trafficology.com/adwords and print out the accompanying AdWords study guide. After you’re
done listening to this lesson, make sure you watch our videos that show you the exact step-by-step
process to find the best keywords for your AdWords campaign.
Welcome, Perry, and thank you for being with us today. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, and
how you got started in Pay-Per-Click advertising?
Perry Marshall:
A couple of years ago, I heard Jon Keel at Improve Results give a talk on Overture and Pay-Per-Click
marketing. And, a whole bunch of alarm bells started going off in my head because, really, Pay-PerClick advertising, number one, I think it’s the most important development in advertising this decade.
It’s as important as the development of any other media that’s been used in advertising. I think it’s as
important as infomercials. It’s as important as 900 numbers.
It’s as important as even mail order itself because what it allows you to do for the first time ever is to
only advertise to people who are interested in what you have right now and are proactively looking for
something, and only pay when you think they might want to hear what you have to say. And, it’s never
been possible to impose those conditions on advertising before.
And so, at the time I was doing marketing projects for a couple of clients and I started buying clicks for
them, and I started buying clicks for my own website. And, that was in April of 2002, and AdWords
was very new. And, I mean a lot of people jumped on to AdWords pretty quickly, but at the time, in
most categories there was zero to six bidders, maybe. Usually not very much more than that, so the bid
prices were pretty low.
Google remained kind of a best kept secret for a while as far as a place to advertise, and I had some
time to flounder around and learn how the system works, and make some mistakes, and not pay too
dearly for those mistakes. Within the last year, it has become much more competitive. They’ve
surpassed Overture and for good reason because, if you know what you’re doing, Google AdWords is
vastly superior to Overture, I mean by a country mile in terms of what you can do and the flexibility,
the control you have, the instantaneous ability to make changes and to test things.
And, but of course, now it’s a lot more competitive than it used to be. Now, instead of two or four or
six people bidding on a certain keyword, now sometimes in actually quite a few categories it’s 20 or 40
or 60 bidders. And so, and it really is a survival of the fittest game, and it really is a situation where the
smartest marketer wins. And, so now if you’re going to jump into AdWords, you do need to be
educated and you need to understand what’s going on.
You don’t want to learn the hard way, or learn by your own mistakes. But, I quickly found it to be the
most instantaneous way to get traffic. And also, it was and still is the best way to gather intelligence in
the process of getting that traffic because you can find out what makes people click and what doesn’t.
Dearl Miller:
For the listeners that aren’t familiar with Pay-Per-Click advertising, can you tell us a little bit about
what it is, and why AdWords is the best Pay-Per-Click option?
Perry Marshall:
Well, Pay-Per-Click marketing was started by www.GoTo.com about three or four years ago, and they
changed their name to Overture. But, what they did was, this was in the middle of the big search
engine battles, Alta Vista was battling with Lycos, battling with Excite, battling with Yahoo, and
Google was in there. For a long time Google was just a minor player, but they eventually got a
foothold and really grew.
But, back in the days of the free search engine wars, people were mostly selling banner ads. I
remember it was either Yahoo or Alta Vista, experimented with selling top listings on search engines
and I don’t think that worked very well because they, I think they took that program away. But, what
Overture did was, or GoTo at the time, was they said, “We’re going to sell the top few listings of a
search engine. We’re going to sell the links on a per-bid basis, so the highest bidder wins.”
And, you pay when the person clicks. You don’t pay just because it’s seen by somebody, like banner
ads. You’ll pay when a person clicks on your link and goes to your site. And I think, to a lot of people,
that sounded kind of perverse. It sounded like you’re kind of screwing with the editorial content of a
search engine and prostituting yourself, maybe. I mean, that was my impression.
Dearl Miller:
Right, because at that point in time people were used to free search engines.
Perry Marshall:
Right. Right. And, you know, and people, ever since search engines became popular, people have
always been obsessing over getting free traffic from search engines like it’s some kind of an
entitlement. But here’s the thing. If you mark off part of that page as being paid listings and you make
it reasonably clear to people what’s sponsored and what’s free, an interesting thing develops. It’s that
now there’s a market price for web traffic, and it goes to whatever its worth.
So, whether it’s a nickel click or $5 a click, whatever traffic is really worth, advertisers will end up
paying that for it. But, the advantage that isn’t so obvious, wasn’t obvious to me at first, was that now,
for the first time on the Internet, an advertiser has complete control over traffic. You can turn it on and
turn it off at will. You can get the exact traffic you want and no other traffic, because you bid on
keywords.
So, the way that it works is that, if you sell Sony digital cameras, you can bid on the phrase “Sony
digital camera,” or “Sony digital cameras,” and your ad will only appear when a person types in “Sony
digital camera.” And so, your ad only appears when a person searches on that particular thing, and you
pay only when the person clicks and comes to your websites. And so, it’s the most results-oriented
advertising you can buy.
And, since there tends to be a relatively steady number of searches on a daily or weekly basis on any
particular thing, it becomes a way to get steady sources of consistent quality traffic, which you can then
test things. And I, this is something that I always talk about, a website is an ongoing experiment of
putting information in front of people and trying different things until you figure out what they really
want, and then sell it to them. Really, the Internet is a complete reversal of how marketing is done.
It used to be that the person, the sales guy or the marketer, whoever it was, they had a product and they
had a list of people they’re going to try to sell it to. And, they take that list and they pick up the phone,
or they send faxes or letters or whatever, and they try to get in front of the person, and interrupt them
from whatever they’re doing, and sell them something. And, search engines are a complete reversal of
that.
In the world of search engines and the Internet, it’s not the vendors and the salespeople who have the
list; it’s the customers who have the list. And, it’s not the vendors and salespeople, you know, running
out of their businesses chasing people. It’s customers coming towards the vendors. And, they have a
list of vendors, and they’re going to see which one has what they want. So, it’s a complete reversal of
what marketing has traditionally been. And so, marketers have to figure out what they want.
“Okay, here they come. I can get in front of them for a fee. What do these people want?” And so,
Pay-Per-Click traffic gives you the ability to have a steady stream of people coming to your website.
Now you can put things in front of them and see what they respond to, and you can try different offers,
and you can try different products. You can try different copy.
And, the advantage of AdWords is not only can you, of course, change the content of your website any
time you want to, but AdWords lets you send people to the exact place in your website you want them
to go. It allows you to, any time you want, to change the text of your ad. You can do it instantly. So,
you can write an ad and bid on some keywords and have some clicks going to your site, but you can
change your ad and you can see, “Oh, well my old ad, 1% of all the people that saw this ad clicked on
it. Now, I changed my ad and now I’m getting 2%. Looks like this new ad is better than the old one.”
So, if the old ad said “lowest prices” and your new ad said “same day delivery,” and twice as many
people are clicking on “same day delivery,” you just discovered that there’s twice as many people
interested in same day delivery as were interested in low prices. And, you might have assumed
otherwise but now you know. And so, you can test copy, and you can test all kinds of different things.
And, you can scientifically make your traffic equation work.
“Okay, I’m paying $.80 a click, but I’m getting $3.00 worth of sales for every click, and my gross
profit is $1.00, so my net profit is $.20.” You can tweak that sales process until you’ve got it where
you want it. Then, you go buy other forms of traffic. See, before Pay-Per-Click search engines, there
was no guaranteed way to get consistent traffic. Traffic you get from sending out emails isn’t
consistent, because the email lists are always changing.
Traffic you get from free search engine listings isn’t consistent, because you don’t have any control
over your ranking in the search engines. Traffic from affiliates is not consistent. And so, this is the
fastest, most scientific way to get your website right. And, Google is better than all the other guys
because Google lets you have instant changes.
Right now, Overture doesn’t. Overture doesn’t let you split test different things. Overture often takes a
week to get going where Google usually only takes a few minutes, so that’s a real advantage and it’s
revolutionary.
Dearl Miller:
Can you talk a little bit about the idea of relevance, and how AdWords using relevance to improve your
conversion rate and your copy?
Perry Marshall:
Let’s talk about what got Google to where they are now. You know, when all these search engines
were going along and competing with each other, for the most part they all seemed about the same to
me. I don’t know about you. I mean, okay, there was Alta Vista, and there was Yahoo, and they were
a little different, but everybody seemed to be more or less doing the same thing. I started to notice that
every time I used Google, I found what I wanted faster than I found at other places.
Google, well there’s a couple of things they did. They would, when I would type in a set of keywords
and press “search,” the results I got would always have those keywords in the context of the other text
on the webpage, rather than just having something from the top of the webpage or from the title bar. I
noticed one day that if I typed in somebody’s name and the city they lived in, it would return their
phone number and their address. “Oh, this is a phone directory, too!”
They started adding more and more stuff, and eventually I started to realize that the fastest way to find
some information that I was looking for was to type it in Google.
Google seemed to be better at figuring out what was relevant to a search than everybody else. And, of
course one of their formulas was the page rank thing where they judged how many sites linked to your
site, is the content similar. And, they really had some smart ways of determining what was relevant
that brought them a lot of fans.
It brought them a lot of attention, and a lot of customers. And so, their priority was always, they want
to be the fastest path from your desire to the fulfillment of that desire.
So, the question was, “How do you translate that into advertising? How do we force our advertisers to
be more relevant, not less relevant? How do we make it more than just this perverse bidding war?”
And so, they put in this really ingenious thing, and I think this was a true stroke of genius.
What they did was they said, “We’re going to let the customers vote on how relevant your ad is. If you
can write an ad that people want to click on, we’re going to give you an advantage compared to what
people don’t click on.” So, they put in a couple of rules.
One rule is if you can’t get people to click on your ad more than .5% of the time, or five times out of
1,000, we’re going to disable your ad.
So, if your ad is seen 1,000 times for the same keyword and less than five people click on it, you’re
going to, your keyword is going to get disabled. And so, that created this self-cleansing factor in
Google where you could bid on anything you want, but if your ad didn’t match that keyword, you
weren’t going anywhere fast.
The other thing they did was they said, “We want to reward advertisers who write ads that people want
to click on, so what we’re going to do is, we’re going to have this little formula for deciding where
everybody’s ranked.” There’s a number one position. There’s a number two position. There’s a
number three position. The first page has anywhere from eight to ten positions available. And then,
page two, there’s eight more, page three, there’s eight more, and page four, there’s eight more.
And so, there could be a lot of bidders, so who gets the top spot? Who gets the second spot? Who gets
the third spot? So, they came up with this formula, and the formula is your bid position compared to
the next guy equals your bid price times your click-through rate. And so, here’s what that means.
That means, if I’ve got an ad that gets a 1% click-through rate, or 1% of the people who search click on
my ad, and I’m bidding $1, then if your ad gets a 2% click-through rate because it’s better worded, it’s
more appealing, if you get a 2% click-through rate compared to my 1% click-through rate. Then, you
could have the same position as me for half the money. You only have to pay $.50, where I have to pay
$1. You can get there for half the money if your ad is twice as relevant, and Google measures
relevancy by click-through rate.
And so, if you want to be number one, you can be number one by bidding high and/or having a relevant
ad. But really, in the end, the best copy writer wins. The person who writes the most appealing ad
wins on Google, because the most appealing ad is the most relevant ad. So then, your job is, you wrote
an appealing ad and people clicked on it, now your job is to sell them something so you can pay for the
advertising that you’re budgeting. And, that’s how Google does it.
And, it’s not just a bidding war; it’s an intelligence war. And, you have to align your priorities with
Google’s, which is give the people what they want, right away, as fast as possible. Give them exactly
what they’re looking for, so when they find their ad and click on it and go to your page, the person
goes, “Now, that’s for me. That’s exactly what I was looking for.” And, Internet marketing is the
science of giving people exactly what they’re looking for.
Dearl Miller:
Well, now that we know a little bit about Google, and about AdWords, and about why AdWords is our
best choice, can you tell us a little bit about the general steps for how to set up an AdWords campaign?
Perry Marshall:
You can go to www.Google.com, and they’ve got a link that says, “Advertise with us.” It’s a real
simple process, mechanically. You click on the link that says “Google AdWords Select” and it invites
you to write an ad. And, you write an ad and it asks you for the URL that you want to send people to
on your website. And then, it asks you for a list of keywords that you want to bid on. And then, it asks
you how much you’re willing to pay, the maximum bid price you’re willing to pay.
And, you pick which countries and which languages you want the ads to show in. And then, you get
done with that, and Google sends you an email. You give them your credit card, they whack you for
$5.00, and you’re on. Your ad is showing, and it’s really that simple. It’s deceptively simple; there’s a
learning curve to it. You find that you can’t just brainstorm a bunch of keywords and throw them in
there with an ad. If you do that, it usually doesn’t work.
You usually have some difficulty with that. You have to have a strategy for breaking your keywords
into little groups of tightly related things. You need a strategy for systemically improving the
performance of all your ads. You need to make sure that you’re bidding not too little, and not too
much. And so, there’s a whole learning curve going on there, but that learning curve exists for one
reason and only reason.
The reason that learning curve exists is what you assume you know, or what you think you know, about
your customers, or about the people who are searching the Internet, what you assume to be true about
those people isn’t true. Okay? And so, all your assumptions are what go into the keywords you choose
and the ads you write, but those first assumptions usually aren’t right. They’re just the first guess.
And so, the real trick to it is looking at your results, you know, today, tomorrow, the next day, the next
day, as they evolve, and changing what you do to respond to what all that traffic is telling you, because
people will tell you what they want by clicking or not clicking on your ad. What makes people click
tells you what makes them tick.
Dearl Miller:
It’s been said that Google is the best direct response marketing machine ever built.
Perry Marshall:
I’ve certainly said that, and I think it’s true. It’s really the fastest way for a person to learn direct
marketing that anybody’s ever come up with. My first experiment with direct marketing was writing
some sales letters and sending them out to people that lived within, you know, a couple miles of my
business. And so, you know, you’d write a sales letter. You’d, I think the first one I sent out was like a
couple of hundred. Okay?
And, I’m trying to sell something, actually I was trying to get appointments, was what I was trying to
do, sales appointments. And, send out a couple hundred letters. And, of course, that involves licking
stamps and all this kind of stuff. Right? It was a lot of work. And, I stick this stuff in the mail. Then,
a week later, I go, “Well, okay, I got four phone calls.” That’s a 2% response, and that’s my first
experiment in direct marketing. Well, that took a week.
Now, on the Internet, you can write a Google AdWords ad and, let’s say that it’s something like “red
wagons.” Well, there might be a thousand searches for red wagons on the Internet every day, and that
means that my ad can be seen a thousand times a day. And, getting a 2% response means that 20
people click on my ad. Let’s compare that to my 200 sales letters. Sending out 200 letters and getting
four people to call, or having an ad seen 200 times and getting four people to click.
You know, a click is not as valuable as a phone call, but that little experiment of just seeing what it
takes to get four people to click on my website, that might only take two hours. Most of that two hours,
I’m doing something else. It might only take five minutes and $5.00 to put that ad up. And so, it’s
very instantaneous. It’s instant gratification, for the buyer and for the seller.
And so, you will get an opportunity to try ideas, and to try concepts, and to test words and headlines
and landing pages, and whatever you want to do, faster on the Internet than anything else. Not to
mention that, you know, you can put an opt-in page where you ask people a question like, “What are
you looking for today?” and they’ll actually tell you. And, you get instant feedback, and it’s nonthreatening. So, really, it’s the fastest way to get right up next to your customers short of calling them
on the phone.
And, since it’s non-threatening, and since people don’t feel like they’re being watched, they do what
they want to do and you can watch what happens. Whereas in most other situations, it’s not nearly as
easy to measure things. And so, on the Internet, you can measure everything with complete precision.
With most other media, you know, split testing stuff, hard to do.
Putting, you know, “Okay, I’ll send 500 people this letter, and I’ll send 500 people this other letter.
And then, when they call I’ve got to ask them for the little code that was on the order form, and then
I’ll know where they saw it, or then I’ll know which letter they got.” That’s all a lot more cumbersome
offline than it is online. So, Google AdWords is the fastest way to learn the art and the science of
direct marketing of anything that anybody’s ever done.
Dearl Miller:
Also, Google allows you to focus on your copy writing in your offer and, like you said, you don’t have
to deal with all those things. It automates the process so that, as a direct marketer, you can focus on the
message that you’re sending to the users.
Perry Marshall:
Right. Right. You can spend all your time on the message instead of monkeying around with, you
know, buying space advertising that’s in a magazine in a newspaper, or sending out a bunch of letters.
Now, I’m very much in favor of offline marketing. I think there are a lot of people who, they focus
only on the Internet, and it’s a mistake because there’s a lot more people offline that could buy than
there are online.
If you’re doing business online, in a lot of cases you’re only going to be able to reach maybe 5% of the
people that are out there. There’s a lot more customers available offline, but the neat thing about the
Internet is you can get your message right on the Internet first, then go do all those other things. So, I
call it my “expanding universe” theory.
The first thing I do is, I buy clicks on Google. Then, after that, I’ll do search engine optimization based
on the keywords that were proven to work. Now, that first step on Google, it might take some patience
and some time to get it right. Okay? It’s not necessarily something I’m going to rush through, but I’m
going to get it right. I’m going to get it profitable, then I’ll go do search engine optimization.
Then, I’ll go to Overture, or Find What, or some of these other Pay-Per-Click search engines. Then I’ll
buy traffic there, based on what worked on Google. Then, I’ll do email stuff. Then, I’ll do print
advertising, and direct mail, and press releases, and all this other stuff. But, I’m going to get it right
with a controllable, instantaneous traffic source, first.
Dearl Miller: It seems that the whole process starts with identifying the wants and needs of your
customers and then, going from there, picking your keywords that best serve the wants and needs of
those particular customers. How can we find the best…?
Perry Marshall:
Right. Right. The question that you have to ask yourself is, “Okay. I have a product. I have a
problem I can solve. If people have that problem that I know how to solve, and they’re trying to find a
solution, what would they type in?” Okay now, here’s where a lot of people get hung up. You know,
somebody will, let’s say that somebody’s got a company called the Jupiter Corporation and they do
some kind of financial thing, let’s say. It’s just hypothetical, okay?
What a lot of people do is they’ll go bid on the word “Jupiter.” Okay? They’re under some foolish
notion that people are searching for their company. They’ll write an ad that says, “Come to Jupiter
Corporation for all your financial needs.” Okay? So, they bid on “Jupiter,” and they’ll find out that
1,000 people search for “Jupiter” and only one person clicked on their ad. Well, duh! They were
searching for the planet Jupiter, right?
Dearl Miller:
Right.
Perry Marshall:
And, nobody’s interested in Jupiter Corporation. Nobody’s interested in any corporation. Nobody’s
interested in, see people don’t buy Coca Cola because they like the Coca Cola Company; they buy
Coca Cola and drink it because they want a cool, refreshing drink, or they want to be cool, or the want
a caffeine blast. And so, so a lot of people, they don’t really think through they keywords that people
might type in.
It’s like well, okay, if you solve financial problems, what kind of financial problems do you solve?
Like, you might, you might really be wanting to bid on “IRA rollover,” or “401K rollover,” or
“unemployment insurance,” or “disability insurance.” Here’s one, somebody brought it to my attention
that, like, companies that sell auto insurance, most of them bid on “auto insurance,” but most people
actually go searching for “car insurance.”
“Auto insurance” is what insurance agents call it. “Car insurance” is what people who own cars call it.
And so, that’s something you will learn if you go bid on these keywords and watch what happens.
You’ll go, “Wow! There’s a lot more searches for car insurance than for auto insurance.” And so, you
have to learn how to think like your customer thinks, rather than thinking like people in your industry
think.
Dearl Miller:
So once we have our initial list, based on the customers’ wants and desires, how can we find the words
that will translate into clicks, and eventually into sales?
Perry Marshall:
Well, my contention would be that a lot of those words have the potential to turn into sales. You can,
well I mean, here’s, there are a couple of basic tools out there. If you go to
http:///inventory.Overture.com, that’s a real useful tool that Overture has. And, if you type in a set of
keywords, they’ll tell you how many searches that keyword got last month, and they’ll show you a
whole bunch of derivatives of the same keywords.
Like, for example, if you do a search on “insurance,” it will show you auto insurance, mortgage
insurance, unemployment insurance. It will go down the list and show you how many searches there
were for that term. See, you have to look at that list, and you’re going to go, “Well, some of these
keywords match what I sell, and some of them don’t. And, some of these get a lot of searches, and
some of them only get a few.” And so you’re looking, you’re especially interested in the ones that get
a lot of searches that match what you sell.
Dearl Miller:
Before we go, can you tell us a little bit about how to write a good AdWords ad, and then what people
can do to their website to help convert the sales?
Perry Marshall:
Okay. Well, a couple of things. First of all, when you write an AdWords ad, don’t expect to hit a
home run the first time out. What you’re going to need to do is keep trying different ads, and keep
writing different ads, and see what gets the highest click-through rate, because you can’t assume that
you know exactly what people want.
You know, a lot of people, they’ll write an ad, let’s say the figure out that, okay, nobody’s searching on
“Jupiter Corporation” but people are searching on “car insurance.” We sell car insurance. So, they bid
on the word “car insurance,” and then they write an ad that says, “Jupiter Corporation. Come here for
all your automotive insurance needs, www.JupiterCorp.com.” Now, that ad usually, an ad written like
that usually won’t do very well because it doesn’t have the words “car insurance” in it, and because it’s
talking about the company much more than it’s talking about the person searching.
Those ads aren’t about you; it’s about them. Okay? And so, that’s the first thing, and there’s a lot of
things. I mean, I’ve got a lot of different, you know, in my course, I have a lot of examples of ads that
worked and ads that didn’t, and formulas that usually work very well, and formulas that don’t. But, if
you wanted to boil it down to something simple, it’s companies talking about themselves, instead of
talking to the customer about himself or herself. Okay?
Now, here’s another thing, is you get to decide what web page the person lands on when they get to
your site, and in most cases it’s bad to assume that the place to send them is your home page. In a lot
of cases, that’s the worst place to send them. Let’s say that you have a clothing store, and you sell suits
and ties and socks, all these kinds of men’s clothing. Well, if you deposit people on the home page
when they search for “Jerry Garcia tie,” well, that might be how it works in the brick and mortar world.
Maybe the person’s in the mall, and they see the store, and they go, “Hey, I need a Jerry Garcia tie.
Let’s see if they’ve got them in there.” And, maybe they’ll go walk through the door, and go all the
way to the back, and find the tie section, and find the Jerry Garcia ties. But, in the online world, you
can save them a lot of steps. If they type in “Jerry Garcia tie,” you can take them right to the page
where you sell Jerry Garcia ties. If you sell Tabasco ties, you can take them right to the page that sells
Tabasco ties.
You take them right exactly where they want, right away. And, you talk to them about them, and what
they want to do with the tie, not about you and how great your ties are. And so, I mean, I think one of
the biggest mistakes I see people making is they bring people to their website, then they make the
customer do a bunch of work to figure out where to go. Well, that’s neither necessary nor desirable.
You can take them right to the thing they’re looking for, exactly.
I mean, I’ve got clients who, they bid on obscure part numbers, and they take people right to a part
number and it’s like, “Wow, there it is! I can buy it right now.” And, obviously the person could go
somewhere else, but do you know what? If they typed it in, they saw your ad, they clicked on the ad, it
took them right to the page, “enter your credit card here and we’ll ship it to you in 24 hours.” The
whole thing is liked this greased funnel.
It’s like we’re going to build a funnel and maybe we’re building the funnel out of, you know, out of
spare parts here, but once we get it put together, we’re going to take out our sandpaper and our tools.
We’re going to smooth it out, and we’re going to turn this crude little funnel into a greased slide with
smooth edges and smooth corners. And, the person’s going to be able to search, click on the ad, find
what they want, easy to buy, easy to figure out what you’re offering them.
They’re going, “Yep. This is for me. This is for me. This is for me.” And, all of your numbers tell
you if you’re right or wrong, all the way through. If your click-through rates are low, it means your ads
aren’t hitting people’s sweet spots. If the conversion rate on your opt-in page, or your sales page, is
low, it means you’re not giving people what they want.
This is an opportunity for you to try something different and give them exactly what they want. And,
once you’ve got that figured out, then you can go to a slightly different product, a slightly different set
of keywords, and say, “Okay, there’s traffic here. What do they want? How do I give it to them?”
And really, the mature and experienced marketer doesn’t even start with a product and try to get traffic
for it anymore.
The experienced marketer looks at the traffic that’s available and says, “Hey! What do these people
want that everybody else isn’t offering them?” and figures out how to get in front of that traffic with the
right product. And so, it becomes the most customer-centric way of looking at the Internet that’s
available, and that’s revolutionary, too.
Dearl Miller:
Testing and tracking is a key to making your Google AdWords campaign successful. Can you talk to a
little bit about how to test and track, and what are just some of the main things that people need to be
aware of?
Perry Marshall:
Well, first of all, Google lets you test and track how many impressions and how many clicks you got
for every keyword you’re bidding on, and for every ad that you’re running. And so, just Google’s
account manager tells you a great deal about your product. You’ll have keywords that have a high
click-through rate; you’ll have keywords that don’t.
And, you say, “Well, obviously, you know, the first set of keywords I’m doing a good job with, but
these other ones, I’m not doing so good. So, maybe I need to delete these, and stick them in a different
group, and try again, and offer people something else here.” That’s the first thing.
Secondly, Google has a conversion tracking tool where you can put a piece of Google code on your
success page, or your “thank you for ordering” page, or your “thank you for opting in” page, and they’ll
track the percentage of people who take the action after they get to your site that you want them to take.
And so, so now you’re tracking two things. You’re going, “Well, okay. Today there were 1,000
searches and I got 30 clicks, so that’s 3%. And, out of all the people that actually came to my site, I got
10% to opt in for my newsletter.”
And so, you know exactly how many searches there were, how many of those searches came to your
website, and how many of the people that came to your website did what you asked them to do. And,
you know how much it cost you per successful action, and per click. You know all of your numbers,
and you know them basically automatically. You don’t have to get out a bunch of spreadsheets or, you
know, all this kind of stuff.
You just, you just look at the numbers and they give it to you. They’re right there. And so, a lot of
direct marketers, you know, they’re mailing out catalogs or whatever it might be. They know they’re
making money, but they don’t know exactly how much money they’re making. They know their
system is basically working, but they don’t know exactly what’s working, exactly what is not working,
but they have an approximate idea.
On the Internet, you never have to guess. You can know exactly, because you can test everything.
Dearl Miller:
Well, that’s all the time we have today. Thank you very much for being here with us today, Perry.
We’ve covered a lot of good information on how our listeners can draw targeted traffic with AdWords.
And, thank you for listening!
Remember to go to www.Trafficology.com/AdWords and go through our AdWords study guide, and
watch our videos on the exact, step-by-step process to find the best Google AdWords keywords. Also,
if you want to learn more about Google AdWords, you can get Perry Marshall’s book, The Definitive
Guide to Google AdWords at www.Trafficology.com/AdWords.
Perry Marshall:
Thank you very much, Dearl. I appreciate your time, too, and I appreciate you entrusting your
customers to me. I’ll look forward to hearing from people out there.
Online Articles: the Absolute Best Free or Low-­‐Cost Way to Drive Traffic to Your Website with Willie Crawford
Willie Crawford:
It’s free publicity, and it’s much more effective than most forms of paid publicity. An ezine publisher
runs your article, endorsing you to their reader. They’re saying, “Here’s a person that I think has
something worth listening to.” They’re presenting you to their reader, and you could not pay for that
type of advertising. Or, if you could, it would be very expensive. And so, it’s just a way to get in front
of hundreds of thousands of people that you would not ordinarily be able to get in front of, for free.
Dearl Miller:
Hello and welcome to Trafficology’s Special Report on using articles to create web traffic. I’m Dearl
Miller from Nitro Marketing, and the editor of www.Trafficology.com. One of the most under-utilized
web traffic techniques is publicity. When most people think of publicity, they envision being on
Oprah, having an article written about them in the New York Times, or doing an interview on a local
A.M. radio station.
Truth be told, those are all very effective ways to generate web traffic and, as we’ve learned from Dr.
Vitale’s monthly column on Hypnotic Marketing, there is a simple, three-step method for making
traditional publicity work for you.
Today, we’re going to share with you a simple, inexpensive way that you can use the power of
publicity to start generating web traffic immediately. By writing and disseminating online articles, you
can spread the word about your product or service, improve your search engine ranking, and create
thousands of new links to your site virtually overnight.
We have with us today the Internet’s foremost authority on using Internet articles to create web traffic.
Mr. Willie Crawford has been marketing online since 1996. He generates a six figure annual income
just by using articles to create web traffic and market niche products. Now, he’s going to share with
you the exact system he uses every day to write and disseminate online articles.
And, in part two of this report, he’ll share with you his top ten advanced tips for using articles to create
web traffic and promote your online business. Now, turn up your speakers and prepare to learn the
science of creating web traffic using online articles. Welcome, Mr. Crawford, to Trafficology’s Special
Report on using articles to create and convert web traffic.
Willie Crawford:
Thank you, Dearl. It’s my pleasure. I’m a big fan of Trafficology and I’m honored to be here.
Dearl Miller:
To start out, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, and how you got started with using online
articles?
Willie Crawford:
Yes. I started on the Internet in 1996, just looking for a way to earn some extra income, and one of the
first people I stumbled across was a person by the name of Jim Daniels. That was about 1997. I was
reading his newsletters and just noticed how much I enjoyed learning from his articles, which were in a
very conversational tone. And, I decided at that point that I was going to someday be as prolific and
write articles as well as Jim did.
And, so I just made that my own goal, writing my own material that was just in a conversational tone,
that got across the message of how to do business things.
Dearl Miller:
If we want to create more web traffic, why should we spend our time writing and disseminating online
articles?
Willie Crawford:
The biggest reason is because it’s free publicity, and it’s much more effective than most forms of paid
publicity. When an ezine publisher runs your article they are, by default, endorsing you to their reader.
They’re saying, “Here’s a person that I think has something worth listening to. They’re presenting you
to their reader, and you could not pay for that type of advertising. Or, if you could, it would be very
expensive.
And so, it’s just a way to get in front of hundreds of thousands of people that you would not ordinarily
be able to get in front of, for free. It’s also an excellent way to brand yourself. If you can write lots of
articles on a given topic, then people begin associating you as the expert on that topic. So, it’s a way to
demonstrate your expertise, to get your name in front of your audience as the person who knows a lot
about a subject.
It’s also an excellent way to generate those thousands of search engine links without any requirement to
reciprocate because, when people publish your articles in their newsletters, they quite often archive
those newsletters on their website, and those links are very persistent. They’ll be there for years, with
people searching on those topics of interest and finding you. It really does work, and it also drives up
your own page rank, and things along that line.
Dearl Miller:
How much time should we expect to spend writing in order to create traffic-pulling articles?
Willie Crawford:
It depends upon how good an author you are, how good of a writer you are. For me, it takes very little
time. I can generate an article of 1,500 words in less than an hour. But, my system for doing that is to
just jot down notes on a topic I think will make a good article, come up with three or four main points,
then just flesh it out, then let it sit for a while, then go back and look at it and just revise it three or four
times. And, altogether though, that takes me less than an hour.
I think the typical person would, should probably plan on sending three or four hours on a typical
article, just to make sure it’s really, really good.
Dearl Miller:
How can we find a good topic for our traffic generating article?
Willie Crawford:
They should look at, first of all, where they hope to get their article published. And then, based on the
audience for that medium, that publication; and, I don’t just publish articles in ezines, I submit them to
article directory type sites, and I give people permission to use my articles in their ebook, and even
their print publications. I look at what problems those target audiences are discussing. For example, I
spend lots of time on discussion forums in the Internet marketing niche.
And so, I look at what types of problems those people are discussing, and that suggests to me topics for
articles, and that’s one of the easiest ways in the world to do it. Another technique I use is I notice
what people are saying to me in email. So, if I get common questions or common concerns expressed
to me in emails, or on feedback forms from my order system, those all suggest topics that I could write
an article on.
Dearl Miller:
You mentioned your system for generating a 1,500 word article in less than an hour. Can you tell us
more about that?
Willie Crawford:
I just was taught a long time ago that ideas are slippery and, if you don’t jot them down as soon as
remember, as you come up with them, that you’re likely to forget them. And, so I always have with me
either a piece of paper and a pen, all my cars and everything are loaded with some, some way to always
jot down notes. And, then I go back and I transfer them to my laptop.
And, so I just have this running idea file and, as I sift through it, I look for ideas that are perfect for
writing an article on. And, over time my articles quite often write themselves as I read down the list
and just add a point or two, and before I know it I have a really solid idea with three or four sub-points.
And, I just pull it out and write an article.
Dearl Miller:
What is the best format for an article? For example, would you recommend a “how-to” article, or a
numbered list, and what other formats have you used?
Willie Crawford:
The numbered list format is one of the easiest formats in the world because you just make a list and
then expand upon each item, so that’s incredibly easy. It doesn’t require any literally skill, per se. It
depends upon the purpose of the article, too. Most of the articles I write, being an Internet marketer, a
person who is out to sell products and services and earn a living from that, most of the articles I write
have the ulterior motive of selling something, and so I use classic copy writing techniques.
That is, I point out a problem and then point out some of the things associated with that problem, point
out what one should look for as a perfect solution to that problem and then, at the end of my article,
point out the item I’m indirectly promoting as a perfect solution to that problem. And that’s one of the
things that I teach people, that I coach, is to almost make the article a self-sell advertisement. That’s an
excellent technique.
Another one that I see used quite a bit is people who have the online discussion forums can take
comments from their discussion forum and just share those with their audience. There are, you can
write articles that are answers to questions you’ve received from subscribers to a newsletter, if it’s just
for your own newsletter or even if you’re going to share it with other newsletters. That’s another
technique, is to basically get questions from your audience that they would like addressed and write
articles on those. Those are my primary systems for creating articles.
Dearl Miller:
Can you walk us through the whole process of writing and distributing an article, from start to finish?
Willie Crawford:
Sure. I basically ask myself what topic is of most interest to my target market at the time. It might be
website traffic generation, or writing effective copy, or something like that. Jot down your main idea,
the main point that you would like to get across, and then three or four sub-points, and then spend some
time thinking about how you’re going to get this point across. And, then it really is just a matter of
fleshing it out in your own words.
I write as if I’m talking to someone sitting across the table from me, and I use “you” and “your” just as
if I’m talking to one individual, so that when they read the article, they feel I’m talking to them. I just
write it. And then, I let it sit for a while, and go back and revise it a number of times, looking for
spelling and grammar errors. I run it through a spell checker, for example, because you do lose a lot of
credibility when you have a major mistake in your article, and you will have your readers pointing that
out to you, and you don’t want that.
Once the article is written and you’re fairly satisfied with it, it’s probably not a bad idea to get a trusted
friend to proofread it for you and point out things to you that maybe don’t flow. Another thing I
recommend is taking your article, after you’ve written it, and reading it aloud to yourself. And, that
will let you catch awkward points in the article itself. Once you are satisfied that the article is worthy
of sharing with the world, my system is to use an article distribution service.
You can compile your own list of target publications and websites and submit it manually, with just a
subject line of “article submission” or “article for your newsletter”, or something to that extent. And
then, open with the fact that you understand they accept articles, and that you’d like to submit yours,
and your only real requirement is that they not change the article and they include a byline point back
to you. But, I go to one of three article submission services.
One of those is called www.EzineTrends.com. Another one I use is called
www.thePhantomWriters.com. A third one I use is called www.SubmitYourArticle.com. And, what
all three of those services do basically is, they take my article and they blast it to anywhere from 600 to
over 1,000 different ezine publishers and websites. And, as soon as it’s blasted out, I get emails back
within the hour saying that they plan on either using my article on the site and their newsletter, or
they’ve already posted it in an article archive on their site.
And, that tells me I’m generating links pointing back to my site, or that I’m going to get exposure to
their audience. That’s how I distribute articles; I don’t do it manually anymore because it’s so time
consuming. And, you’re looking at, with some of these services, probably $15 per article to have it
submitted.
Dearl Miller:
You use an article distribution service to save time. What is your advice to authors who would prefer
to go the free route and do it themselves? How would they do that?
Willie Crawford:
There are several ways of doing it. One is you could manually look for article directories just by going
to a search engine and typing in the phrase “article directories” and then sifting through the returns.
And, I don’t personally do that, but whenever I submit an article through a distribution service and I
discover a new one has published my article, I will often go over to that directory and just load up 20 of
my older articles to get more links coming to me from that directory.
So, that’s certainly very effective, especially after you’ve written a number of articles and you just have
them all in text files in one folder on your hard drive. It’s very easy to spend an hour just loading the
articles into one directory in the proper format. So, it’s worth using the search engines there. Another
technique I used to use all the time was, Yahoo Groups has some lists that are article distribution lists.
And, some of those lists have in the thousands of members.
You have to be a member of the list and, as a member of the list, you are allowed to submit your
articles. And, the articles go to other list members, who are publishers and writers, and they very often
will use your articles. And, the articles are also archived on the Yahoo site, so that’s another
distribution channel.
There’s also software out there, I’m thinking Ezine Announcer, which is by Jason Potash, is one piece
that a lot of people use. And, it’s a semi-automated system for submitting software, for submitting
articles. A lot of people use that to both promote their newsletter and to promote their articles. Those
are the main ones.
There are many discussion forums, online discussion forums. Discussion forums in many niches that
encourage you to post your articles on the forum. Now, if you are not a regular visitor to a particular
forum, you shouldn’t do that. You should visit the forum and make yourself know first. There’s the
slang term “drive-by article”, that’s a person who has never visited the forum before.
They just, to get their links out there, drive by, post an article, and you never hear from them again.
And, a lot of online communities don’t appreciate that behavior. It’s like you stopping in somebody’s
back yard and putting up a sign to your business and leaving. It’s not appreciated. But, those are the
main free distribution methods I have used and would recommend.
Dearl Miller:
What kind of short term ROI have you seen from this, and what kind of long term RIO have you seen
from it?
Willie Crawford:
You can get very good quality because what you have is, you have writers that hope you will use them
over and over again. And, you know, some of these writers, in under an hour, can generate a fairly
good article. You may want to edit it, but I’ve gotten, I’ve had clients get very good articles for that
price.
If you decide to write articles on your own, should you focus on areas that you’re an expert on, or is it
okay to use research to write an article?
Willie Crawford:
I do both. I reason that things that I’m an expert on, I can very quickly create an article on. And, some
of my articles are written with the intention actually of just putting information out there for the search
engines to find and demonstrate I’m an expert. So, based on that, I sometimes will write two or three
articles a week with the primary purpose of just putting it out there so that I can be branded as the
expert. And, those are all things that I know well, just from my study and from my experiences.
At the same time, when I want to know about a topic and I can’t find a lot of information about the
topic readily, or I don’t see a lot written on the topic, that suggests to me that that’s a good topic to
research and write on because, if I’m looking for the information and can’t find it readily, then there’s a
good chance that others are interested in that topic. That’s when I recommend researching a topic, and
making sure you get all your facts accurate. But, quite often those articles will do very well and will be
published by a lot of sources.
Dearl Miller:
You mentioned reading your article aloud, and having someone else read the article for you. What
other things do you recommend we do before sending out our article?
Willie Crawford:
Those are the two big things. The reason you want to get someone else to read it is because we often
read, and see, what we meant rather than what we said. So, getting someone else to read it will catch
that mistake, which I make quite often. And then, reading it aloud just points out places where it
doesn’t flow because, if someone’s reading an article and it doesn’t flow, or a sentence doesn’t make
sense, the structure is just too awkward, a lot of people will just stop reading that article. You just lose
your reader.
Or, if you’re trying to convince the reader of a certain point, you lose credibility because you can’t
express yourself and the reader no longer lends as much credence to what you’re saying. Those are
actually the two main ways that I cross-check the quality of what I am writing. Sometimes I will post
an article on a discussion forum or something like that, with the primary intent being of having others
visiting that forum use the article.
But, at the same time I know that there are people who spend half their lives on discussion forums and
have nothing better to do than proofread other people’s words. So, that’s a good way get your articles
proofread, too.
Dearl Miller:
What is the key to writing a profit-pulling article?
Willie Crawford:
Some keys to writing a profit-pulling article is, first of all, knowing what your message is before you
even write the first word. But it’s writing the article in a way where it doesn’t come across as a blatant
advertisement. You put in URLs to things you want to recommend, and to places you want people to
go, but you don’t say, “This is the greatest thing since sliced bread. You must go buy this now.” Quite
often, you don’t want to use affiliate URLs at all. You want to use redirect URLs that don’t look like
affiliate URLs.
I quite often will even purchase a domain just to use in an article. That domain will redirect to where I
want to really send the visitor because there are many people that don’t want to click on affiliate URLs.
They get the feeling, when they see an affiliate URL, that they’re being sold to. If they see a regular
domain name, with nothing after the domain name, they don’t feel like they’re being sold to, quite
often.
And, so they’re more likely to click through and check out whatever it is that you really want them to
look at. Not being afraid to recommend something, at the same time. If you think that somebody
should go take a look at something that you want to sell, tell them to click on the link and go take a
look at it right away because people, if you don’t tell them to do it, quite often they won’t do it. People
want to be told what to do. Too many people don’t do that in their writing.
Those are the main things, really.
Dearl Miller:
How can you be careful that your article doesn’t turn into an ad?
Willie Crawford:
Just, in the back of your mind, always asking yourself if you were a publisher, would you run this
article? And, not putting too many URLs in the article, because that looks sort of tacky and even some
spam filters respond to too many URLs in the article. So, just looking at the article and making sure
that it has a balanced look to it, that it looks like it provides a lot of quality information. Re-read your
own article and ask yourself, did you really provide information that can be acted upon, aside from the
sales message.
Dearl Miller:
I’d like to talk a little about the structure of an effective, traffic-creating online article. Do you use a
five paragraph format?
Willie Crawford:
No, I don’t. I use an opening that basically makes some declarative statement, and then I have two or
three sub-points, and then I close with, I guess that is five paragraphs, but I don’t usually end up with
five paragraphs, I usually end up with more because part of my structure is to make each paragraph
look very short. People look at a thick paragraph with lots of words and it looks like work to them, to
read it.
And, so many readers are turned off when they look at something and it looks like heavy reading. And,
if they see short paragraphs, it’s more inviting to them. And, so I will intentionally go back and take a
longer paragraph, if it looks too big, and break it up, and I’ll even have paragraphs that are a single
sentence.
Dearl Miller:
Do you use a by line in your articles?
Willie Crawford:
Yes, I do. And, that’s essential because, quite often, I’ll write an article that doesn’t appear to sell
anything at all. It just appears to be providing information, but the by line is a discreet call to visit my
site, to learn more about me, or to even go and sign up for something. And, since publishers don’t want
to just advertise you and your product, they want to provide quality information to their audience, it’s
really the only dependable way of insuring you get that link pointing back to you, in the words that you
want.
I usually put a copyright notice in there, too. It’s not necessary; once you write something, it’s
automatically copyrighted but I do it, primarily, to show that the article is recent. If you put “Copyright
2004” with your name, then that tells all the readers that this is a brand new article. And, I think that
makes them more likely to read it, if they’re not guessing if it’s a three or four year old article.
Dearl Miller:
You talked about the by line, and a copyright. What are the separate sections of an online article?
Willie Crawford:
Just as with good copy writing, the most important part of an article is actually the title because it has to
suggest to the reader that he is going to get some benefit from it. It has to grab his attention and
suggest that he really, really needs to read that article to solve some problem he has, or to reduce some
pain, or whatever. So, I spend a lot of time on the title and I quite often go back and revamp it a
number of times.
After that, I personally put in a copyright notice, and that’s to primarily alert my reader that the article
is recent, to let them know when the article was written. And, I’ll even go back sometimes and revise
older articles, and change the copyright date on it, just so that people reading it will get a sense that it’s
recent and current.
After that, I have my opening paragraph, and that usually states my main assertion, or it states a
problem that I’m going to suggest a solution to, or it states something that they should be concerned
about. Then, I have three or four sub-points. Each of those, when I’m outlining, is just a bullet that
states the point. And then, I just expound upon that in several fairly short paragraphs, again to make it
look easy to read and to make it less work.
Then, a closing basically summarizing my opening assertion and telling them what they need to do.
So, the closing always includes the call to action. And then a by line, which basically says who I am,
why I’m an authority on the topic, why they should listen to me, and where they can go if they want
more of the great information I provide. And that’s about it.
Dearl Miller:
How do you develop the title for your article?
Willie Crawford:
I have a basic concept in mind that I want to get across, and then I look for a way of expressing it that
suggests benefit. For example, how to do something. I make sure that it’s clear in the title what the
article is about. I don’t try to get cute, where you can read the title and not have a clue what the article
is about because I know that we all are flooded with so much email, and the publishers you’re going to
submit the articles to are flooded with so many articles, that they’re just going to glance at the title first.
That tells them whether or not to even bother looking at the rest of it.
So, definitely suggest a benefit, suggest you’re solving a problem in the title. Or, in the title, point out
a pain that they’re experiencing and instantly connect with them by letting them know that you
understand a difficulty they’re going through. Because your reader, quite often, is looking for someone
who understands them, who has empathy. And, if your title suggests you’ve been through the same
thing and solved it, they know you can relate to them. They know that you’re on the same wavelength,
and so they’re more likely to read the article.
Dearl Miller:
What are some things that we can do to ensure our article does not become stale?
Willie Crawford:
They should look at whether or not the things that they’re mentioning in the article are things that will
change over time and, if possible, not include those things that will change over time. For example, if
you’re writing an article on search engine optimization, certain things won’t change such as providing
quality content and even the basic structure of a web page. But, there are things that will change just
because the formulas of the search engines change.
So, I write articles very often asking myself, “Is this going to change over time?” If it’s going to
change over time, I generally leave it out because there are more than enough topics that I can write on
that are timely. At the same time, I have no problem with going back and dusting off an article, and rereleasing it. That’s actually something I do once every six months or so.
I’ll just re-release an article, and I’ll maybe even change the copyright to put “revised” with the
copyright date. It’s a lazy way of getting the article out there again to new people who have come
online since you first published article, hoping that a new publisher will pick it up and present it to a
new audience.
Dearl Miller:
What are the best ways to close an article and encourage the reader to take action?
Willie Crawford:
Quite often, I end my article by saying, “So, now you know the secret to how to do this or how to do
that, so now you have no more excuses. You should go ahead and do this now before your competitors
all find out about it.” Those are my two biggies, just telling them that, if they don’t act now, they
probably never will act, and that they no longer have an excuse because I’ve taught them the secret, or
I’ve taught them some key.
Quite often, I’ll also just say, “Now take a look at this, before you forget.” That’s another call to
action. When I write my article and I read it, I read it to make sure that it feels like has some closure.
If you write an article and you read it, and it feels like you just left the reader hanging, that tells you
that the article is not complete. So, that’s another reason I read the article out loud and I listen to the
flow. It should flow.
It should say “Here’s a problem, here’s a concern” and “Here are some points on that problem or
concern” and “Here’s how to resolve that problem or concern”. It should feel like the complete subject
was addressed. If it doesn’t, then your article is not complete and you need to go back and add more to
it.
Dearl Miller:
What are the qualities of an effective article?
Willie Crawford:
The qualities of an effective article is always having the reader in mind, and writing from the
perspective of what’s in it for the reader. As you go back and you read your article, every sentence that
you read, ask yourself, “Does this convey to the reader something that the reader would be interested
in?” If there is anything in the article you put in there that is just fluff, or that the reader wouldn’t care
about, delete it. And, that’s how you define the article.
You get rid of things that the reader wouldn’t care about, because that’s just things you care about, and
you’ll lose the reader with that. And then, it has to flow. Again, you read it, and as you read it, if your
train of thought doesn’t, if it doesn’t feel right to you, then it’s probably not going to feel right to the
reader. And again, people don’t like to work when they’re reading something.
So, if you lose them by making it not flow, or with a grammatical error, or with things that, when the
reader reads it, you lose credibility because the reader thinks it’s not true, or it’s too bold in assertions
that you haven’t proven, all those things will lose your reader. And so, it just has to feel right. It’s a
learned skill to an extent because, after you’ve done enough of them, you go back and you read
something and you say, “This just doesn’t feel right,” so you change it.
Dearl Miller:
What are some of the biggest mistakes that people who just started writing articles make?
Willie Crawford:
The biggest one I see is that people will write an article on a topic that they aren’t an expert on. So,
what they do is they read a book, or an ebook, or they read several articles on the topic, and they
basically regurgitate what they read. And, you read the article and you can tell that they are just
echoing what they read.
Another mistake I see is that, sometimes, the article is too, the writing style is too formal. I have a very
good friend who is an excellent writer and he taught me to add a lot of contractions, for example,
because that’s how we talk. And, so if you have a lot of contractions deliberately, don’t say “do not” or
“can not”, because that’s not how you talk. If you say “don’t” and “can’t”, when people are reading it,
it feels more like you’re talking to them. It puts them more at ease.
It drops the defenses and, if you’re trying to sell something they’re more likely to buy and it just flows
better. It feels better, as they’re reading it. It’s the way their mind works, and you’re just talking to
them. So, don’t make the writing too formal. Don’t make the paragraphs too long. Don’t use big
words.
I mean, we’re all, we all think we’re brilliant, and if you’re on the computer and understand a lot of
“computereze” and stuff, then you are probably above average, I suppose. And, you don’t need to
prove that to anyone. So, using big words can lose people. And, you have to realize that your audience
is international, and English might not be the primary language for a lot of your readers. And, so if you
use too many big words or too many slang terms, you very often will lose a reader who might have
been a very good customer otherwise. Those are the main things.
Dearl Miller:
What’s the upper limit of articles that people should submit per week?
Willie Crawford:
The upper limit that they can submit in a week?
Dearl Miller:
Yes.
Willie Crawford:
I wouldn’t submit more than one article per week to a given source. Knowing that most of the
publishers of the types of newsletters I read publish once a week, or maybe even once every two weeks,
you know that the majority can’t run your article, and knowing that most publishers will only run one
or two articles in an issue anyway. You know not flood them with articles, but I do have weeks I’ll
write two or three articles and just submit them through different channels.
Really, you shouldn’t submit more than one a week, just to make it, you may have publishers that really
like your writing, but if you just flood them with stuff, they can’t use it all, so you’re perhaps wasting
your time. At the same time, if you write fewer articles, it gives you more time to really polish the
quality of your work.
See, I’m full time Internet, and often sit on the beach with my laptop or note pad, just making notes, so
I have all the time in the world to really refine things. But, if you’re really pressed for time, and you’re
doing this in your spare time with a regular job, then definitely I wouldn’t do more than one article a
week.
Dearl Miller:
What’s the best day of the week to submit an article?
Willie Crawford:
I’m not aware of a better time to submit an article. I’m aware of a better day to publish a newsletter,
and so Thursday seems to be the best day of the week for me to publish a newsletter. And, based on
that, I submit my articles in time that publishers would see them on Tuesday or Wednesday, so that, I
suppose a few publishers have selected articles and, when they get something better, they change what
they’re going to put in a publication.
So, I submit usually on Tuesday or Wednesday. And, I always publish on Thursday when something
doesn’t prevent me from doing it, because people are over that hump in the week. They’re not on
Monday when they’re all frustrated from all the things that are at work, and they’re not on Friday when
they’re already thinking about the weekend and their mind is off business.
Dearl Miller:
As writers and marketers, what can we do to make our articles stick out and encourage ezine editors to
actually publish our article?
Willie Crawford:
Excellent question. First of all, you need to incentivized the publisher. You need to view the whole
process from the perspective of the publisher, who is often being bombarded with articles and wants to
present articles to his subscribers that they will appreciate getting, and that will keep subscribers rather
than causing them to unsubscribe because they’re getting too much fluff. So, you want to write really
quality articles.
And, at the same time, when it’s practical, you want to somehow incentivized the publisher and make it
possible for them to earn money from running your articles, maybe by, again, allowing them to change
a link within the article to one of their affiliate links, or something along that line. I do that quite often.
That gives them an excellent reason to run one of my articles.
Dearl Miller:
Have you ever compiled articles into a product?
Willie Crawford:
I’ve taken collections of my articles and compiled them into “Best of” type of ebooks and then sent
them viral. I’ve taken my articles and put them into ebooks and given them to my affiliates with
brandable links, so that the affiliate can take my article on a given topic, maybe I had five or six articles
on traffic generation, and the affiliate was then allowed to pass this book around. But, any link in the
book that mentioned a certain product or service was brandable to where they could change it to their
affiliate link. So, yes, I’ve done that.
Dearl Miller:
One thing that I’ve started doing with articles is I’ve started including multimedia content. Either I will
include an audio version of the article, or I will include an audio supplement, or video supplement
tutorial to go with the article.
Willie Crawford:
I like the idea of multimedia primarily because it gives people a choice as to how they consume the
material. I know people who publish their newsletters as an audio file, and it’s the only format they do
it in, and it’s great because that publication probably does have a longer shelf life. If you publish it as
an MP3 file, there’s a greater likelihood of people downloading it, then loading it onto their portable
MP3 player, and listening to it while they’re out and about, and things along that line.
It’s the same as if you publish your newsletter straight text. It usually has a shorter life on the user’s
computer than, say, a PDF file because people look at a PDF publication and they think, “Well, this
must be important because the person put in more time to put it into a more formal format.” People
just, in their minds, put a higher value on a PDF than they do on a plain text email. And, so I’m a fan
of multimedia for that reason.
I haven’t actually personally done a lot with it myself. Like many people, I don’t like to change too
fast, so I don’t embrace new things right away. I don’t feel a need to be on the bleeding edge; I allow
others to validate that something is better before I jump into it. I don’t feel like I’m losing out, but
audio is definitely very big and video is up and coming because of the increase in bandwidth that’s
available to most online people now.
Dearl Miller:
This concludes part one of Trafficology’s Special Report on using articles to promote your online
business. Stay tuned for part two, where Willie Crawford will share with you his top ten advanced tips
for using articles to create web traffic and promote your online business. Thank you for listening, and
thank you for being with us today, Mr. Crawford. Do you have any final thoughts on how to use
articles to generate web traffic?
Willie Crawford:
It’s my pleasure, having joined you today. And, my only real final thought is that I think too many
people spend too much time thinking about writing articles, rather than doing it. Even if you feel
intimidated, or that you’re not a great writer, or that there’s already too many articles out there for your
market, I encourage you still to just start writing articles. They work. They’re free publicity.
They’re much more effective than paid advertising because they come across under the radar, as you
trying to help people rather than you trying to sell people things, so they drop their defenses. So, just
start writing. And, as you do more and more writing, it feels easier, and you just naturally become
more polished. It’s just repetition and practice makes you better at any anything.
Top 10 Tips for Using Articles to Promote Your Online Business with Willie Crawford
My first tip for promoting your online business using articles is to incentivize publishers to increase the
chance of them using your article in the first place; that is, doing things that allow a publisher to profit
directly from using your article, such as giving them permission to make minor changes to the article,
perhaps change a link in the article to their affiliate link either for your own affiliate program or for
another affiliate program that you know they are likely a member of.
Another thing is to make sure the article, this is still to incentivize the publisher, contains tremendous
value. Know that when the publisher runs this article, the publisher knows that readers are going to
love it and are going to send them emails thanking them for the article. It has to be that good, so that
this publisher would almost be silly not to use your article; it is that good. You want to just incentivize
them.
Another way you can incentivize or make a deal with the publisher is to either say directly or suggest
indirectly that if they run your article, you will purchase advertising in their newsletter. That at first
sounds counterproductive if you’re trying to get free publicity, but the fact that your article is running
in the same issue, that your ad is running in the same issue as your article actually adds additional
credibility to your ad. It makes it pull better, because if people see the same URL in an ad somewhere
or a newsletter that they’ve seen in an article that they just finished reading, they connect it to and they
are most likely to respond to, the ad. So, that is my first advanced tip.
My second tip is to use articles to supercharge your own affiliate program, and that is similar to the first
in that what I do is I encourage you to allow your affiliates to use your articles to promote the affiliate
program and to substitute their affiliate link with the URL’s in the article.
So, basically an affiliate program manager is writing articles and then posting them in the affiliate
resource section or, what I do is I post my articles on my website and I post a notice next to the article
saying, “If you’re an affiliate for any of my programs, you have permission to change the resource box
to your affiliate link for my product.” Now I’ll even go farther, and at times, give people who are not
my affiliate’s permission to change a link for an affiliate product I’m promoting.
Say I’m promoting Web Position Gold, and I’m an affiliate and it’s not my product, so I don’t benefit
from somebody else making a sale for this product I may give another affiliate from Web Position Gold
permission to change it to his affiliate link. So he will run my article because I still have links in the
article to other stuff I’m promoting, and my resource box is still pointing back to my site.
There I’m giving up a few benefits. I’m giving up the possibility of me making a sale for that one
affiliate product, but I’m getting more search engine inbound links, and I’m getting more exposure to
this publisher’s audience. I also encourage my affiliates to take my articles and use them in as many
mediums as they possibly can again pointing out to them that they are going to make money when they
make sales. Therefore, I encourage them to use it in their ebooks, their print books and their ezines, on
their websites, to post my articles and article directories that perhaps I haven’t discovered by changing
the link to theirs. I encourage them to create all kinds of brandable, viral products that all can have
their affiliate link in it because every time they make a sale with my affiliate product, we’re both
benefiting. That’s tip number two.
The third tip is basically to use articles as a tool for increasing your search engine ranking in link
popularity. And that is basically making sure, I view articles basically as gateways or doorways
pointing to my site, and I want as many links as possible out there pointing to my site. So, I want my
article in as many places as possible.
And so, when you write an article, I would focus, have a primary site that I want to promote and I
would include a link to that site in my resource box in as many places as I could. Then I would just,
either myself or have someone I’ve hired to place that article in as many places as practical. Now, a
good way to get other webmasters and publishers to place your article on their site or to place your
article in a newsletter which is perhaps later archived and still gets a link from their site back to you, is
to do an article swap.
We all know that a newsletter publisher can only run so many articles in each issue; you only have so
much space. So, what I do is, I’ll quite often say to a publisher of a popular newsletter, “If you’ll run
my article in your newsletter, I’ll run your article in my newsletter, therefore exposing my audience to
you.” It’s very similar to a link exchange, but it’s much more powerful in many ways, because the link
exchange depends upon somebody visiting the site and seeing the link.
But when that publisher pushes your article directly into the reader’s email box, you have a greater
chance of somebody discovering your site from that. So, that is tip number three. The fourth tip is
basically considering articles as a tool for boosting your online credibility for adding to your bio.
Every place that you can get your article published, basically gives you the right to say that you had
that article published someplace.
So, you can add that to your bio, especially when you are featured in larger publications. That looks
good; it says, “I was good enough to be published in,” whatever publication. Just the fact that you are
writing articles, when so many people, especially beginners, are intimidated at the thought of just
attempting to write an article, gives you an added credential. It says that you are a “doer,” that you
have accomplished something.
It firmly establishes in the mind of your audience that you are an expert; that you know enough about a
topic to write an article on it, to create or present information on it and share your thoughts with them.
So, it’s very powerful. You will eventually find that if you’ve written enough articles on a given topic,
that people will associate you with that topic, they will consider you an expert on that topic and you’ll
find emails from people that basically say that they’ve learned a lot on that topic from you. It’s very,
very powerful, because people buy from people they know, like a trust. Your articles are a very
powerful trust-building tool, and they are very powerful for making people like you, because when you
provide helpful information to them, they appreciate that. And people like people who help them, so
again, it’s a very powerful tool. But tip number four is to think of your articles as a tool that
credentializes you, legitimizes your expertise.
My fifth tip is because your articles are also a form of advertising, I think that you need to track
everything. What that does, is the way I do it is quite often I will have a publisher tell me that he is
going to run one of my articles. I will give that publisher a special URL to use in the resource box, so
that anyone clicking through to my site from his site or from his article, [inaudible] running my article
will register as that person having generated traffic for me.
That tells me which of my articles is producing results for me, and if I know a given article is getting
great click-through rates or even making sales for me, I’m more likely, or I should be more likely, to
try to get that article published in more places or use that article in other venues, such as maybe adding
it to an ebook, or some type of collection. So, you want to track where your results are coming from,
which articles are producing results, and which publications are producing results.
If you see that a given publication when it runs your article generates a lot of sales or subscribers, it’s
probably worth your while to even pay that publisher to run your article if they for some reason don’t
want to run them, you know, but you know they’re good enough. So, again, think of your articles as
advertising, and as you should with all advertising, track the results from this advertising. That’s tip
number five.
Tip number six is, when you’re writing an article, begin with the end in mind. That is, before you even
write the very first word, know what response you want from your reader. And then you figure out
how you are going to get that response. You write an article basically to lead your reader to take the
reaction that you want them to take. And to an extent, that makes your article writing like copywriting,
where the headline is again, the subject line or the title is the headline for your article, which is to an
extent an ad, and then the body explains to them what they need to do to solve a problem that they are
aware of, but you’ve made them more aware of and why the solution you’re suggesting is the logical
solution.
So, before you even write that first word, you need to have mapped out what you want them to do, and
how you plan on getting them to take that action. So, writing articles is, to an extent, copywriting, at
least in my opinion. That is tip number six.
One of my favorite things to do with articles, and this is tip number seven, is to place my articles on my
websites and other websites as optimized pages. So, the article naturally has a certain keyword density,
and focuses on a given topic. You spend all this time developing and refining an article. Use that
article in as many places as you want as a web page on your site, and then give other webmasters
permission to post it on their site but give them a page that is already optimized. Make it easy for them
use your page by giving them the HTML code that already has all the proper title tags and description
tags, and all those things that make a page rank high anyway. So, think of that article as a doorway
page. One of my most successful articles was actually an article on how to write a top ten doorway
page.
If you go to any search engine now, three or four years after I wrote that article, and you type in, “Top
Ten Doorway Page,” that article is still out there and is still sending people to me who are interested in
doing doorway pages, even though the topic of doorway pages is falling out of favor for other more
affective techniques. But again, it just shows that when you optimize an article and turn it into a web
page that focuses on a given topic, it can generate traffic for you for years to come. So, that is tip
number seven.
Tip number eight is to write lots of articles. Again, it’s similar to seven in that you’re creating a
doorway page, you’re creating search engine fodder so that your name, your website URL, you’re
being associated with a given topic everywhere in the search engines.
I would suggest doing something like taking your topic of interest and coming up with as many related
keywords as you can, and then writing articles centered around those keywords so that again, you’re
getting as many articles on a topic that you want to brand yourself as an expert on, out there in the
search engines. You are helping people who are interested in that topic, you are helping them to
identify you as the expert and to find you through the search engines.
So, just, you don’t want to create garbage, you want to create quality articles, but you want as many as
you can out there. In this instance, it doesn’t matter as much if a lot of other publishers pick up the
article, because at this point, some of the other articles are primarily for search engine fodder. That’s
tip number eight.
My ninth tip is, again I’m focusing on getting a lot of quality articles out there, and if you’re not a good
writer, I suggest that instead of trying to write something that is a great literary piece, that you make
your article a list; “Ten Ways to Generate Website Traffic”, “Ten Ways to Reduce Buyer Remorse.”
Ten ways to do this, the top seven ways to do this, it’s very easy to make a list, and then you don’t have
to write fancy pros.
You can just explain why you suggest doing something a certain way in your own words. A very good
article, people will appreciate it because it’s concise and it doesn’t have a lot of fluff. So, that is a good
way to write an article if you’re not a good writer. And then you need to get others to proofread or edit
your work. Also, if you’re not a good writer, I’ve mentioned before, I would recommend using ghost
writers.
There is nothing wrong with that. People have done it for centuries. There are major published book
series where the person whose name is associated with the book didn’t write a word of the book.
Someone else wrote all the, the different versions of the book that are part of the series. So, that has
been done for a long time. What you’re doing, is you’re lending your name to the article but having
someone else do the work. Someone who appreciates the opportunity to earn some money, perhaps.
So, don’t hesitate to use a ghost writer if you don’t have the talent for it, or if you don’t have the time to
do a lot of writing. That’s tip number nine.
My tenth tip is, once you’re generating articles, look for other uses for them. You spend all this time
and energy writing and refining articles and submitting them and getting them published. Now you
need to ask yourself, “How can I reuse this material?” Methods that you can reuse material, ways that
you can reuse it include creating article collections and turning those into ebooks. You can expand
upon the points, say the seven ways to do something, and turn it into a teleseminar.
You can create software that allows you to, allows your users to implement something that you
suggested or taught in an article. Basically, you’re looking for ways to get as much mileage as
practical out of work you have already done. Another thing I suggested earlier was, taking an article
that you’ve written that’s become dated, and dusting if off and re-releasing it again getting more
mileage out of work that you have already done with very little additional effort.
Another thing that I have done is translated some of my articles into other languages. English is the
primary language of ecommerce and of commerce, but the majority of the world doesn’t speak English.
So, if you can have your article translated into French and Spanish, German and Japanese, you’re
reaching a whole new market that you probably would not reach otherwise.
And so, it’s certainly worth having it translated into other languages. That also gives you another
credential. You can say that your work has been published in all these other languages, something to
add to your bio that makes it sound really impressive. That’s tip number ten.
Online Sales Letters: How to Increase the Response Rate of Any Website with Michel Fortin Dearl Miller:
Hello, and welcome to Trafficology’s spotlight on copywriting sales letters. I’m Dearl Miller from
Nitro Marketing, the editor of www.Trafficology.com. As you’ve already learned, copywriting is one
of the most important elements of traffic conversion. Web copy is how you communicate with visitors,
welcoming new customers, helping them find what they need and explaining why they should purchase
from you with words, images, and sometimes multimedia, web copy is your online sales force.
A key element of web copy is the sales letter. This gateway to your site has the responsibility of
greeting each and every visitor, weeding out the qualified prospects and guiding them through each
step of the sales process. By grabbing the customer’s attention, developing an interest in your product,
creating a burning desire to purchase today, and encouraging them to take action immediately, your
sales letter literally converts visitors into paying customers begging for you to take their money.
To help you learn how to create a winning sales letter, we have with us one of the Net’s most respected
and most successful copywriters of all time. Over the past ten years, Michel Fortin has written the
words that have sold over 35 million dollars worth of products and services in over two hundred
different industries. Also known as the Success Doctor, his sales letters have achieved response rates
as high as 46% and Michel recently wrote a sales letter that I’m sure you’ve all seen, John Reese’s
Traffic Secrets. That one sales letter generated one million dollars of sales in the first eighteen hours.
Today, Michel is going to explain how to use the most important elements of a winning sales letter.
He’s going to share with you his favorite copywriting formula and he’s going to guide us on our quest
to write better web copy. Now turn up your speakers and prepare to learn the science of web
copywriting.
Dearl Miller:
Hello, Michel, and welcome to Trafficology. Thank you for being here today.
Michel Fortin:
Thank you for having me.
Dearl Miller:
To get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and why you chose to become a copywriter?
Michel Fortin:
Oh, sure. Whenever I started out in this field I was first and foremost a salesperson and, of course, I
had this tremendous fear of rejection. I think all sales people go through that, but in my case,
specifically, I hated going from door to door and knocking on doors and bothering people, and at that
time, I needed a way to create some income because I was a very young salesperson and I had to
declare bankruptcy at a very young age because I was just not showing any income.
Then one day I came across a book that changed my life and it’s “No BS Sales Success” by Dan
Kennedy. Dan mentioned in his book something that struck me. He talked about positioning, not
prospecting. Positioning is such that it creates a sort of magnetization, I guess you can say. It attracts
qualified prospects to come to you. They’re already interested, already wanting to buy what you offer,
so you no longer had to be, you know, rejected. You don’t have to prospect anymore. You had people
coming to you.
The way to do that is to write articles, to create press releases, to create lead generation ads, to offer
free information, like free reports, and get people to raise their hand, so to speak, so that they can ask
for whatever information you’re offering. They just pre-qualified themselves and they presented
themselves to you as genuinely interested prospects.
What I’ve done is, my entire sales income skyrocketed when I started to apply these techniques which
involved a lot of copywriting. Copywriting, specifically, is really just salesmanship in print. This is
something that John E. Kennedy said in 1905 and it’s something that is so true in today’s world
because essentially what you’re doing is, you’re putting down in print something that you would do in
a face-to-face sales presentation.
So, what I’ve done is, I’ve created, I wrote copy and I created people to come to me and I decided at
that point I said, “My goodness, I’ve got this skill, how to write. I know how to sell and I really don’t
have to put myself in front of people and try to sell anything. I just have to write copy and I became a
copywriter at that point.” That’s where my love for writing copy and salesmanship started.
Dearl Miller:
What are the basic elements of a sales letter? I mean, what are the elements that every sales letter
should have and then what are the extra elements that should only be used in special situations?
Michel Fortin:
Before I do that, there are three immutable laws that people have to understand and get ingrained in
their minds before they actually put any kind of words down, whether it’s electronically or in print.
Once they understand these three immutable laws, they can write copy from that point on that will
work with these and increase the response ratio of any sales letter without any problems.
Here are the three immutable laws. People never read anything at first. They never, ever do. Here’s
the key. You see, we are all bombarded with a gazillion marketing messages every single day, from,
you know, tiny little logos on pens all the way to TV commercials, on the radio, MTV, and so on and
so forth. So, people are sort of desensitized to anything commercial. Your information, your sales
presentation, your sales letter, your web site, whatever the case may be, has to have the first job of all,
to get people to start reading.
It’s key because if people hit your website or open up your sales letter and they don’t even feel any
kind of interest into starting to read, if you haven’t really captured their attention, then you’ve lost the
entire pitch completely.
The second immutable fact is that, or the second immutable law is the fact that people never believe
anything at first. Everything is, you know, we all have so many marketing messages come across our
desk every single day or on our TV that it’s really hard for us to believe anything. So, your job as a
copywriter or as a business owner or any kind of marketing message you want to put together is to
create some kind of believability, some proof.
You want to come across as if what you have to offer is important and it’s genuinely, it’s not just
important in the sense that the message itself, but it generally ties with and then specifically it goes into
the needs, wants, goals, desires of the person watching the message, reading the message. So, you have
to prove your case.
The third key, the third element, of course, is to get people to do something because the immutable law
is that people never do anything at first. Then that means that any kind of marketing message, at least
to keep on reading or to keep on watching is getting them to do something all the way to getting them
to answer your ad, to respond to your ad, to pick up the phone, to email, to fill out a form, to click on a
“buy now” link and order your product. Those are things that you need to tell people exactly what to
do. You need to take them by the hand.
So, the three immutable laws, just to come back to it, people never read anything at first. The second
is, people never believe anything at first. The third is that people never do anything at first. So, the
three steps that I usually use in my copy are the three “Ps,” I call them the three Ps, Pull them in, Prove
your case, Push them to act. Those are the three Ps.
If you look at it differently, there’s a formula that’s been around for so long called the “AIDA”
formula, A-I-D-A, “Attention-Interest-Desire-Action.” Those are three things that I – whenever I talk
about proving your case and all that stuff, I follow the AIDA formula in doing that. Whether it’s a
sales letter on the Internet, whether it’s a sales piece that you receive in direct mail, or whether it’s an
infomercial on TV, if you fully understand those three laws, you’ll be able to apply those.
Now, let’s just look at sales letters specifically. A sales letter has components that will work on all
these elements. Grabbing people’s attention, meaning, getting them to stop scanning your sales letter
because that’s what usually people do. You’ve got to do certain little things that will pull them into the
sales letter.
The number one thing that people see when they hit your sales letter, whether it’s a website or open up
a direct mail piece, is the headline. The headline is extraordinarily vital to your sales letter. In fact,
when I critique copy, the biggest problem I often see is that the headline hasn’t sufficiently grabbed
their attention. It hasn’t pulled them in.
Of course, there are tiny little tricks that we can use to grab their attention. In direct mail, we use a
little dollar bill, we use a penny, we use a pen, we use a lift-note, which is a separate note that’s folded
within the, that is separate from the sales letter that’s inserted in the envelope. Online we’ve got popups, we got lead-capturing forms, which is what Jonathan Mizel calls a “name squeeze” page. We’ve
got a headline that’s in red that has been proven to increase response.
In fact, we’ve tested, I’m a fanatical tester and I really don’t consider myself a great copywriter. I
consider myself a privileged copywriter because I’ve had the opportunity to have written letters for
fanatical testers, John Reese being one of them. I found a lot of stuff by having them test a lot of the
things that I tried and written copy for. One of the things we found out, in the colors of the headline,
the red out-pulled any other color probably because it really stands out. It grabs their attention, exactly,
part of the AIDA formula that I just mentioned.
The second thing is, people will not start reading still at that point. They probably will but may not.
They’ll probably scan and on the website they’ll scroll. So, you have elements within your copy that
needs to pull them in. The second thing that I usually use to pull them in are “Johnson” boxes. A
Johnson box is a separate table that is maybe in a different color, maybe in a shaded border because
borders tend to increase readership.
That actually has been proven scientifically and what we want to do is probably incorporate certain
kinds of information in those Johnson boxes that grabs their attention, maybe little curiosity ticklers,
maybe something that will tell half a story but not complete the story which is using the “Zeigarnik”
effect which is essentially a psychological ploy that will start a certain idea but doesn’t finish it until
later on, pulling the people into the letter.
There are also, in terms of things that have grabbed their attention, that help to grab their attention, are
headers, subheads, which are larger bolded-type font within your sales letter that sort of like are just
titles for chapters in a book. When people scroll down, they’ll tend to stop at what stands out because
if you scroll down a sales letter from top to bottom, it’s almost hypnotic to a point. It’s like a trancelike blur of sameness so that if they scroll down and there’s nothing that sticks out, they’ll not, they’re
not going to stop scrolling.
They’re going to scroll right on to the end and if they haven’t, if you haven’t grabbed their attention,
you’ve just lost them. So, subheads are incredibly important. There are also important ways to do
subheads properly. A subhead shouldn’t really be a generic summary of what’s to come. It should
help to tickle their curiosity, maybe start a kind of idea that will be finished later on, so when they
scroll and they see the sub, and then they read the subhead, if they’re thinking at that point, “My gosh, I
got to read this further,” you’ve done your job. You’ve got them to stop scanning and you’ve got them
to start reading.
The third element that I use to get their attention are bullets. Bullets are a primary part of any sales
letter, especially because on a sales letter you want to include your benefits, you want to describe your
benefits, and by using bullets, it also clusters them for greater impact. But in terms of getting them to
stop scanning, bullets are slightly indented, especially if you use tiny little graphics as your bullets.
Therefore, when they scroll down your copy, they break the flow, they break the trance-like state the
people are in. That’s why bullets are incredibly important.
The fourth element, of course, are the P.S.s at the end. In fact, they might be the second because when
people read or scan any sales letters, they usually read the top part and the bottom part, just like if you
were to pick up a book off the shelf at a book store, people tend to read the first few pages and go
directly to the end to the last few pages. Well, the same way, bullets and subheads and all that stuff
which are within the sales letter are great, but the headline and the P.S. are probably the top most
important elements that grab their attention.
Then your P.S., which is usually used as an after-thought, you might want to include information in
there, not necessarily to summarize the offer too much, but maybe to give them a bit of information that
gets them to go back to the beginning and start reading your sales letter. That’s crucial because when
people are sort of pulled in, at least to get them to start reading the very first few paragraphs, that’s the
next job that you have, is not to sell them up front.
Peter Stone, a great copywriter, he calls it a “Bucket Brigade.” If you remember how fires used to be
put out in the old days, where people would be lining up from the lake to the house that would be on
fire and they would be passing buckets of water from one to another. Well, essentially, a sales letter is
the same thing. If you have a paragraph, your paragraph at the very top, for example, is not meant to
give them too much information. It’s not meant to be too long as well because when you have a
paragraph that’s more than four to five lines deep, you slowly start to bore people. Then people will
start to say, “Well, your sales letter’s too long.”
Remember this, that there’s no such thing as long copy. There is a thing called “boring” copy and
usually when the copy starts to become boring, that’s when people tend to say that the copy is too long
or the sales letter’s too long. So, every paragraph builds on the next and builds on the next and builds
on the next. It’s what Gary Halbert calls the “grease shooter,” the “grease slide effect.”
So, think of it as a bucket brigade. Every subhead in your sales letter also builds on the next one, on
the next chunk of content within your sales letter that has a certain flow. That flow is something that I
use a, I use a formula to sort of focus on what kind of flow those, the content follows. I call it the
“Quest” formula, Q-U-E-S-T. The Quest formula is essentially, it’s like climbing a mountain.
Essentially, it’s to start at a certain point and getting them to the top of the mountain, so once they’re at
the top, going back on the other side, it’s just, you know, it’s downhill from there. It’s really easy.
Here’s what I mean by “Quest.” “Q” stands for “Qualify,” “U” stands for “Understand,” “E” stands for
“Educate,” “S” stands for “Stimulate” and “T” stands for “Transition.” In a nutshell, here’s what it
means. The first letter “Q,” “Qualify,” when people hit your sales letter, you need to put them in a
certain frame of mind.
First of all, if you’ve done good targeting, if your visitors hitting your website are targeted, then they’re
sort of qualified to a certain degree. They may know they have a problem that they want to solve, so
your job is to qualify them even more by using copy that tells them who this particular solution is for.
You don’t give them the solution up front. You sort of maybe talk about the problem, maybe tell a
little story about someone who’s suffering from that problem, maybe using kind of a question where
you say, “Isn’t it bad whenever this problem happens?” Or, “Wouldn’t it be good if this benefit would
occur?”
Then what you do after you qualify them with a “Q,” you educate them, I’m sorry, you understand
them, the “U,” the next step. Then you sort of empathize with your reader. You tell them that you
understand their situation. You understand how painful it is or you understand how painful it would be
without the benefit that you’ve just presented in the “Q.”
In fact, “U” is the point where I usually tend to agitate the problem. Dan Kennedy calls this “problem,
agitate, solve.” You make sure that they know there’s a problem or you make them understand there’s
a problem or you bring it to the top of their minds and then you blow it up. You aggravate the problem,
you make it bigger, so that they feel that they need to have a solution.
See, the whole point about doing that is that every sales letter has a problem. The problem is, paying
for it, paying for your product. You want to make the problem big enough so that in contrast the
problem of paying for your solution is very small compared to this huge problem that they want to
solve. So, that’s what I do in the “U.”
The “E” is at the top of the mountain. This is where you start educating them about your product. This
is the point in the sales letter where I start talking about the product, the solution, or the service. This is
where you introduce, not necessarily the offer itself. You talk about the product. You start talking
about the features. You start talking about the uses and so if you have an ebook, you might introduce
the cover of the ebook, some of the ideas in the chapters, maybe sort of tying that in with the “Q” and
the “U” by saying, “Well, you see when we talk about this particular problem, well, here’s a solution
that might solve that problem and here’s how.”
Then what we do is then we start going down the other side of the mountain. So, now we’re in this
“S,” stimulate. This is where we introduce the offer. This is where we talk about the benefits of the
product and we tie them in with the features. Features alone are not powerful enough. You want to
translate those features into benefits and this is where you list them.
This is where you start building up value too so that people feel that there is a need to, this is where you
build desire in the AIDA formula, where you build them a need, they have to buy this product and they
have to buy it now. You also give a lot of reasons, like reasons why they should buy the product,
reasons why they should buy the product now and so on and so forth.
Then “T” is the famous call to action section of your sales letter, whether it’s the order form, whether
it’s your final pitch at the end, your close. You know, sometimes you see this in a sales letter where it
says, with a subhead it says, like to wrap this up. This is the area that you transition the reader from
reader to buyer, from reader to customer, from reader to client. Then you might also want to use in that
transitional period, you want to use maybe premiums. You want to maybe talk about some guarantees
and so on and so forth.
Oh, just to recap something I haven’t really mentioned in the “E,” in the “educate.” Educate also,
educate them on the proof, on the believability of your product. I failed to mention this, because it’s so
important and that’s why I’m going back. But educate them on why the product is believable; it’s
important. This is where you include testimonials. This is where you include maybe case studies,
maybe also using some, if you have, for example, a software, screenshots of the software, before and
after pictures of the software.
You want to use also good testimonials that actually offer results where people talk about the results
they received from using either your product or service and so on and so forth. So, that’s just a very
quick overview of my formula called the “Quest” formula, which is sort of a different take on the
AIDA formula, but it’s used in order to follow a certain flow of the content that builds on those three
immutable laws I mentioned earlier and wraps it all together.
Dearl Miller:
Now, when you write, do you follow the Quest formula step by step?
Michel Fortin:
I follow the Quest formula, I wouldn’t say step by step. Very often what I do is, I write an outline. I
do a lot of research before I actually write any kind of copy. There’s something that I really want to
build the entire sales pitch on. Very often, we, John Carlson, for example, very famous copywriter, he
calls it the “hook.” Bob Bly, another very famous copywriter, he calls it the “platform.” In a story or
in a movie or in a book, we call it the “plot,” the major plot.
Well, in the sales letter, what I try to do is, I try to find, and I do a bit of detective work and I try to find
that major hook, that one thing that I can hinge my entire sales letter on, this “platform, as Bob Bly
calls it. From that point on, I create an outline by following the Quest formula. I write down subheads
or I write down ideas. They might not necessarily be the subheads.
They might be just single words just to trigger some ideas in my mind that I want to build from that
point on, but they follow that formula because, really, sales letters are proven to work over and over
again. I mean, why try to reinvent the wheel when you can use something that’s been proven to work
and has been proven to work for ages.
So, when you use the Quest formula, I just create that little outline, build my content and then I sort of
go back and redo the headline or add, I create several headlines and I can hand pick and then I do the
subheads and I add some of the elements that builds on those three laws that we mentioned earlier. I
want to make sure that it grabs their attention, that it pulls them in, that it proves my case sufficiently,
meaning that it gives enough reasons why, why the should listen to me, why should they buy my
product and why should they buy now.
Then finally, to push them to act, which is to get them to buy the product. Is there enough call to
action? You know, a lot of times sales letters are wimpy. Just as much as people fear rejection in real
life, they hate to ask people, they hate to pressure people, they hate to be aggressive. Well, sales letters
sometimes they offer the same thing. People tend to be wimpy. They don’t ask for the order. It’s
funny because a lot of people are, you know, they’re quiet about the fact that they want to be led.
They want to be told what to do. Even though you might not be, you don’t want to be too aggressive,
of course, but you might want to be hard-hitting in the sense that you want to tell them, “This is what I
want you to do, Mr. Prospect,” and they will do it, not because you’ve told them what to do, because
you’ve given them some direction, because people are desperate for direction and that’s the whole
point.
Dearl Miller:
Let’s go through some of the elements of a sales letter. You talked about some of these things already,
but let me tease them out specifically. What are the qualities of a good headline?
Michel Fortin:
Headlines, there are different types. Of course, you could have a very short headline and you could
have a very long headline. As long as the headline does its job, it can be whatever size it needs to be.
A lot of people have debated this and it’s the same debate between long copy and short copy. Some
people said, say, “Oh, headlines shouldn’t be any more than seventeen words long,” and some people
say, “No, no, they should be,” you know, “much more than that,” etcetera, etcetera It doesn’t really
matter as long as it does its job to pull people in, as long as it pre-qualifies them before they read the
sales letter.
In fact, that’s part of my Quest formula, with a “Q.” In fact, when people start reading the sales letter
and they read the headline and it gets them to start reading, that’s great, but if after they read the
headline, they don’t read, and if your headline does its job, that means that they weren’t qualified, they
weren’t going to buy from the sales letter in the first place. They won’t buy from three hundred words
much less three thousand words.
So, a headline has to do its job. It has to tell enough. Maybe you want to use short headlines to create
curiosity as long as you know that you can qualify them very well up front without wasting anyone’s
time. Or you want to give them enough information but without telling them the whole story. Here’s
what I mean by that, a headline sometimes has different elements that we’ve been testing and testing
and testing. Sometimes the best headlines I found are usually, there are five of them. The five best
headlines follow a certain formula.
The very first one that out-pulls all the others is the “who else” headline. I’m sure you’ve seen this
again and again and again. Who else wants to have this, enjoy this benefit. Who else wants to explode
their income by one million, whatever John Reese did. The idea is that who else, we’ve tested this,
trust me, we’ve tested this against other headlines.
Very often, we would have a headline that would start with a simple verb, let’s say for example,
discover the seven secret tips to doubling your traffic and then we would just add the “who else” before
that, who else wants to discover the seven secret tips, or whatever the case may be, and it almost
doubled the conversion rate of a sales letter just because of that “who else,” strange as that might
sound. So, that would be the number one.
The second best headline that I’ve ever used is the “if-then” headline and this is a Gary Bencivenga
technique. Gary Bencivenga, another great copywriter. He talked about this “if-then,” which is simply
this. If you meet this condition, then you can enjoy this benefit. So, for example, in the case of Traffic
Secrets, that’s the exact same formula I’ve used. If you can copy and paste, then you have the ability,
then you have all it takes to, you know, boost traffic to your website and so on and so forth.
The reason why I’ve created that, well, first of all, it’s been proven scientifically to have increased
sales. But the reason why I want to use that is because John wanted to sell this product to newbies as
much as to seasoned Internet traffic experts. So, we wanted to sort of convey that in the headline in
one single fell swoop.
That’s why I said, “Well, if you can copy and paste, and pretty much anybody can copy and paste, then
you have what it takes to,” and then you have the benefits of a regular headline, you know, then you
have what it takes to discover how to boost traffic or you, then you have what it takes to do X or to
enjoy X benefits and so on and so forth, the major core idea, the major core benefit.
The third headline that has been the best is, give me an “I’ll,” meaning, give me something and I’ll give
you this benefit, whether it’s give me twenty-two minutes of your time and I’ll show you the secrets of,
or give me, like, I have a DVD that I sell on a website called www.CopyOnFire.com and what I do is, I
ship DVDs for just, I only ask for the shipping cost and if they like it, I charge their credit card
automatically after thirty days.
This is actually not me, it’s the publisher that does this. But the headline I came up with is, give me
$9.95 and I’ll send you a two-DVD set, etcetera, etcetera, with the benefits on how to boost your copy
and so on and so forth. So, give me something and I’ll do something is the third best headline. The
fourth best headline that we’ve tested is the “how to,” the very famous “how to” headline, how to enjoy
X benefits, how to do something in order to enjoy X benefits, how to uncover the secrets to boosting
the traffic to your website and so on and so forth.
In fact, we’ve tested plain headlines that started with a verb, just like I mentioned earlier, discover the
seventeen tricks to doubling your traffic and we would say, “How to discover,” or “How to double,”
you know, “with these seventeen tricks.” It increased response anywhere between forty to sixty percent
just by adding the word “how-to.” The fifth and final headline that I tested that has been the best are
usually those that start with a verb that are aggressive, they’re directional, they tell people exactly what
to do or what they’re going to do.
But one thing that I found is, a lot of the headlines start with verbs that are hackneyed, that are
repetitious and used over and over again, and I tend not to do that because they usually tell people right
up front, this is a sales letter, and it’ll get them disinterested very fast. Like, discover how to explode
your income. The word “discover” as the very first verb used in a headline of that nature has been
shown to reduce response.
So, what we found is, by replacing those with much more picture verbs, verbs that create some kind of
mental imagery. Rather than say, “Discover the tricks of solid financial management which will cure
your financial woes,” I would say, “Unearth the secrets of problems that are sucking cash right out of
your wallet,” and so on and so forth. Those are verbs that, you know, “unearth,” “catapult,”
“demystify,” those are words that are far more powerful and they paint much more vivid pictures.
Those are the part of that headline that I would start with the verb and those are the fifth, that’s the fifth
headline and the type of headlines that I tested over and over again that have been proven to out-pull
any other headline.
Dearl Miller:
Can you talk about using a story in your sales letter and how to develop that story?
Michel Fortin:
Whenever you tell a good story, every story, and it comes back to those three immutable laws that I
mentioned earlier, you know. You’ve got the intro, you’ve got the body copy, the content, the main
copy and you’ve got the conclusion. In sales letters, you follow the same things, pull them in, prove
your case, push them to act. Now, if you’re telling a really good story, first of all, you might want to
tell one really good story or you might want to include several tiny little stories in your sales letter that
keeps them interested and pull them into the sales letter.
First of all, there is a technique that David Garfinkel, who is a great copywriter himself, he mentioned it
to me and I knew about this, but he never, I never knew it was an actual technique. He called it the
“nested loop” and that really uses or it works on the “Zeigarnik” Effect. The Zeigarnik Effect is this:
People feel a certain kind of disconcertedness, a certain kind of uneasiness when a task has not been
completed. In fact, it’s been proven that people remember unfinished tasks more than they do finished
tasks.
So, when you create a story, sometimes you include tiny bits of information at the beginning of your
story, but what you do is, you keep them hanging until the very end. Now, you can use this in order to
get them to buy your product or you can do this in order to get people to read your entire sales letter
from top to bottom. A good way to do that is by starting some kind of idea. Now, you can either go on
a tangent that is still relevant to your sales pitch or you can actually tell them, I’m going to tell you
about this a little bit later on, but first, I need to tell you something more important.
I’m sure you’ve probably seen news shows or even the news on regular TV where they talk about some
news items like, for example, tonight’s headline, famous actress dies in horrible fire in her Bel Air
mansion, more on that story later, but first, and then something else, and you want to listen to that story
and very often, they’ll use that story as the very last story in the entire news show, which pulls you for
the entire show. You’re just sitting there on the edge of your seat until finally that story airs.
Sales letters and stories are very much the same thing. In fact, if you read Traffic Secrets, you’ll notice
that sometimes we start it with some ideas, like, for example, at the very beginning of Traffic Secrets,
we used the idea that people have been misled in terms of traffic. So, we say, “Here are the big myths
that we want to demystify,” so there’s myth number one and here’s the big myth and there’s a solution
or there’s a way around this myth. I’ll tell you more about that later, but here’s myth number two.
So, what we’ve done is, we’ve used that nested loop. We start it, we open up some ideas and then
when people start reading the letter and further down, later down the sales letter, we’ve closed a loop.
We’ve told them exactly what we wanted to say, when we mentioned at the earlier, at the beginning of
the sales letter. That keeps them hanging.
Plus, what a nested loop is really good for is, when people, when you start an idea, people are
intrinsically curious. People, like I said, they feel a certain kind of uneasiness until the loop has been
closed. That’s a great way, they’re really focused on whatever kind of information you’re introducing
within that loop because they’re watching every word, they’re hanging onto every word until you finish
that idea.
Well, that’s a great thing because then you can introduce pieces of information, parts of your story
where your, for example, your plot culminates and you want to use that kind of information to drive
home certain points, drive home certain benefits, drive home certain believability points and credibility
points and that’s also a really good tactic because whatever information you put in between those, the
loop, in between the loop, you will have them remembering that information more than any other piece
of information within your entire sales letter.
You can use that in terms of your entire sales letter or you can use tiny little nested loops throughout
your story, throughout the sales letter, so that it keeps them hanging from one idea to the next, one idea
to the next, one idea to the next.
You don’t want to give them too much information too fast because then they lose interest. Just like,
for example, and here’s a really good idea or a really good example of how the Zeigarnik Effect works.
I’m sure you probably remember the show in the ‘80s, “Dallas,” the famous saying for the longest time,
and it was on so many shows is, “who shot J.R.” And the ratings just shot up because people kept
watching every single show to find out who finally did shot J.R., but then when the show aired where
they introduced the person that did do the shooting, the ratings dropped. People lost interest.
It’s so important that if you want to close a loop, well, you want to do it in such a way that, do you start
a loop right away after that, or do you close it later on when you’re about to make your final close and
your final pitch because if you give too much information too early in your story, it’s like a really good
book and halfway through the book, you find out, you know, who did it, let’s say, in a murder mystery
book.
You find out who did it in the middle of the book, you lose interest and then people will start to get
bored and then people will start accusing you of having too long of a sales letter rather than, you know,
like I said before, because the fact that it’s boring.
Here’s one point that I really want to mention and stress. All great copywriters have a very important
skill, and I mentioned this very early in this call, which is, all great copywriters are great salespeople.
That’s first and foremost. In fact, a lot of times when I train new copywriters or junior copywriters, I
usually tell them, learn how to sell first and foremost.
Learn the tactics and the strategies that are involved in selling and handling objections, in asking the
proper questions and the way you present your product and the features and the benefits and asking for
the close and doing trial closes and then doing the final close and so on and so forth. Same thing with
copywriting. Basically, copywriting is a printed form of a sales presentation.
Well, here’s the extra little point that I wanted to make is that all salespeople and all copywriters have
an even greater denominator and that’s the fact that all great copywriters and all great salespeople have
or all great storytellers.
If you can learn how to tell a really good story using some of the tactics that I just mentioned, you can
keep them hanging onto your sales letter, you boost their emotions, you press those hot buttons, you get
them so wanting the solution that you offer or they feel so bad about the problems that they’re suffering
that they need your solution, then you’ve done your job. You’ve done the job of telling, not only a
good story, but of selling and good copywriting.
Dearl Miller:
Something that people commonly see or commonly use in sales letters or bulleted points, can you
explain why people use bulleted points? What’s the right number of bulleted points to use and how to
avoid writing bad bulleted points?
Michel Fortin:
Bullets are essential parts of copy. In fact, you could probably almost write an entire sales letter just
using bullets. Bullets are fantastic in sales letters because they’re short and sweet, they go straight to
the point, and they’re clustered for greater impact. Very often, bullet points – because like I said,
people don’t want to read this huge book, this huge story with large paragraphs that are ten lines deep,
so many characters long, because it really fatigues, first of all, it fatigues the eyes.
Bullets, from a cosmetic standpoint, help to keep ideas and points very short and sweet, to the point,
bullet to bullet, it helps when people try to scan your copy and then read the bullets that you want them
to read and to pull them into your copy. It gives them a bit of a visual break from going from one
bullet to the other because it separates everything nice and clean. At the same time, it’s also great to
include pieces of information that you want to drive home.
Now, a good bullet point, I want to make sure that understand, bullets also, you don’t want to put too
many too clustered in one single area. You might want to cluster them based on certain categories, a
certain topic, or certain ideas. Maybe, for example, you want to talk about the bullets of that describe
the benefits of your product on one end. Then later on, you might want to use a bullet that describes
some of the extra benefits with, let’s say, the premiums that you offer. Then later on, you use more
bullets that describe the offer and exactly what they get with the offer and so on and so forth.
So, those are just different ways to sort of intersperse your copy with proper amounts of bullets that are
separated by categories and it gives it some kind of rhythm and flow to the copy so that people don’t
get tired too fast and it really doesn’t fatigue the eye, because if you use too many bullets, then you’re
countering the exact thing that you want to fight by using bullets, which is to get them interested and
not get bored.
Now, a good bullet, very often, tells a really good story in itself, the bullet itself. Very often, what I use
bullets with are the benefits and you want to maybe describe the benefit of the product by linking that
to what it means to them specifically. Here’s what I mean by that. A lot of people have a tendency to
muddy the difference between features and benefits.
Very often, when I critique copy, I tend to recopy, especially bullets, that have, supposedly have
benefits, but when I read them closely, they’re not really benefits, they’re just glorified features. In
fact, I use a certain kind of process, a certain kind of formula, to separate all that. I usually tend to put
them in three columns, one called “features,” the other one called “advantages” and the third one called
“benefits.”
So, when you create your bullets, here’s a good way to do this. Take a pad of paper, separate it into
three columns, put down all the features in the first column called “features.” Now, here’s the way to
look at it. Features are things that a product or service have. Advantages is the corresponding function
of the feature. This is where people tend to think that function is a benefit, which it’s not. Function
meaning, what does that feature do, what does it cause, how is it used. That would be the advantage,
not the benefit. This is where people tend to have problems with.
The third column, which is benefits, is what those features mean, what do they mean at a personal,
intimate, and direct level. Here’s a good example. I critiqued a website that was selling cream that
helps reduce wrinkles. The cream said it was “PH balanced.” That was one of her bullets and she said,
well, that’s the benefit, PH balanced. Well, no, it’s not because it’s only a feature. The fact that it’s PH
balanced is what it has. So, she said, “Well, then, it’s gentle on your face.” She said, “Well, that’s a
benefit because it actually,” and I said, “No, because that’s the function. The fact that it’s PH balanced
means that it’s gentle on your face.” I said, “Go a step further.”
There’s a trick that John Carlton teaches. He says, “What this means to you, Mr. Prospect.” Think of
that way. When you look at a benefit and then you translate that benefit into an advantage, then ask
yourself, well, what this means to you, Mr. or Mrs. or Miss Prospect, is this, and that’s your benefit. In
this case, PH balanced means gentle on your face, meaning that it’s not harsh like the chemical peels
and surgeries and injections that you would normally get at a doctor’s office.
You would be able to heal very quickly once you have the cream; as a matter of fact, there’s no healing
process. You won’t have any bandages, you won’t have any scars or any kind of bruising that you
would get normally if you had a surgery or something like that from a doctor’s office. You would be
able to go into public after using this cream and you’ll notice the changes right away because it’s so
gentle, so on and so forth. Those are benefits. That’s what you would include in a bullet. In fact, you
might want to use all three in a bullet.
By thinking of the, what this means to you, in fact, Peter Stone, the copywriter I mentioned earlier, uses
the “so that” technique. So, you say, “This cream is PH balanced so that it’s gentle on your face,” so
that, and then you would show the benefit, or “What this means to you is,” and “This is what the
benefit is,” and you would include that in your bullet.
Sometimes, let’s say, for example, an info product or a service that offers specific kinds of information,
but you don’t want to give too many results out. You might want to use ticklers or curiosity boosters
that will tell some kind of information in the bullet without giving them too much. In fact, you might
want to use what John Carlton calls the “benefit within the benefit.”
Here’s what you do, is that you use a bullet that starts off with an idea and then you add something, a
piece of information to justify that without giving too much information. The seventeen tips that will
help you bring your website to the top of the search engines within only seven weeks, that would be the
one.
You see, I’m not giving too much information, I’m just saying what it is, and then, and it has its
benefit, top of the search engines. Or you might want to even go further than that. You might say, that
will increase your traffic almost automatically or instantly because of the fact that it’s at the top of the
search engine. Then you would maybe use either parentheses or a subsequent bullet or an [inaudible]
bullet, which is a more indented bullet that says, in fact, one of those little tricks only takes twelve
minutes to implement and will, and so on and so forth. So, you’re adding emphasis or you’re building
on the previous bullet or the previous benefit.
Dearl Miller:
Can you talk about using testimonials? What are some qualities of good testimonials?
Michel Fortin:
That’s a great question. Thank you so much for asking that.
There are three elements of any kind of good benefit as much as a good testimonial. The reason why I
say that is because a lot of times people when they give testimonials or when they print a testimonial
within a sales letter, sometimes testimonials help to build on one factor of those three. If you have at
least one of those, you got a great testimonial. Just the fact that you say, “Hey,” you know, “John is
great,” means nothing and that’s not a good testimonial.
A testimonial has to have one of three things. Two would be great, three would be awesome. Here
they are: Quantifiable, measurable, time-bound. Here’s what it means. The more quantifiable,
whether it’s a benefit or testimonial doesn’t matter. If there’s a quantity involved, people tend to give
instant credibility to something that is quantifiable. That’s why, for example, in bullets we use the
seventeen steps, the five simple tricks, the two-minute step formula, etcetera, etcetera Quantities do
increase credibility, but quantities also increase not only the believability of a benefit, but also a
testimonial.
If I told you after joining Trafficology I’ve managed to increase my traffic to my website, that’s bland,
but if I say, “I’ve managed to increase my traffic to a thousand unique visitors a day,” that is much
better, it’s quantifiable. But even that is still a bit bland because it’s very generic. In fact, people tend
to believe more odd and non-rounded numbers. That’s why, for example, Ivory Soap said it was 99
and 44/100 pure because it’s much more believable than if you had to say a hundred percent pure.
So, if you say, “After joining Trafficology I managed to boost my visitors to 1,157 visitors a day,”
that’s far more believable and it’s quantifiable, but it’s far more specific and that’s a key of any kind of
testimonial that really does a good job.
The second is, measurable. If I tell you that I’ve increased traffic to my website by 1,157 visitors, if
I’m already producing eight hundred visitors to my web site, then one thousand means nothing because
I’ve only increased it by two hundred. So, what you want to do is you want to say something that helps
to have that quantity, some kind of baseline that you can measure that quantity on, or something, if you
have, let’s say, forget quantity for a second because it could be either one of those three.
So, let’s say you have just this kind of result. Well, you want to say something that proves that this
result is huge. If I told you that I’ve made a million dollars with your course and if I’m already a
millionaire, who cares? But if I say, “I was flat broke and I made a million dollars with your course,”
then I’ve got, it’s much more “oomph.”
Well, in the same case with the visitors, let’s say, before joining Trafficology, I was getting, I was
barely getting fifty-two visitors, unique visitors to my site every day. Then after one week, I increased
it to 1,157 unique visitors. That’s measurable. In fact, I just included a third one in that example,
which is time-bound, one week. It’s the time frame within which that result was achieved.
So, essentially, the whole point is that if you want to have a good testimonial, if you want to have
people give you good testimonials, ask them to be quantifiable, measurable and time-bound, or if they
give testimonials, ask questions after that, if they give maybe testimonials that are a bit too generic, ask
them, in order to fill those three gaps. If you have at least one, you’re better off than having none.
If you have two, it’s even better and then three it’s the best testimonial you can ever have. Before
joining Trafficology, I was producing fifty-two unique visitors to my site, but after only one week or
after only eight days or after only seven hours, whatever the case, the time frame, might be, I’ve
managed to boost my traffic to over 1,150 visitors or to 1,157 visitors and so on and so on and so forth.
So, those are the three elements, be quantifiable, be measurable and be time-bound.
Dearl Miller:
Can you talk about the actual layout of a sales letter?
What should a sales letter look like?
Michel Fortin:
Ogilvy, a very famous advertising copywriter said that people tend to react with a certain kind of
hostility towards something that they’re not used to. This is true. If you read a sales letter that is going
against the grain, if it follows a format that you’re not used to, you tend, and when I say “react
hostilely,” I don’t mean that you’re hostile, but you tend to shrug it off or you tend not to believe it or
you tend to feel already, when you hit it, “Oh, this is going to be too boring,” or “This is going to be too
long,” or “This is something that I don’t want to read because I don’t have time.” Even on an
unconscious level.
So, the job of a really good sales letter, first of all, a sales letter has certain qualities to it that help to
increase response just because of the fact that it’s on paper. It is on an eight and a half by eleven
printed page or a A4 page and it has a kind of border around it. It has some kind of white space and
borders actually have been proven scientifically to increase response and so on and so forth.
It’s the same thing with a website. The worst websites that I’ve seen are those that are fluid, meaning
that they have a percentage width. Usually they cover the entire monitor resolution. The problem with
that, and there are ample usability tests. Forget response and forget copywriting for a second.
There are ample usability tests that prove that lines that are way too long tend to fatigue the reader fast
and people have a tendency to start scanning more when the lines are too long. What I tend to say is,
depending on the monitor resolution, if you have a website that’s a hundred percent width, you’re
going to have in a larger monitor a larger website that is much more fluid and longer lines versus one
that has a smaller monitor.
Well, if you use a fixed width table and usually it’s six hundred to seven hundred pixels wide, then you
sort of mimic that sales letter, what people are used to, exactly what Ogilvy said. But here’s the key on
all that, is that in any kind of monitor resolution, six hundred pixels is six hundred pixels is six hundred
pixels. So, no matter what size of monitor they have, it remains the same, number one.
Number two, is that it forces the lines to wrap at sixty to seventy characters in length, which is what the
eye is not only used to, but at the same time increases readability, increases readership. It’s been
proven. But here’s the more important point, is that when you create lines that are wrapping at sixty to
seventy characters in length, you tend to keep the reader engaged and the eye is not to be, they don’t
become fatigued too fast and that’s the key because you want them to keep on reading and flowing with
your sales letter without being fatigued. That’s why I also tell people to no longer, to use paragraphs
no longer than four to five lines deep.
So, no more than sixty to seventy characters in length and no more than four to five lines deep. When
you use also elements from a traditional direct mail piece, things that we use, for example, even books,
you tend to increase readership. For example, using “dear friend.” I’ve tested this in the past and there
was one time when I tested it and I thought it reduced response. Then we found out that it was because
of the specific case that we were working on. I’ve tested it, oh, about ten to twelve times now, I think,
and adding “dear friend” does increase response.
Adding a drop cap, which is the very large bold first letter of the entire sales letter increases readership.
Padding the table. In fact, the layout of the table itself, sometimes people tend to create a fixed width
table, but then their content, their copy starts exactly where the border starts which is really hard on the
eyes. You want to have some kind of border there because borders do tend to increase readership, but
the reason why they do is also because it acts as a reference point.
When you read from one line and you jump to the next, then you have some kind of reference point.
The problem with the border that’s flush against the copy is that you tend to lose that reference point.
So, I tend to tell people to pad your tables between twenty to thirty pixels so that there’s some kind of
white space around the copy. The white space itself is, you know, in a direct mail piece, you don’t
want to necessarily do that all the time.
In fact, Dan Kennedy, a great copywriter and my mentor, says that you want to use up as much real
estate as possible to prove your case and to make your point. Online you have the luxury of having all
the space in the world. Plus, a monitor is different in a direct mail piece in the sense that there’s light
involved, causes the eye to get fatigued faster, plus people tend to multitask like crazy on the Internet.
They tend to have two, three, or four browsers or windows opens. They may be checking their email.
They have some kind of software opened up at the same time, what have you.
So, you want to use these elements to increase their readership, to get them not to be fatigued so much
so fast. So the drop cap and all those little elements that I mentioned earlier, the signature at the end, in
fact, we found out that through testing, adding a name below the testimonial increases response.
I’ve tested this a while back because Gary Halbert mentioned at some point that putting the headline in
quotes increased response and the theory behind that is maybe because of the fact that it makes the
headline appear as if it was a testimonial or as if it was something that somebody actually said. I
thought about that and I thought, well, if I add the name underneath, just like, for example, a byline of a
newspaper article, “by Michel Fortin,” right underneath the headline. How would that increase
response?
I tested that and it did increase response and then what we decided to do after that is to test a signature,
actually adding a signature below the headline rather than just typing out the name. That increased the
response even more. Now we tested a blue signature as if it was a blue ink pen that would write out the
signature versus, for example, a black ink pen, and it increased response even more. That’s one thing.
The second thing is, we’ve tested background colors and we found out that black, blue and white outpulled any other color, green, purple, red, what have you. That’s why I tend to use, whenever I write
my own copy, a middle table that’s about six hundred to seven hundred pixels wide with the
background around that, meaning the rest of the page, usually in dark blue and black or in white.
Those are the colors, for the same reasons that we mentioned earlier. You know, you have a direct mail
piece, what you usually do is, you tend to open up your envelope, pull out the mail piece and put it on
your desk. That sort of helps to direct the eyes into the mail piece. Well, same idea with the web site.
By using those elements, those cosmetics, you increase readership and also you increase response.
Dearl Miller:
Can you talk about what a prehead is, how to use it, and how it differs from your headline, your
subheadlines?
Michel Fortin:
The first thing that people should see and should read is the headline, which is why when we tested the
headline being in red out-pulled any other color because it calls attention to it. In fact, we found out
that by removing the graphic header at the very top of your sales letter increased response. Very often,
the header that has copy on it will tend to compete with your headline. If you use a header with a
picture, it has to have negligible difference and sometimes even it increased response by having one
with a picture on it, but the fact remains that the headline is the first thing that people should see and
read and nothing should compete with it.
Now, the prehead is usually a tiny little statement before the headline that sort of qualifies the readers a
little bit more. Very often, that would be read as an afterthought. People don’t really read that first.
They tend to read the headlines first when they hit a website. Well, what a headline, a prehead can do
is to either create some kind of curiosity, maybe tell some kind of little story or starting telling people a
little story that would qualify them.
Part of that Quest formula I mentioned earlier, and maybe sometimes you want to also use a prehead to
tell who this letter is for, who it is not for, maybe something that the writer of the letter has done or
gone through that puts people in a certain kind of frame of mind before they start reading letters.
Sometimes you have these preheads that start with “warning” or “special notice” or maybe some kind
of scarcity tactic by saying, “Please read the letter below because I’m about to make an offer available
only to 257 people only,” or whatever. You want to use a prehead in order to qualify the reader or to
push people into the sales letter.
In fact, when you use a headline, the headline itself might draw their attention enough to start reading,
but if it doesn’t, they tend to start reading it from the very beginning after they’ve read the headline and
that’s why a prehead sometimes does the same job as all the other elements that helps them to stop
scanning.
You might want to include some kind of key information in there. Maybe you want to ask a question,
are you tired of creating websites that generate zero traffic, are you tired of seeing your bank account
being sucked dry by paying for all these SEO, optimization services, that lead to no results. Then dot,
dot, dot, and you have this headline that sort of is a, almost a different idea, but it adds to that, where
the prehead sort of supports the idea that you want to introduce in the headline.
So, the prehead in itself is not really an entire pitch or is not really meant to be too many lines deep. As
a matter of fact, you might want to use just maybe two or three lines, no more, and maybe also use it to
justify it with the left-hand side of your copy because we’ve tested both sides and it seems to be the
side that pulled the most.
But even that was a little bit negligible in terms of the results, but the idea is, you don’t want to be too
wordy in your prehead. The headline is king. You want to use the prehead as a way to either qualify
the reader or to pull the reader even more once they have read the headline so that it introduces a key
piece of information, like the scarcity or the prequalifier.
Dearl Miller:
What are your feelings about using multimedia and what different types of multimedia have you found
to be the most effective?
Michel Fortin:
People communicate using different modalities and as you probably already know, Dearl, that there are
three of them. There’s the visual modality, there’s aural modality, and often people erroneously use the
word “auditive” or “auditory.” It’s actually “aural.” Aural modality and the kinesthetic modality. So,
either people need to see something in order to understand it or to appreciate it or to grasp the idea, they
either need to hear it in order to grasp it, or they need to do something in order to understand it. They
need to follow along or to actually feel and so on and so forth.
Using multimedia, we’re seeing this more and more with the Internet. Now that technology has grown
to a point where we can create multimedia that would work on any kind of Internet connection and it
also enables people to be engaged in the reading process. The more you engage them, the more they’re
apt to do something. Here’s the key. You have people who are predominantly visual, you have people
who are predominantly aural and you have people who are predominantly kinesthetic.
We are all three at some point in our lives. Sometimes even all the time, but we are predominantly one
or the other. Visuals usually tend to be the biggest of the pact, but we’re also aural and we’re also
kinesthetic, which is why we found that if you include audio buttons or like these buttons that you click
on and you can actually hear the voice of the author or maybe some key piece of information, you
increase response and you increase sales because now you’ve engaged the other part or the other
modality, the other sense.
Then the third is doing, which is clicking, getting them to fill out a form, getting them to watch a video,
to click a button, and watch a video. If you looked at Traffic Secrets, John included tiny little snippets
of excerpts from his videos, his DVDs. We’re going more and more towards this infomercial-type
atmosphere on the Internet because of the technology becoming simpler and easier to use.
By engaging all the senses, you increase response. In fact, it was proven. I used to teach professional
selling at a local college here and the textbook that we used was called “Interactive Selling” by Dr.
Ronald Marks, a gentleman who has a Ph.D. in marketing at the University of Missouri.
He talked about in there, and I don’t remember the exact numbers, but the fact that by engaging all the
senses, which is what multimedia does, you increase retention, you increase, you decrease the learning
curve, you increase retention, comprehension, also you increase sales because people tend to, once you
engage all the senses, be more involved in the sales process, increase their level of desire more and you
also help depress the kinds of hot buttons that if you use either one of those modalities, you’ll have
more buttons that you’ll be pressing because then they fully understand the value and the grandeur of
those benefits that you’re about to describe.
That’s why if you include audio, at least audio, on your sales letter, you increase sales, and if you create
some kind of kinesthetic, meaning of form, meaning something that you can have them click on, you
probably have found just recently there is a technology that just came out called the “interactive sales
letter.” I believe it’s www.InteractiveSalesLetter.com. I can’t remember the exact URL.
Essentially what it is, it’s the javascript that changes the sales letter or the content of the sales letter on
the fly when people click certain buttons, which is good because personalization has been proven to
increase sales, but if you get people to do something, you know, we found out that using an opt in form
at the beginning when people hit your website, they fill out the opt in form and the resulting thank you
page is the actual sales letter. You have the ability to get them engaged in the process. You get the
kinesthetics to understand what you’re trying to communicate, which is all about this multimedia that I
was mentioning earlier.
Now, you don’t want to do too much audio or kinesthetic because people are predominantly visual.
Most people are predominantly visual. The thing is, the Internet is, you know, it’s the nature of the
beast. The Internet also engages all the senses in itself and if you have a person hitting your website
that’s also, you know, there’s multiple browser windows open, they’re checking their email, they’re
downloading their email, they’re probably chatting on MSN messenger or ICQ or AOL messenger with
somebody else.
If you have a sales letter that doesn’t get the visual aspects involved and if you have, for example, an
entire sales letter that’s all in audio, you might lose your reader. You want to use these tactics, but you
want to use them judiciously. You don’t want to do too much of one or the other. Print will always
outsell any other mode. Multimedia is an aid, it is not meant to replace copy. That’s why it’s
important to note that if you use those elements, always focus on the fact that those little elements help
to support and add to your sales letter.
Here’s a great example. John Reese has a sales letter for Auction Secrets and he told me that he used a
certain tactic on his sales letter that increased his response and I tried that on my own website and
essentially it’s this. The headline says “Who else wants to” and then there’s a headline and there’s a
subhead right below that, a second headline, that says “If you answered yes, click the button below for
an important audio message.”
I’ve used that and it actually increased my sales by 44%. That’s what I mean. You want to use tiny
little audio buttons or tiny little features and multimedia to help to support your sales message, but they
do not replace it. But just to answer your question, bottom line, yes, the more multimedia you use, not
too much, but the more you do and you use it in that way, the more you have a chance to engage all the
senses and, therefore, increase your sales.
Dearl Miller:
That’s all the time we have today. Michel, do you have any final thoughts on how to write a successful
online sales letter?
Michel Fortin:
When people ask me, Mike, how do you write copy like you do, or can you give me any tips on how to
write copy like you do. There are five tiny little tips. They’re tiny because they’re very simple. Well,
you’ll understand that even though they’re tiny, they’re extremely important and very powerful.
The first thing is, before you learn how to write any kind of copy is to learn how to sell. That is the
fundamental skill of all great copywriters. If you know how to sell, you’ll be able to sell in print just as
much as you would be able to sell in a face-to-face situation. So, my tip to you is to learn about selling
and to hone your sales skills.
Go out there and buy books on selling, not copywriting, books on selling, from Zig Ziglar, Tom
Hopkins, Brian Tracy, so on and so forth. Visit websites about sales training, even Dan Kennedy has
some and he’s a copywriter himself. Just learn about selling and hone your sales skills. Learn how to
handle objections, how to tell compound stories, how to properly qualify your reader, how to do trial
closes and close properly.
Once you’ve got those skills down, the second tip is to learn about copywriting itself, but there are two
versions of this. There are the old guys, I call them the “old guys” because there are copywriters from
th
the 20 Century to the ‘50s that are, you know, they’re timeless. They’ve written books about
copywriting that will last forever because they are fundamental.
You’re looking at copywriters like, you know, from Johnny Kennedy to all the way to Ogilvy to guys
like Gary Halbert today and John Carlton and Dan Kennedy who are my favorites. You also have
Claude Hopkins, Scientific Advertising. You have Eugene Schwartz’s Breakthrough Advertising.
Those are powerful books to read about copywriting.
So, then when you know how to sell, the second tip, like, just to recap, is to learn how to write good
copy by learning from the masters. The third is to create a Swipe file. You know, we call ourselves
copywriters because copy talks about the content of a sales message, but we also copy very often
because, as they say, there’s nothing new under the sun. You can use, everything is pretty much
formulaic.
You’ve understood that from the moment I talked about the three immutable laws to the AIDA formula
all the way down to the Quest formula. Copywriting is a formulaic process. The same way, you can
read sales pitches, read sales letters, from copywriters that are proven to sell that have results to back
them up. Keep those in your Swipe file. A Swipe file is a file of sales letters that you keep that you
can return to and sort of read the way they present their pitch. Look at the way the headline reads.
Look at the way they introduce, where they’ve introduced the price. How do they qualify the reader
properly. What kind of story do they say? You can, not copy word for word because that would be
copyright infringement, but I would say take the formulas, some of the fundamental processes that
they’ve used in that sales letter and you can copy those in your own sales letter.
The fourth I would definitely say, for example, if you have sales letters that you know have been
proven to sell well, write them with a pen, not with a keyboard, because the connection between your
brain and your fingers are different with writing with a pen than what it is with writing on a keyboard.
Take a pen and paper and rewrite the entire sales letter word for word.
It sort of creates a connection in your brain when you do that because when you do that, you’re reading
it with more intensity, more intent, more purpose and you, therefore, start to grasp the understanding of
what kinds of approaches the copywriter took when he wrote that sales letter. So, that would be the
fourth tip.
The fifth and final tip is, I have a website that I offer a special kind of course in copywriting, but I do
this where I grab everything that I just mention in the four previous tips. You don’t learn how to write
copy when you join my private site. You actually see me. I record everything, screen-captured with
screen-capturing software, I record myself as I write or rewrite copy. So, you actually see me and you
see the sales letter as I do it. You actually see the logic, the process, that I go through when I rewrite
copy.
I even divulge during my recorded sessions some tests, split test results, which are fascinating because
that’s, the number one reason why a lot of people join my private site is to learn results from split tests
that I’ve conducted in the past. But the whole purpose of doing this is that you actually see. It’s like as
if you were looking over my shoulder as I write copy. Rather than me telling you how to write copy,
because there are, see, there’s a middleman process.
I tell you how to write copy, you have to first understand what I mean by that and then you have to go
out there and apply it. When you see me actually doing it, you learn directly, no middleman involved,
you actually see me doing it and the beauty about that too is that if you had a Swipe file, for example,
like, you know, tip number three that I mentioned earlier. If you had a Swipe file, sometimes you’re
left scratching your head trying to figure out why certain things were done, why certain words were
used, why certain approaches were used in the copy.
Well, when you have access to videos like the ones I offer in my private site, you can sort of
understand, rather than just leaving, you know, having something that’s leaving you dumbfounded by
why certain things were used. You have an understanding because I explain everything step by step,
detail by detail, just so that you know what kind of website it is.
The URL is http://CopyDoctor.TrafficologyResources.com
It’s a private membership site. It’s close to $30 a month and you actually, I have access to almost thirty
hours of video, I critique a new website or a new sales letter every month, minimum of one. Right now
I’m doing about two or three. There’s a members form. There’s tons of articles and resources.
There’s software that I use myself and I actually show you how I use it. There are also books and other
kinds of sales letters that I’ve come across that are fantastic that you can actually keep for your own
Swipe file, and so on and so forth.
So, those are the five tips.
Dearl Miller:
Thank you very much for being here today, Michel.
Can you give us that URL one more time?
Michel Fortin:
Thanks, Dearl. It’s http://CopyDoctor.TrafficologyResources.com
Dearl Miller:
This concludes Trafficology’s spotlight on copywriting your online sales letter. For more information
on copywriting, be sure to review the links provided in the resources section. There, you’ll find a video
of Michel doing a sales letter critique as well as information from Dr. Joe Vitale on how to write
hypnotic web copy and Mr. Willie Crawford on how to write articles to create web traffic.
Web Copywriting: How to Write the Words that Will Sell Your Product or Service Online with Dr. Joe Vitale
Joe Vitale:
Well, you know I love copywriting and I think I want people to realize how exciting it is to hold that
much power in your hands because people can write a novel or people can write articles or people can
write plays or poetry and I've written all of that but the most challenging and the most fulfilling and the
most profitable kind of writing is copywriting.
Dearl Miller:
Hello and welcome to Trafficology's Spotlight on Copywriting. I'm Dearl Miller from Nitro Marketing
and the editor of www.Trafficology.com. Today, you're going to learn how to write the words that will
sell your product or service online. Web copy is acknowledged to be one of the most important pieces
of the online marketing strategy. You can have the best product with the best features at the best price
but if you're unable to communicate the value of your product, you will not sell anything. A good
copywriter is worth their weight in gold.
They're very rare and are very well paid. In fact, some come in upwards of $25,000.00 for a single
sales letter. But professional marketers know that the success of their sales letter may very well
determine the success of their entire online business. Bottom line: if you become a master copywriter,
you will literally have the ability to write money. Conversely, if you don't at least understand the
copywriting basics, you seriously handicap your ability to sell any product or service online.
To help you learn web copywriting, we have with us today the number one best selling author and
master copywriter, Dr. Joe Vitale. From the age of 15, Joe has studied the human mind through
hypnosis and over the past 30 years, he's authored far too many books to mention, including number
one bestseller, Spiritual Marketing and the number three bestseller, The Greatest Marketing Secret of
All Time. In fact, Joe is about to release his most profound work yet, The Hypnotic Writing Manual,
available only through the Nitro Web Cast.
If you're serious about learning hypnotic writing, sign up for the free Nitro Web Cast listed below.
Now turn up your speakers and prepare to learn this science of copywriting. Welcome, Dr. Vitale, to
Trafficology's Spotlight on Copywriting. Thank you for being here with us today.
Joe Vitale:
My pleasure, thanks for inviting me.
Dearl Miller:
How did you get started with hypnosis and what made you adapt that to copywriting?
Joe Vitale:
Well, those are two big questions to begin with. Hypnosis, I was interested in well over 30 years ago
when I was kid, actually a teenager, and I was reading a lot of self help, self improvement,
psychological books. I was very fascinated by all of that. I, of course, started studying hypnosis
because that's that mystical, mysterious element of the mind that even now is a little confusing to
people. And I was fascinated with it. I had heard that just by putting people into a light trance that
they can heal themselves of problems, that many dentists were putting people into a light hypnotic
trance and performing dental work on them and these people weren't feeling any pain.
People were overcoming smoking and losing weight and curing all kind of problems they were having
for years. All of that fascinates me. It fascinated me even when I was kid. I actually played around
with hypnosis and this is not something I would advise to do at home because I would hypnotize the
neighbor kid, who was my friend. He was a teenager and I was a teenager. We had no business doing
that but that shows how long ago I was interested in hypnosis.
Then as I started to go more into writing and I studied Rod Serling and Jack Leonard and Mark Twain
and Ernest Hemmingway and all the great literary artists that you can think of, I used to wonder how
are they putting me into this kind of trance. They would write stories that would make me laugh or cry
or feel something and in a sense that's a hypnotic trance. And so out of my interest in hypnosis and out
of my interest in writing, I blended the two into what I've now branded and I am trade marking called
Hypnotic Writing.
So, it's really an interesting, it's a blend of my two biggest passions.
Dearl Miller:
Can you talk a little bit about what copywriting is and why it's so important?
Joe Vitale:
Well, I'm going to answer the second part first. The copywriting is so profoundly important that I'll
make this maybe startling statement, that without copy, you will have no sales. That it's the words that
cause the sale. It's nothing else. We live in this age where we can have all the bells and whistles you
can think of from video to audio to different colors to interactive software to infomercials online. I
mean we can do so many miraculous things and they all do assist the selling process.
So, when you get down to it, it's words and only words that get into the mind, that influence the mind
and lead people to actually part with their money, which is what most of us listening wants them to do.
Copywriting itself is the science of using words to sell. It's the science of using words to influence. It's
persuasion. You might call it literary persuasion. But, in essence, copywriting is the words in an
advertisement, the words in a sales letter, the words on a web site, that are designed to tell a story very
often, communicate a message very often, and finally to get you to buy something more often than not.
So, copywriting is using words to make sales and it is profoundly important. Without it you have this
sad thing take place and that's no sales whatsoever.
Dearl Miller:
Can you compare copywriting to a salesman in a showroom or a sales process that people might think
of normally?
Joe Vitale:
Yeah, that's actually a great question because when you are writing a sales letter, you're writing an
email, you're writing a web site, you are in affect the salesperson that's in the showroom. So, in other
words, if you wanted to go buy a blouse today or a new shirt today or a new outfit today or go buy a
new car today, you would walk into somebody's retail place and you would end up talking to a
salesperson. The salesperson would hopefully, if they're a good sales person, listen to you to find out
what you're wanting and then what would they do?
They would talk to you about what they have and when they talk to you, they will be using what every
copywriter uses, that's words. Now how they talk to you or what persuasion formula they used and
how well they communicate and whether they actually make the sale is going to be hit or miss
depending on how qualified and how experienced, how educated that sales person is. With a
copywriter, you are definitely a salesperson. You are a salesperson in print. One of the most famous
definitions of advertising is its salesmanship in print.
And you can adapt that for the Internet age by saying that copywriting is salesmanship online. So, yes,
you are a salesperson. You are like a salesperson in a good store, but you got to be better than that
salesperson because you can't do a lot of things that a person in person would do. You can't smile at
them. Let them see inside your eyes as you look inside their eyes, you can't watch their body
movement. You can't reach out and touch them, at least not right now.
We're going into this virtual world, we will at some point probably be able to do that, but right now, a
copywriter online is left to the greatest arsenal of all time and that's the words that are available to all of
us.
Dearl Miller:
Now that we understand what copywriting is and how very important it is to your success online, how
does someone who knows nothing about copywriting begin the process?
Joe Vitale:
Yeah, that's a wonderful question and the best way to begin it, and this is like the million-dollar tip for
today, is to simply study copywriters right now. You have a free education online. For example,
people that go and sign up for my newsletter at my www.MrFire.com site are getting a free education
from me. I'm known to mail out emails almost weekly, sometimes daily, and whether that is relevant to
you or not, in terms of whatever I'm offering, what is relevant to you is what you're receiving in your
email box.
You're getting a pretty well known copywriter sending you examples of his work. Study those. And
you can do this for anybody. From the Nitro Marketing list and when they send you things out, they
are sending you examples of good copywriting. But don't even stop there, whatever you're interest is,
go online, search it out, get on some email lists and start studying what you receive and go to the web
sites and start studying what's on those web sites. And what you'll notice is that some of them are very
engaging.
Some of them are almost, if you will, hypnotic. Some of those lead you to part with your money and
you really want to pay attention to those. You want to ask yourself, "Okay, I'm about to buy this pair
of socks online because of this email." What did they say that made me convinced that I should do
this? That is going to be a profound education. It'll be very revealing. By the same token, if you get
an email and it seems boring to you, ask yourself why is it boring. Why am I not interested? Because
that's going to highlight where that copywriter blew it.
And they might have blown it with the subject line. It may not have been targeted to you or maybe the
opening of the email did not speak to your interests and it got too wordy and it took too long to get to
their point in the email. And so what I'm saying is the best way to start is right online with your own
email box and with your own web browser. Start searching and start studying. Only don't do it without
awareness. Don't do it mindlessly. Keep asking yourself is this working? Do I want to buy?
If it is working and I do want to buy, what's making that happen? If this isn't working, if this is boring
to me, why is it boring? Why is not engaging me? Because all of that are going to illustrate some
principals of copywriting that I won't have time to narrate right now but you'll be able to discover on
your own. And, of course, there's lots of books out there. I'd read anything by Dan Kennedy, anything
by John Caples, anything by Bob Bly, anything by Joe Sugarman and of course, anything Joe Vitale
and you can begin to learn the process of copywriting.
Dearl Miller:
Can you talk about the importance of using a story in your web copy?
Joe Vitale:
Yeah, I love stories. I love stories. Talk to me for any length of time and sooner or later, you're going
to hear me tell a story about something or other and that story is conveying a lot of different things. It's
making a point for one. It's entertaining you for another. And it's also often delivering a selling
message, almost subliminally, almost unconsciously. It's slipping in under your conscious radar. Now
stories don't have to be a big deal. You don't have to sit there and fabricate a story, which I don't
encourage people to do because you are not writing fiction.
Copywriting should be all nonfiction. It's the truth and it should only be the truth. So, pay attention to
the stories that happen to you in your life. For example, if you do have a web site and you're selling
magic tricks online or maybe you're selling a beauty formula or an herbal product or anything on those
lines, first of all why did you get into that business? There's a story there and people are interested in
people.
If you tell your story of why you are now selling magic tricks or herbal products online, that's going to
be interesting to some people and if there's real valid moving reasons for your getting online to do this,
that will also help convince people of your sincerity, your honesty, your integrity and maybe even a
nature of your product. That's one level of story.
Another level of story is what about the customers who write to you and say, "I bought this particular
magic trick from you and I performed it at the dinner the other night and I'll tell you I was never the life
of the party before but my God, I got applause. People were laughing. They were still talking about it
hours later, days later and I feel like the greatest magician of all time." Well, that story is not only an
endorsement for you but it's an actual hypnotic technique because you didn't tell the person who was
about to buy your next product that you sell great products.
This story by a third party, a satisfied customer, tells about the power of your product. So, the selling is
being done for you through this story. So, anyway, stories are very powerful. I've written a whole
book on it and could talk about it for days. So, I'll just leave it at that. Stories are powerful. Think of
stories. We all think in stories. There's actually been research that's been done that says we are storied
beings. We make sense of our world through the story. So, using story in copywriting, helps make
sense of your offer and it also helps anchor it in people's mind and remember it better.
Dearl Miller:
When writing a lot of people have trouble developing their own story. A lot of us have stories inside of
us and a lot of experiences but it's hard to get them out. Do you have any techniques to tease or draw
those stories out of people that can be used for copywriting?
Joe Vitale:
I sure do. After doing this for so many decades, I've learned where the little mental door is and the
combination lock to turn it and open it to let those stories come out. The first thing to be aware of that
most people when they sit down to write, freeze up. And they freeze up because all of the editorial
upbringing we had. We had a spelling teacher, an English teacher, a teacher who told us to watch our
punctuation, our sentences, our grammar and blah blah and to the effect it made us paranoid about
writing.
We're afraid to write a word because we thought we might get an F on our paper. And it was Mark
Twain who said, "If we were all taught to speak the same way we were taught to write, we'd all stutter."
And that's so insightful because what it's saying is that we're paranoid about writing right now because
we're afraid of making a mistake. So, I say become aware of that process and turn it off. There's a
couple ways to do that.
The first is you can mentally turn it off if you're aware enough to realize that I have this editorial voice
in my head and that I can just ask it to come back later. Don't interrupt me right now. I'm going to sit
down and write this story. So, you could possibly turn it off. I can do that and with practice anybody
can do that. Another thing is, and I've created a whole software program that does this, there's one
aspect, one benefit in this writing program that will actually do this for you, but you don't need the
program. I'll just describe it for you. You want to write your story.
You go to your computer. You turn it on. You fire up your word processing program. You're looking
at a blank page. Okay, you're about to start writing. Turn off the screen. Turn off the screen. What
that does is disable the editorial part of your brain that's going to try to watch it and rewrite it as you
write it. So, you turn off the screen and you start typing. You start telling your story. Just typing
away, knowing you're going to make some mistakes but who cares. Nobody's going to see right now.
When you're all done, you write for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes. You tell your story. When
you feel like, “Okay, I've told my story. I'm sure it's garbage but I told it.” Turn the computer monitor
back on. Save what you just wrote. Now invite the editorial part of you back and go through it and
clean it up. What I have found, without exception, that people have more fun writing. They're more
creative in their writing. They unleash the natural copywriter within themselves when they allow
themselves to do this writing.
The story unfolds all on it's own and then finally and this is a very basic principal in hypnosis, your
unconscious mind actually ends up doing the writing. And your unconscious mind can do it because
your conscious mind doesn't have anything to do work with. It can't see the screen. So, that's another
tip. Now let me give you one more. Another thing that a lot of copywriters do is they'll do what you
and I are doing right now. They'll pick up the phone. They'll call somebody and say, “Hear me out. I
want to tell you this story about this product.”
And they will tell the story in their own words to somebody listening on the phone. Now here's the
key. They're recording it. They record it because they are talking naturally. They are not worried
about editing themselves. They might have a few false starts and corrections while they're telling their
story. Much like what I'm doing in this interview. None of this is scripted. I'm talking from the top of
my head. And if we were writing all of this out and I looked at it later on the screen, I might edit it a
little bit but this is coming with a very natural flow.
When you talk to somebody on the phone, especially somebody you like and you're already
comfortable with and have a repoire with, you'll tell your story easily. Record it. You can either listen
to it and then go and type up your story or you can give it to somebody to transcribe. When they give
you the transcription back, go through it and edit it to fine tune it and smooth it out and make it the
story you want it to be. But writing your story, telling your story does not have to be a big deal. You're
right.
It's in you and I've just given you at least three ways to get it out.
Dearl Miller:
When you talked about stories you mentioned how you don't recommend people make up a story. It's
very important when writing and communicating, especially during the sales process, to always be
building trust between you and the prospect. Can you talk about the importance of trust and how to
develop that trust through your copywriting?
Joe Vitale:
Yes, that's a great question. You know we live in the age of skepticism and the truth is we've lived in
that age for a hundred or more years. People have learned to mistrust advertising. Unfortunately, there
have been a lot of people who have made wild claims, fraudulent claims, misleading claims and so
people have learned not to trust advertising. And when they do trust it, when they do trust somebody,
you have created a repoire there, a bond there that is probably worth potentially a million dollars to
you.
And what I'm talking about here is your own name, your own brand, your own reputation. And what
happens is that, well, I'll use myself as an example. I've been online for maybe 15 years. And over that
time, people have learned to trust me. And many people have been on my mailing list for a decade or
more. And these people have learned because this is what I practice, that I only endorse things I
personally used, things I personally believe in, things I personally feel my list would welcome and be
glad to hear about.
And because of that integrity, which I will never violate and have never violated, that trust is there. So,
when I send out a mailing, like I plan to do this Friday for a new product, they'll pay attention to it.
And they'll say, “If Joe says it works, it must work because I've learned to trust him.” Well look at the
other side of this, the dark side of this.
If you start lying to people or misleading people and, by God, I don't want you to do either one of them,
but for the sake of this conversation, and to illustrate what I'm talking about, if somebody goes out
there and is misleading about their product or service, not only will they not get sales because people
have a built in BS detector, but they will also lose customers forever. If somebody does buy and they
get the product and they realize this really isn't what it was built to be, they will never trust you again.
They will never buy from you again and even worse than that, they will tell dozens of other people not
to trust you. You will have ruined your reputation to hopefully make a sale and that sale would not
have been worth it. So, you never, ever, ever, ever, ever want to mislead people in your copy. And
that's why when I made the comment don't fabricate a story, you don't want to fabricate anything. You
want to use real stories, real facts, real benefits. The measurable things should be what's in your copy,
nothing that you're guessing at.
And when you tell somebody it's going to work for them, you should be able to truck in some evidence
to prove that from other satisfied customers, from some studies that have been done, some research
from a guarantee but the bottom line is that trust, that bond with that relationship with your customer,
whether it's a prospect or a long term customer, is worth more than I can even put a dollar amount to.
So, you must honor it.
Dearl Miller:
You mentioned using testimonials and evidence. Can you talk about; can you give me two or three
specific ways that people can demonstrate and develop trust using their copywriting?
Joe Vitale:
Ways to develop trust in their copywriting, well, definitely building a reputation over time is one of the
best ways. And that means always telling the truth so that when people buy from you the first time and
like what they get because you honored your word, they'll come back to you the next time and the
believability will just get more and more anchored. But if it's a first time sale and you're just starting
out, then of course, obviously, tell the truth. Second of all, if you have endorsements, use them.
And what I mean by that is whenever somebody tells you, I bought you're product and I really liked it,
ask them for a testimonial. I have it built in to my mind, it's like this software in my brain that kicks in
that if someone says, “I read one of your books and it made such and such profit for me,” I'll say first,
“Thank you.” Second, “Will you put it in writing for me that I might be able to use it in my
promotional material?” Now I've never had anyone say no. Not in decades, nobody’s ever said “no.”
And you don't pay them of course. You don't need to bribe them.
You don't need to give them anything for it. They are thanking you for a product they really liked.
When they give you the endorsement, they are giving it to you knowing that they are helping you but if
they're real marketing savvy, they also know that they are getting some promotion too. So, if you, for
example, gave me an endorsement for one of my books, I'd put it on my web site. Your name would be
seen by all the people going to my web site. So, it's a win-win when it comes to testimonials.
So, again, to help build this trust, you want to tell the truth of course. You want to put some
testimonials in there. If there's any way to use some studies or facts or anything that's objective, almost
scientific proof that what you're trying to sell will work, that will help people believe you. I think what
I'm trying to get at here is that you want objective third parties to do the selling for you. You can
always introduce them in your copywriting but if you do all the raving and cheerleading about your
product, people are going to be suspicious.
They are going to think, "Why is he the one talking about it. Why doesn't he have anybody else talking
about it?" So, you need to bring in your preponderance of evidence; that they say in legal terms; and
overwhelm people with the evidence that your product or service does what it says it will do.
Dearl Miller:
What is the number one key to making a sales letter work?
Joe Vitale:
The number one key to making a sales letter work is to be entirely focused on what the reader gets. If
you can be entirely focused on what that reader is going to get as a result of getting/buying your
product or service and you only speak to them. You speak to their needs. You speak to their hopes and
their dreams and their pains and their sorrows and they feel like you wrote it to them, you will have
created some of the most powerful copywriting of all times.
My most famous mantra that I've been saying for years is the thing you want to keep in mind, “Get out
of your ego and get into your readers ego.” And this goes back to what I just said. The more you think
of what the reader is going to get, the more you think entirely of what that reader is going to get, the
higher percentages of you creating a piece of truly hypnotic copywriting and the higher your sales will
be. Too many people write copy that is self-serving. There's too much "I" in it. I did this. I found
this. I discovered this.
And there's nothing wrong with a little bit of that to help explain your story but you need to be talking
about what you will get from buying this product, this book, this tape, this magic trick, this pair of
socks. What will the reader get? Focus on the end result of what the reader will get. That's the number
one thing to keep in mind.
Dearl Miller:
What is your favorite way to create web copy?
Joe Vitale:
Interesting. What is my favorite way to create web copy? I'll tell you in a nutshell what my basic
process is. The very first is I need to be very familiar with the product or service that's going to be on,
going to be sold on that web site and that goes back to sincerity. I need to be one with that product or
service. So, if I'm writing this for a client, I'll say, “Send the product to me or let me use the service.” I
need to sample it. The second thing I'm doing is I'm researching it because I'm looking for the
excitement. And this is unique with Joe Vitale.
It may not be true with all copywriters but what I'm looking for is the excitement. Other copywriters
might say I'm looking for the uniqueness in the product or service. I say I'm looking for the excitement
because if I can find what I can get really excited about, why is this product or service different from
everything else? Why is it unique? Why is it special? What does it do? How does it save the
particular world it's going to appeal to? If I can find what I'm excited about, I can write the entire web
site writing that emotion of excitement. So, the first thing I do is ask for the product or service because
I'm going to research it.
The second thing in my research I'm looking for the excitement, for the uniqueness, for the personality,
for the benefit that this product or service gives. Then the third thing I do, which I think is unique to
me, is I create a headline first. I may change that headline later but I've created 30 different ways to
develop a headline. And this is in a couple of my different books. It's in my writing software. I've
talked about it in other places and it's not all that new.
I've just collected these 30 proven ways to write a headline. By coming up with a great headline, I
anchor in my mind the excitement that I want to communicate to the people that will eventually be
reading the web site. So, that's my third big key. Once I know what the headline is, that kind of
summarizes the essence of what I want to say on the web site, I can then proceed to write. And then
that's the fourth step for me is I start writing.
And I write the whole web site as fast as I can, doing it without interruption, trying not to stop, trying
my best to get a first draft out and I'm writing it fast because I don't want to bring in the editorial part of
me that will interrupt the flow. And then the fifth step is after I've done all of that, I may take a break
and I'll go back and I'll edit it. I'll fine-tune it. I'll look for places to put in hypnotic language. I'll be
sure that it's communicating what I want it to communicate.
So, I mean this is more of an elaborated process I've written about in some of my books and my
software talks about this and walks you through it but to answer your question, that's it in a nutshell.
And looking for the excitement and having a great headline are kickoff points for me to write any web
site.
Dearl Miller:
This concludes Part One of Trafficology's Spotlight on Copywriting. Today you learned exactly what
web copy is and why copywriting is so very important to the success of your online business. You also
learned how to begin your copywriting journey, how to use a story to communicate the excitement of
owning your product and how to build a trusting lifelong relationship with your customers using web
copy alone. Dr. Vitale shared with you the number one key to making a sales letter work and he also
taught you his personal process for writing successful web copy.
Now that you understand the basics of copywriting, make sure to check out Part Two where Joe will
share with you his seven keys to writing hypnotic web copy. Thank you very much for being with us
today, Dr. Vitale. Do you have any final thoughts on copywriting?
Joe Vitale:
Well, you know I love copywriting and I think I want people to realize how exciting it is to hold that
much power in your hands because people can write a novel or people can write articles or people can
write plays or poetry and I've written all of that but the most challenging and the most fulfilling and the
most profitable kind of writing is copywriting. When you write copy, you are talking to a stranger and
convincing that stranger to send you money for something they won't see until after they've sent you
the money and you've sent them the product or service.
That is very challenging, very fulfilling and very powerful. So, I just want you to realize this is fun!
This is exciting and have a ball doing it because when you're doing it and you do have a ball, the end
result is money in the bank.
7 Keys to Writing Hypnotically & Encourage Visitors to Purchase Your Product or Service Online with Dr. Joe Vitale
Joe Vitale:
I want you to engage all of the senses to the best of your ability. You don’t just speak to a person’s
brain; you’re speaking to their whole body/mind system, so you are engaging their emotion. And in
fact, the more you use their senses and help them become sensory aware of your product or service, the
more emotionally they’ll become married to it.
Dearl Miller:
Hello, and welcome to part two of Trafficology’s Spotlight on Copywriting. I’m Dearl Miller from
Nitro Marketing, and the editor of Trafficology.com. In part one, we talked with master copywriter,
Dr. Joe Vitale. He introduced you to copywriting, explained what copywriting is, and why it’s so very
important. He also shared with us several personal copywriting secrets.
Today, in part two, we’ll cover an advanced copywriting technique. Dr. Vitale will teach you how
using certain hypnotic words and magnetic phrases can persuade, inspire, inform, entertain, seduce,
sell, and much, much more. So, turn up your speakers and prepare to learn the Seven Keys to Hypnotic
Writing!
Welcome, Dr. Vitale, to Trafficology’s Spotlight on Copywriting. Thank you for being here with us
today.
Joe Vitale:
Oh, I’m looking forward to it! I’ve been waiting for this one.
Dearl Miller:
Can you talk to us a little bit about what hypnotic copywriting is, and how that differs from what
people normally think of copywriting?
Joe Vitale:
Yeah, I sure can. Hypnotic copywriting, I call it “hypnotic writing.” And, the first thing to realize is
it’s an actual scientific state of mind. Most people don’t know, I am a certified Hypnotherapist and, in
fact, I just spoke at the world’s largest convention for hypnotists. It’s the National Guild of Hypnotists.
Two thousand of these professional people come from all over the world to attend seminars, to upgrade
their education, to be further certified, and so forth.
And, they asked me to speak on hypnotic writing and to explain to them what it is and how it works.
Now, hypnotic writing is what’s called a “waking trance.” And, I’m not going to make this
complicated, but I’ll just point out that there have been times when you’re driving down the highway,
maybe late at night, early in the morning, not much traffic around, you’re just looking at this highway
and you see the white line, the white line, the white line, the white line as you’re driving.
You will go into what’s called “highway hypnosis.” That is a light, waking trance. You can still drive.
If a deer jumped out in front of you you’d be startled, but you’d be able to handle the car. So, you’re
wide-awake and you’re driving.
There have been times when you watched a movie and you were totally riveted to the movie to the
sense that, if the phone rang, you might have heard it, or maybe you didn’t even hear it, or somebody
called you and maybe you heard them, maybe you didn’t, or you had an appointment and you just said,
“To heck with it. I’m going to watch this movie.” You were in a type of waking trance.
Well, I used to read the great writers of the world, from Mark Twain to Jack London to Shirley Jackson
to Edgar Allan Poe, and I realized they were putting us into a type of trance. They would make us
laugh, or cry, or be afraid even, when they wrote horror stories. And I thought, “How are they doing
that?” And, then I would read the great copywriters, from John {4:01 Kaples} to David Ogleby to
Robert Collier, and they get people to buy things during the Great Depression, when people were
broke. And I thought, “How are they doing that?”
And, I realized that these great writers were actually using this waking hypnosis. They were using this
waking trance to put people into a state to get them to feel something. So, hypnotic writing is putting
people into this light, waking trance to get them to buy your product or service. That’s my general
definition of it. Now, how does it differ from traditional copywriting?
Traditional copywriting is writing words that sell, and it’s very challenging. Anybody that can write
words that sell deserves to be paid a lot of money, because it’s a very challenging, very hard thing to
do. But, hypnotic copywriting goes a degree further. It goes a degree deeper, if you will, because it’s
upping the odds of you getting the results you want. Yes, copywriting is powerful and can make
money.
Hypnotic copywriting influences people on a deeper level to help create rapport, and to help them buy
whatever your product or service is. So, it’s deepening, it’s strengthening, it’s enlarging this power you
have when you use words to make money. That’s the difference between hypnotic copywriting and
traditional copywriting.
Dearl Miller:
Is it ethical to use something as powerful as hypnosis in order to help sell your product or service?
Joe Vitale:
That’s a wonderful question. Well, the reality is it’s all in how you use it. It’s like asking, “Is it ethical
to have a gun in the house?” Well, it depends on what you’re planning to do with it. You can use these
things for good and of course, you can use them for evil. I am not talking to would-be cult leaders. I
am not talking to would-be Hitlers. I am talking to the average person, the person that’s listening to
this.
These are real people, genuine people; hard working people who want to sell their product or service.
They’re not trying to sell drugs. They’re not trying to do something illegal. They’re not trying to start
their own religion. I don’t think, maybe some of them are, but for the most part I think they’re just
hard working. They’re trying to make a living online. They have a product or service to sell, and
they’re looking for the best way to communicate what they’re offering to the target market that should
want it.
There’s nothing unethical about doing that. So, the bottom line for me is, what do you plan to use it
for? If you are planning to do something unethical or illegal with it, get off the call. I don’t want to
hear from you. I don’t want to know anything about what you’re doing. And, in some way, shape, or
form you should realize that there is this karmic law, and it will come back to bite you.
Dearl Miller:
You mentioned that you are a Certified Hypnotherapist. Does someone have to be a Certified
Hypnotherapist in order to write hypnotic copy?
Joe Vitale:
Oh, that’s a good question. I didn’t see that one coming. No, not at all. In fact, the way that I write
about hypnotic writing, and the way that I teach hypnotic writing, is just to basically free the inner
copywriter within you. I’m not teaching you any sort of hypnotic techniques that you might use to put
somebody in a trance; I’m not teaching that at all. I am teaching people more about how to use
language and how to express themselves for greater clarity and more persuasive impact.
So, when somebody like me gets certified as a hypnotherapist, we go through a lot of training to teach
us how to deal with people one-on-one, how to help them heal whatever might be going on in their
lives, how to put them into hypnotic trances at various levels – light, medium, and deep – and to do it
quickly, and how to handle problems that surface. None of that has to go into hypnotic writing. None
of that does. Now, hypnotic writing only deals with a light trance, as I mentioned earlier, and a waking
trance at that.
So, you don’t need to have the in-depth, highly educated skills of a professional hypnotist in order to
pull this off. All you need to do, in many ways, is use what I teach people to use to sharpen their
current writing abilities and to speak to what people really want to read about. The more you can do
that, the more you can put people into a waking trance, and you don’t need to be a hypnotist to do it.
Dearl Miller:
Now that we understand what hypnotic writing is and how it differs from standard copywriting, let’s
cover your Seven Keys to Hypnotic Writing.
Number one: Hypnotic writing is personal. It speaks to you. It uses words such as “you”, “me”, “I”,
and “yours.” This makes the readers feel as if you’re speaking to them personally.
You say that the more personal your writing is, the more hypnotic your site is. Can you explain how to
make your writing personal?
Joe Vitale:
Yeah, I can do it by asking you to think of what most government writing looks like. Most people that
have received any sort of legal forms, for example, or a letter from their attorney, or paperwork from
the government, Social Security Administration, unemployment material, most of that kind of writing
is very impersonal. You don’t sense that there’s a person there. There’s an entity there; a government,
a corporation, a body of people, but not an individual.
Hypnotic writing usually comes from one person talking to one person, much like our conversation
right now. It’s one person talking to one person, and a bunch of other people get to listen to this later.
But, in order for this to be hypnotic, in order for any writing to be hypnotic, it needs to be written as if
it’s a letter from a friend. Now, this is an important distinction because all of that writing that I just
mentioned, that’s “governmentese” or “legalese,” is a form of detached writing.
People read it, but they’re detached from it because they don’t sense the person who wrote it. They
don’t sense the voice behind it. There’s no connection. There’s no rapport. There’s no relationship.
Hypnotic writing builds relationships. There needs to be rapport, and there needs to be that rapport for
a fundamental reason that’s true in hypnosis.
No hypnotist can put anybody intro a trance unless there’s what’s called “an agreement.” That
agreement is that the person being hypnotized believes the hypnotist can do it, and that hypnotist is in
front of them or on the phone with them. They can put people into trances over the phone. But, my
point is it’s a one-on-one relationship. When there’s a one-on-one relationship, you can put somebody
into a trance if you know what you’re doing.
I put Mark Joiner into a hypnotic trance a year or so ago for a publicity campaign we were doing. He
allowed me to put him into a state of hypnosis. I did it over the phone, but it was me speaking to him,
and he had the agreement. He said that Joe could do this, and he believed Joe could do this, and he
listened to me, and I could do this. So, I put him into a hypnotic trance, and that was a historic
moment. It was a lot of fun as well.
Well, when it comes to writing, you want to speak to a person. And what I mean by that is most
people, when they sit down to write a letter, think, “Oh my God! One hundred thousand to a million
people are going to read this and I have to write to all of them. This is so overwhelming! What are they
going to think? What are they asking?” And, you clog up. You start to block your own creativity, and
the end result is you write something that’s very impersonal, that’s not very hypnotic.
You want to write your letters as if you’re writing a letter to a friend. Whether you’re writing a sales
letter, or a web site, or an email that potentially, you know, 100,000 or 1 million people may look at,
you want every one of them to look at it and sense that you wrote it to that individual. A major key
here is that when people read anything, when they read a book, when they read a newspaper, when they
read a website, they read it one person at a time. So, when you write your website, your email, your
article, your book, whatever it is, you write it to one person.
Now, I don’t know how to make this as profound as it needs to be. I really want you to get the impact
of this because, when you make your writing personal, when you write to a person and you use words
like “you” and “your” and “I,” much like I’m doing when I’m talking to you, I am saying “I” and “you”
in this conversation, those are very hypnotic. They help to create rapport. They help to create
relationship on an almost unconscious, subliminal, unseen, basically hypnotic level.
The more you can do that, the more everybody that reads your article or your website is going to think,
“He wrote it to me.” They won’t think that as a conscious thought; they’ll have that as an unconscious
thought. And, it will make the writing breezier. It will make it easier. It will make it more personal,
and I think that’s really the most hypnotic key of all. The more you talk to one person, that person will
sense that you have created a relationship with them and you have begun the process of hypnosis.
You’ve begun the process of hypnotic writing. But, you’ve got to do it in this personal way. “You”,
“I”, “my”, “your”, all those personal words. Here’s a tip. Here’s something that’s one of my secrets.
When I write an email, I know that potentially 100,000 people or more are going to see my email. If I
just thought about that, I could get overwhelmed. Instead, I wipe that from my mind and I go, “I want
to write this email to one person, David, or Sue, off my list.”
I’ll just think of that person. I’ll go, “Okay. David, let me tell you about this new product.” And, I’ll
write the email to David. When I’m done, I’ll look at the email and, more often than not, it will be
ready to go for the 100,000 that will be reading it. And, when they read it they’ll think, “Wow! Joe
wrote this to me. I wonder if he just wrote it to me.” Now, I don’t use the word “David, here’s
something great”. I use the word “David, here’s something great” when I draft the email in order to
fool myself to make it a one-on-one, personal, hypnotic piece of writing.
When I re-write it, I take out any references to a single person, like David or Sue, and I send out an
email that now has the personal aura around it. So, that’s kind of a long answer, but I hope I’ve made
the point because it’s a very fundamental and powerful point to make.
Dearl Miller:
The second key to hypnotic writing is to be active. You say that hypnotic writing is active writing.
Can you explain exactly what active writing is, and why that is important to hypnotic writing?
Joe Vitale:
Yes, it’s very important to hypnotic writing. I’ll go as far as to say if somebody could transform any
website they currently have, any email they currently have, any sales letter they currently have into
active writing, they will have possibly doubled the power of what they had already written. And, that’s
how influential this principal is.
Now, I want to make sure we’re clear here because active and passive writing is a little bit confusing.
To go back to the earlier example, most government writing, most legalese writing, is passive writing.
And, that is usually something along the lines of, I’m trying to think of an example, “Enclosed in this
envelope is a contract.” That’s pretty passive right there. Something that’s a degree more active is,
“I’ve enclosed in this envelope,” or, “You’ll find in this envelope a contract that I’ve included.”
Of course, I’m making this up so I’m a little rough in doing this on the spot, but that’s more active.
Passive writing is usually without a person doing something in the sentence. Active writing usually has
somebody doing something in the sentence. I think, in my first eBook, Hypnotic Writing, I had the
example that “the door was opened.” That’s passive; the door was opened, well yeah. The door was
opened, but by who? How was it opened? So, “the door was opened” is passive writing.
“Joe opened the door” is active writing. Then, you can take it a degree and make it much more active
and say, “Joe kicked open the door.” Well, that word “kicked’ now makes that sentence come alive,
and it’s much more hypnotic. If you look at these in degrees, the very first one, “the door was opened,”
is very passive. There’s no romance to it. There’s no color to it. There’s no activity to it. There’s no
person in it.
There’s no personality in it. It says something, but it says it in an empty way. Most websites do that.
They are very empty. They’re very passive in their language. So, change it and now we have “Joe
opened the door.” Well, that’s good. We’ve got a person doing something. Change all of the writing
on your website to a person doing something, a person saying something, a person claiming something,
a person proving something, and now you have something more active.
Well, you can make it even more hypnotic and say, “Joe kicked in the door.” Now, we have some
expression there and the word “kicked” also helps communicate some emotion. Well, if he kicked in
the door, he probably was angry, or maybe he was really excited. So, we start to even build on
curiosity. Well, if you go went through your website, changed passive writing to active writing, and
then whenever the active writing was there you could find a way to add a word to make it even
stronger, now you’ve made it much more hypnotic.
I think the whole issue of active versus passive is something that, you know, a whole separate
conversation can be done on. I encourage people to read books like The Elements of Style, the famous
book by Strunk and White, which talks about active versus passive writing. That book’s online for
free. I’m not sure exactly where it’s at, but it’s only like a $5.00 paperback that’s been in print since
the 1920s. And, everybody that’s interested in writing should have it.
So, active versus passive writing. Go through your writing and think about each sentence in it, and this
is fun. This is like a game. You look at a sentence and you ask yourself, “Is this passive, or is this
active?” And, if you’re not sure, you just ask yourself, “Well, is somebody doing something? Is there
a verb in here that shows somebody is reading, or somebody is buying, or somebody is kicking, or
somebody is doing?” Then it’s probably active.
And then, see if you can enrich it to make it even stronger, more compelling, and more hypnotic, by
adding an adverb, something that says, much like my phrase, “Joe kicked in the door.” Adding the
word “kicked” is much more powerful than just the word “opened.” So, active versus passive. Very
powerful, very important, and a fundamental key to transforming any piece of existing copywriting into
much more powerful hypnotic writing.
Dearl Miller:
The third key to hypnotic writing is to use emotions. You can create emotions in your writing using a
story, or a direct narrative. I remember one of your most famous letters began, “I was nearly in tears.”
With that line, you engaged the emotions of your reader. They had to read your letter in order to
discover what you were in tears for. Can you explain how people can use emotions to make their
writing more hypnotic?
Joe Vitale:
Yeah, this is another very important one, and very rarely used principle of hypnotic writing. Emotion
moves people. Emotion moves people. We are logical beings, but our emotion definitely overrides us,
and we have to remember a key principle in copywriting, and in all writing. People buy for emotional
reasons, and they justify their purchase with logical reasons. So, you need both in order to make a
compelling message on any website, or in any sales letter.
Basically, emotion means tell a story that people can relate to, that they can also feel as they’re relating
to it. The example that you just read was one of my most famous emails, which is a very short email I
sent out that I had the headline, “I was nearly in tears.” Well, a lot of things were going on there. I was
definitely playing on curiosity, which we’ll talk about a little later, but I was also priming the pump for
people to feel something.
“I was nearly in tears.” Well, was I nearly in tears of laughter? Was I rolling around on the floor,
busting up, just cracking up because something was so funny? Or, was I sobbing? Was I sitting in a
chair, head in hands, crying uncontrollably, because I was nearly in tears? So, I was priming the pump,
then that letter went on to talk about something that had truly happened to me. And of course, I’ve
talked about sincerity being a key principle. We may have a chance to talk about that again later, but
this really happened to me.
I had written a book called Spiritual Marketing that’s being revised, and it will come out under a new
title called The Attractor Factor, and I had sent an early addition of that book to my sister, who was the
person I wrote the book for, the person I really wanted to influence. And she wrote me a letter back, a
snail mail letter that I got in the mail. And in that letter, she had said, “I read your book. It totally
changed my life. I went out and bought a new car.”
And I thought, “Oh boy, my sister’s pulling my chain. She’s lying to me here. She’s kidding me,”
because my book, Spiritual Marketing, which will be The Attractor Factor, is all about going for your
dreams and thinking big, and manifesting the kind of miracles you want in your life. And, I thought
she was kidding, but she had enclosed a picture of her new car. And, I was blown away! I mean, I’m
still kind of emotional as I’m remembering this because it was such a powerful moment.
I went from thinking she was kidding, to realizing she manifested her own miracle as a result of what I
wrote. Well, I was so moved I jumped up, I went to my computer, and I spontaneously wrote this letter
that began with the subject line, “I was nearly in tears.” Then, in the subject, or in the body of the
letter, I wrote what I just told you. I told the story, and I ended it with a P.S. saying, “If you would like
to read my book, it’s at Amazon and you can go buy it.” Well, there was not much of a call for action,
but people went and bought the book.
I had people write me after getting my email that said, “That was one of the most hypnotic emails I’ve
ever read.” Other people said, “I can’t believe the story you just told. It was miraculous and
inspiring.” It caused people to feel something. It caused them to then do something, in this case they
went and bought my book. And, many of them wrote me, and probably most of them were inspired by
that little piece of email. Now, what made it work? That emotion. The emotion that was in it.
I’m sure the curiosity made it work. I’m sure sincerity made it work, but there was genuine emotion
that people can feel, and it came from an actual event. So, when it comes to emotion, I tell people,
“Don’t be afraid to tell people what you feel. Don’t be afraid to tell people what they will feel when
they get your product or service.”
I’ve been working with a client pretty recently who has transformed his body. He went from very
overweight to now looking like a, you know, a young Hercules. And, I told him, “Don’t be afraid to
show your pictures. Don’t be afraid to tell your story, and specifically don’t be afraid to pant the
emotion that will be there for people. Based on where they’re at now, they’re probably unhappy and
they may be unhealthy, but also paint the picture of what they will feel when they achieve their dreams.
Sell that dream.”
So, again, I’m heavily relying on emotion. Emotion is key to creating rapport in your writing. When I
said earlier that I had studied Jack London and Shirley Jackson and Mark Twain and Ernest
Hemingway, all of these people used emotion. You will not find them writing these great classics of
literature and avoiding emotion. Emotion is always in there. So, emotion is a key principle in hypnotic
writing.
Dearl Miller:
The fourth key to hypnotic writing is to use your senses. In your writing, you always involve the
reader’s senses. You use descriptions of feeling, tasting, seeing, smelling, and hearing. All these
encourage your reader to become more involved with your writing, and therefore susceptible to what
your writing commands. Can you explain how to use the reader’s senses when writing web copy?
Joe Vitale:
Yes I can, and we can do this one pretty quick because I think most people will catch on to what I’m
talking about here. Most writing, most websites that are out there, only speak to the brain. They only
speak to somebody’s logical side. They forget the emotional side. And, of course, we’ve talked about
some of the emotion, but I mean more than that. They forget all the senses.
So, when you’re writing your copy, think in terms of what will people see when they get your product
or service, or what will they see when their life changes as a result of having your product or service.
So, seeing is one of the senses that you want to be sure to address. Well, what will people smell?
Almost nobody ever addresses the sense of smell, but we all use it almost unconsciously.
It may not be appropriate in all situations but, for example, if you are selling an herbal product on your
website and it is some sort of perfume type thing, what does that smell like? “You will smell this when
you open the bottle.” Of course, this would go if you’re selling wine, or champagne, or I don’t know,
any number of things that might have a fragrance to it.
Or, even if you were selling a weight loss gym of some sort, a fitness product, you might smell what
it’s like when that musky smell is in the air when you are working out, and you know that that signifies
you are getting the kind of fit body you want in your life. So, you’re starting to speak to that one.
Well, also don’t forget hearing. What will you hear when you get this product or service? Or, if it’s a
fitness thing again, what will people say about you when they see you at your ideal weight?
Or, when you perform the magic trick that you buy from this website, what will your friends say about
how skilled you were in performing this astonishing feat in front of them? So, what I’m saying here is
to speak to every one of the senses. Don’t forget anything, including touching. What will you touch
when you get this product or service?
Sometimes, if you’re selling a hefty product, somebody will say, “You will receive a 50 pound box in
the mail.” Well, that’s one way of expressing it. Another one might be, “Imagine when you reach
down, put your hands around this giant box and feel the heavy cardboard. And then, as you begin to
lift it, you feel a little bit of a pull in your back because you suddenly realized, “Oh, there’s 50 pounds
of books and videos”, or “There’s fifty pounds of magic tricks”, or “There’s fifty pounds of peanuts in
here.” I don’t know what it is, but you get the point.
I want you to engage all of the senses to the best of your ability. You don’t just speak to a person’s
brain. You’re speaking to their whole body/mind system, so you are engaging their emotion. And, in
fact, the more you use the senses and help them become sensory aware of your product or service, the
more emotionally they’ll become married to it. So, this is like an inside tip that most copywriters, even
some of the best copywriters out there, don’t know about.
They’re kind of in a, and I hope I don’t sound like I’m putting any other copywriters down, I’m just
trying to give everybody listening an edge in writing their copy. So, a lot of copywriters are going to
write something that’s a little bit hard to visualize, and I want you to write something that people can
visualize, they can smell, they can touch, they can hear, you know, that they can be involved in with
this body/mind approach.
And, you do that as simply as using words like “imagine this,” “you’ll hear this,” “you’ll touch this,”
“you’ll smell this.” You can use those words to guide people into what you want them to feel, think, or
hear, or sense, and those actual words are hypnotic commands. When I say the words like “Imagine
how many more sales you’ll get from your website when you starting writing with, using all of the
sensory awareness techniques I’m talking about”, well, when I use the words “imagine what kind of
sales you’ll get”, I was giving you a hypnotic command. So, use all of the sense in your website and
you can increase the odds of your sales.
Dearl Miller:
The fifth key to hypnotic writing is to be commanding. Hypnotic writing commands the reader to do
something. In fact, by embedding a command, a reader might not realize that you’re instructing them
to perform a certain task. Can you explain what a hypnotic command is, and how to use a hypnotic
command in your copywriting?
Joe Vitale:
There are at least two different ways to do it, and there’s probably more as I think about this, but the
first is on an obvious level. Now, traditional copywriting knows that you should always ask for the
order. Asking for the order is a command. In other words, you’ve written your sales letter and at the
end of it, you say something like, “Okay, click here to buy.” Or, in an email you might say, “Okay,
click here to be taken to my website.” Or, you might say, “Call this 1-800 number and you’ll be able to
buy the product.”
So, you’re giving a command. And, there is a certain level of hypnotic power to that, and that’s what
traditional copywriters do, and you should do that. Stating a command is very powerful, very
necessary, and an important ingredient of all good copywriting. Now, taking this a step further and a
step deeper, there’s also what’s called an “embedded command.”
An embedded command is something like what I used earlier, and I think it was on the last example we
were just talking about, where I said something to the effect of, “Imagine how powerful your sales will
be, or how many more sales you’ll get, when you start using hypnotic writing on your website.” That’s
a embedded command. I am asking you to imagine that particular command. I didn’t say, “You now
get double the impact of sales on your website.”
I said, “Imagine getting double the impact, or double the sales, on your website.” So, I hid the
command a little bit. Now, you could embed these even deeper and, for example, you’re telling a story
and within the story somebody says, “Well, I was listening to the Joe Vitale interview on the webcast
the other day and he said to imagine getting double the sales on my website, and so I started to imagine
that. I went and made some of the changes he was talking about on his website. And, son of a gun! I
got double the sales. I could hardly believe it!”
Well, in telling that story, I’ve embedded a couple commands in there. I’ve encouraged you to
implement a lot of the techniques we’re unveiling right now. I’ve encouraged you to think back to
what I just said, and within there was a hidden command for you to imagine using these techniques. I
also got you to imagine doubling your sales from using these techniques, and I did it in this kind of, oh,
one step buried down command.
Now, I know this may sound a little confusing here, and I don’t mean it to be more complicated than
what it really is. Here’s a tip to make this simpler. So, this is a big example, a million dollar tip for the
day. Whenever you write your copy, you are about to start writing your copy, so whenever you’re
about to start writing your copy, have in your mind the command you want people to take.
Have in your mind the action you want them to take at the end of your sales letter, or at the end of your
email, or at the end of the website. When you go in to your copywriting with this command in your
mind, it will show up as embedded commands throughout your copy. Now, you’re going to have to
trust me on this one because I’m not sure how to explain it to you in any sort of convincing way. But,
I’m a great believer in programming your own mind for the success that you want.
I call it “setting an intention.” It’s the power of intention that I talk about in the upcoming book, The
Attractor Factor. So, have the intention that you want people to stampede over to your website, to buy
your product or service instantly, and that you’re going to get so many sales that particular day. Then,
write your copy and, as you’re writing your copy, unconsciously you’ll start to insert these little
suggestions to the reader that will cause them to take the action you want them to take.
Now, notice something. I just gave you an embedded hypnotic command. Replay this last paragraph
and in it, you will hear a hypnotic command to do something. I just asked you to go and have this
intention when you go and do your writing, and I just primed your unconscious mind by saying, “When
you have this intention and you start writing, you will unconsciously start to plug in statements that will
lead people to do the result that you want them to make.”
Well, I just did that, on you. So, there is a very good example of embedded commands. It’s fun,
slightly mysterious, but you can do it. Keep in mind what I just said. Go into your copywriting with
that intention, then watch how you write your copy and see the results afterwards.
Dearl Miller:
The sixth key to hypnotic writing is to use curiosity.
Can you explain how to effectively use curiosity in your copywriting?
Joe Vitale:
I love curiosity. Curiosity is probably the most popular tool in Joe Vitale’s bag of tricks. I use it all the
time. I’m getting ready to send an email out in the next couple days and it has the headline, something
to the effect, “How did a 40 year old chicken farmer teach me three letters that caused my website
traffic to triple?” Well, I bet you’re curious, and that’s the reason for writing that kind of headline.
Now, note something about it. It’s a question. I love questions. Why do I love questions?
Okay, I just asked you a question. Why do I love questions? You’re waiting for me to answer that
question. That’s why I love questions. It opens your mind. It causes you to stop on the spot, to be
riveted to my words, and to awake my next command. So, when I say, “I love questions, and why do I
love questions?” your mind is open until I answer that question. When I gave you the headline, “How
did a 40 year old chicken farmer teach me three letters that caused my website traffic to triple?” you
were curious.
You want to know, and I think that is profoundly powerful. That is a hypnotic tool any of us can use.
Now, the best way to use it, the simplest way to use it, and this is like the billion dollar tip of the day,
and that is to turn any statements you have into questions. If you have a headline that says,
“Announcing new breakthrough software program! Does your books for you while you sleep,” and of
course I’m making that up. Well, turn it into a question. “What is the new breakthrough software
program that does your bookkeeping while you sleep?”
Just by doing that one little maneuver, adding a question mark at the end of it, you’ve now made it
more engaging. You’ve now made it more hypnotic. You’ve now made people curious. I love
curiosity. I use it all the time. I use it in news releases. I use it on websites. I use it in the very
conversation we’re having. You can even build curiosity by asking trivia. I’ve often asked people,
“What was Homer Simpson’s middle name?” Now, nobody cares. Nobody cares what Homer
Simpson’s middle name is.
Your life is not dependent on it. Your income is not dependent on it. But, right now, you want to
know. And, you want to know because this is the nature of our brain. Our minds love questions, and
our minds are engaged by curiosity. So, this is a major tip. Go through your website. Whenever you
have bulleted points, turn them into questions. This is one of the things I told my weight loss client,
this fitness guy, with his website.
He had these, a hundred bulleted points, and they were all good bulleted points. Most copywriters
know how to write a good bulleted point, but a hypnotic writer turns every bulleted point into a
question. And the trick there is to make sure the question cannot be answered until you buy the product
or service. So, in other words, if I said, “Do you know Homer Simpson’s middle name?” You could
answer it with a yes or no. You’re not very well engaged; you’re not all that curious.
If I say, “What was Homer Simpson’s middle name?” your mind is engaged because it’s an open-ended
question. If you know the answer, that’s fine. If you don’t know the answer, you’re still hanging on,
waiting for me to tell you. The answer is Jay. Homer Jay Simpson. Now, as soon as I tell you the
answer, your mind closes. You’re no longer open. And, this is why I like to use curiosity throughout
the whole hypnotic website, or hypnotic sales letter.
When I use the headline that I’ve given twice now, and here’s the third time, “What were the three
letters a 40 year old chicken farmer said to me that caused me to have triple the traffic?” I changed the
headline a little bit there, but the same thing is working. It’s a question. It’s open-ended. You do not
know the answer until you get my email, or until you go the website that describes it. And, I’m not
going to give you the answer now because I’m going to keep your mind open. So, curiosity is very,
very powerful and truly hypnotic.
Dearl Miller:
The seventh key to hypnotic writing is to keep it hidden. Hypnotic writing is hidden, smooth, personal.
Hypnotic writing will allow your message to sneak in below the reader’s conscious awareness. Can
you explain how hypnotic writing is hidden, and tell us some ways how we can be sure our hypnotic
writing is hidden?
Joe Vitale:
Yeah, that’s a good one to wrap up with because a lot of people that try to write hypnotic writing
without reading my books, or using my software, or studying my website get a little bit heavy-handed.
And, what I mean by that is they’ll write, oh, a real long headline using a lot of sensory awareness in
the headline, and trying to get people to imagine the end result. And, they’re trying to do all the things
they’ve heard to do, all the things I’ve been talking about, but they’ve violated a basic premise.
They didn’t make the headline short, engaging, curious, and relevant to the target audience. So, they
might have made a headline that, in their mind, was hypnotic, but in the buyer’s mind was confusing
and boring. So, that would be an example of hypnotic writing that isn’t hidden. It’s way too obvious,
and it becomes clumsy. And, that’s probably the word that would best describe someone who doesn’t
know what they’re doing with hypnotic writing.
Their website, their sales letter, their email ends up reading very awkwardly. It ends up reading very
clumsily. It’s not smooth at all. The best way to write hypnotically is to tell a story using all of the
principles we’ve been talking about here, and ending with a polite call to action. A good example is
that example I gave earlier, about the letter from my sister that caused me to write a subject line that
said, “I was nearly in tears.” That was very smooth, very easy, very light, but still hypnotic, and it
ended up with an almost subliminal command to go to Amazon.com and buy the Spiritual Marketing
book, or The Attractor Factor book.
So, I would say that this is more or less a warning, a head’s up, a precaution to the people listening.
When you start to write new copy, or to rewrite your website, your existing copy, whatever it happens
to be, don’t make a big deal out of this. Have fun with this. Be natural with this. Allow the natural
hypnotic capabilities that are already within you to come out. All of us have a storytelling part of us.
If you think about when you’re with a group of people that you’re totally at ease with, maybe it’s one
other person, maybe it’s your best friend, maybe it’s your mother or your father, maybe it’s a group of
people that you party with, maybe it’s somebody that you have dinner with, maybe it’s your spouse, I
don’t know who it is, but you tell stories to that person and you don’t edit yourself. You do it very
easily. You do it very smoothly.
And, you probably even communicate things that are persuasive, and you haven’t even thought of that
before. For example, maybe you went and saw a movie fairly recently. You really loved the movie,
and you couldn’t wait to tell other people about it. So, you got whoever it is you’re comfortable with
on the phone, you told them the story, you told them about the movie, and you encouraged them to see
it. And, maybe you even said, “You know, I want to see it again. Let’s go together.”
Well, that was hypnotic copywriting. You had a relationship. You had created trust. You had created
rapport. You told a story. You built curiosity. You did all the selling. You even had a command, “Go
see the movie!” Or, you even had a more subtle command like, “I really loved it and I’d be willing to
see it again. Let’s go.” There’s an example of how to do hypnotic writing that’s hidden.
You’ve probably never thought before that when you recommended a restaurant, or you recommended
a book, or your recommended a movie, that you were actually practicing hypnotic copywriting. Well
you were, but you weren’t doing it heavy-handed. You weren’t doing it in an obvious way, because
you weren’t thinking about it.
So, my advice here is to take all these principles in, to study the different letters I’ve referred to, the
website, the books, the software, and all of these different things we’ve talked about, to take it in, soak
it up, sleep on it, and then almost forget about it. Pay attention to how you write your next letters. Pay
attention to how you have your conversation. Note how much more persuasive you are.
Now, let me pause here. I just gave you a whole bunch of hypnotic, hidden commands. When you
replay the last three or minutes of this conversation, maybe even replay the entire thing, this whole
interview and all these seven tips, you’ll hear me telling stories. You’ll hear me making what are
called “presuppositions,” where I am assuming you’re going to pay attention the next time you make a
phone call to a friend and you talk to them about a movie.
I’m assuming you’re going to pay attention to how hypnotic you are when you do that. So, I just used
hypnotic writing in this interview, and I did not do it in a heavy-handed way. It was probably smooth,
and you probably didn’t even think about until now, when I paused and made you aware of it. So, your
hypnotic writing online needs to have the same qualities. Be easy. Be friendly. Be smooth. Be
natural, and allow it just to seep out.
Dearl Miller:
This concludes part two of Trafficology’s Spotlight on Copywriting. Today, Dr. Vitale revealed to you
his advanced copywriting technique, hypnotic writing, and you learned the seven keys to make your
web copy hypnotic. Thank you for listening, and thank you very much for being here with us today, Dr.
Vitale.
Joe Vitale:
It was my pleasure. You asked a lot of great questions. We covered a lot of great information. I feel
good about it, and I wish everybody Godspeed in using it.
with Mike Stewart, Mike Stewart:
Dearl Miller:
Welcome to Trafficology's Spotlight on Multimedia. This is Dearl Miller from Nitro Marketing and
the editor of www.Trafficology.com. Today we're going to show how making your web site talk
translates into more customers on your list and more money in your pocket. When people become
serious about doing business online they quickly discover that web selling is less about product
specifications and more about communicating the benefits of a product and tapping into the emotions
of their customer. There's no better way to do that than by using multimedia.
Turn up your speakers because next up, Mike Stewart's going to teach you how break the silence of the
web. Welcome, Mr. Stewart, to Trafficology's Spotlight on Multimedia.
Mike Stewart:
Hey, it's great to be here.
Dearl Miller:
So, how did you get started with Internet audio and how did you become known as the Internet Audio
Guy?
Mike Stewart:
Well, I have many years experience of owning a recording studio producing radio and television
broadcast audio and back in 97 and 98, after having done the radio and television production for so
many years, I wanted to be able to sell music for radio and television production. That's what I had a
lot of experience in and I knew selling music would be an opportunity for me to have a product to sell.
I didn't even really identify that's what I was doing but I was knowing that the Internet was an
opportunity for me to let people hear the music I had composed and that hopefully it would be a way
for me to get new customers in other parts of the world and sell music. What I didn't realize I'd do is
that I'd fall in love with what the Internet was capable of doing.
And one of the things that intrigued me and baffled me was that here was basically what looked to me
like a television set, basically a computer monitor, and it had speakers but no one was really
productively or effectively using the power of audio like we did in radio and television and to me the
internet was nothing more than a very large antennae that had the capability, even in 97 and 98, had the
capability of broadcasting audio/radio content worldwide even over a dial up. Real Audio was one of
the first screening formats and I became real interested in that and I said, "Well okay, this is the next
broadcast medium that I want to know how it works and how I can apply my creative audio skills to it."
So, I've always been in audio but when I saw the Internet and computers had speakers, I said, "Okay,
Internet/audio has got to be the future for me." So, that was pretty much how I got involved with it.
Dearl Miller:
Can you tell us some of the different ways that
Mike Stewart:
There's quite a few ways that would help marketers sell their products. It's just, there's a known fact
that over 35% of the public of human beings cannot comprehend with full comprehension just by
reading text. We're called auditory learners and no matter how much we read on a web page, in a book,
or in a brochure, even though we understand and can read the words, it's not an IQ issue, it's a
comprehension issue. It's that we're not as affected by the printed word as much as we are by hearing a
human voice say the printed words or say good original copy.
So, when it comes to convincing somebody after you've got them to visit your web site, I know that one
of your specialties here is getting people to show up at the web site and getting people to show up to me
is traffic. That's what traffic is all about. That's a great word for people coming to the door. But once
they come to the door, there's 35% of us that even though we see what you're saying and read it, we
still don't have the effective comprehension that maybe other people would have.
So, we know definitely through testing, Alex Mandossian, Rick Raddis and Armand Moran have done
extensive testing to know that when the option to hear a human being say sales copy, give explanations,
give testimonials, all the other advertising techniques that we know are proven to help people convert
to doing the next step which could be opting in to a mail list or hopefully, ultimately becoming a
customer, that conversion increases by the fact that people have that second emotional level to engage.
Alex used to call it increases stickiness to a web site when there's that curiosity level when they see that
button on there that says, “Click here to listen.” There's a percentage of people that are just curious to
see if the thing works and when it does, now comes on this enthusiastic human being saying, "Hey,
welcome. Let me tell you a little bit how this is really going to solve your problems." Those emotional
enthusiasm elements of the human voice are very hard to replicate in black text on white background.
So, use of audio to engage somebody once you get that traffic to your web site, is pretty much across
the board a necessity to increase the effectiveness of your web site. And then, of course, the use of
testimonials has been a staple of advertising since the beginning of radio, and when you see a
testimonial in text, my feeling is, “Well, I wonder if that's really true.” But when I see somebody's
picture, I see the testimonial in text with quotation marks and I have the ability to listen to it, now it
becomes a whole lot more believable and starts warming you up and convincing you that that product
or service really is as good as the person who developed it says it is.
So, that's a marketing aspect of audio but the thing that gets me most excited and to reach people who
need to know about audio and how it's usable is the fact that they can make very valuable, even higher
perceived value products by learning the skills. The same skills it takes to make the marketing audio is
the same skills you use to create the products. Using audio on a web site, it not only entails in the
conversion and the relationship building process, but it can also ultimately be delivered on a web site as
subscription content, as downloadable content, as the actual money generating content.
So, we're seeing whole lots of different applications of giving away audio content or selling audio
content to do up-sells. My friend, Jim Edwards, has had a great model in the last year by creating lots
and lots of free audio content. It was a subscription to build a list. You have to subscribe to get to the
free audio content but the free audio content is constantly demonstrating and explaining the power of
certain systems and products that he's an affiliate for. So, he has turned that into an extremely
successful, profitable venture by creating this content quickly.
Now here's the other good thing about creating audio content. It's a lot easier to sit and talk about
something than it is to sit down and write it. Writing a three or four page article, to me, sounds like
you're getting ready to do a term paper but our conversation that we're going to have here in the next 30
minutes is several pages of content. It's much easier and faster to record yourself than it is to have to
create content sitting down in front of a keyboard and typing it out.
So, there's plenty of reasons why people who have information to share should learn the extra medium
of recording it and recording it with computers because the equipment and the systems are just so
readily available and so inexpensive that it just makes sense that if you've got information in your head,
you can either sit down and type it out or write it with a pencil on a legal pad or you can say it in front
of a microphone.
Now you brought up an interesting point there, which I had never considered about using audio as a
way to differentiate yourself for affiliate sales. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Mike Stewart:
Well, if I have a web site and I show a picture of your product, say it's an information product or it's a
piece of software or whatever it is, I mean it could actually be a fulfillable product, it could be spices or
a piece of electronics or whatever. It doesn't matter what the product is. I don't really have a lot of
white space there around that picture to tell you the features, benefits and how it's going to benefit me.
The model that Jim has been doing using, he's been doing it a lot with a software that he's an affiliate
with.
He basically would create a presentation, two to three minutes, demonstrating how beneficial this new
product is. He doesn't ever once mention that you should buy it. He's talking about “I found this really
wonderful thing that I know it's going to help you guys. So, let me show you how it works. Let me
show you what it does.” And you can hear the excitement in his voice. Now this is really great what
this is going to do. But you're sitting here and you're engaged and you're seeing demonstrated or
hearing about something that's really going to help you in your niche and then right beside his listen
button, is an affiliate link button.
That says that if you love what you just heard about, click here and buy it. I think the combination of
that is very powerful for affiliate marketing. Otherwise, you've got a static picture with a hyperlink and
maybe a few lines of text. Well, if I get two minutes or three minutes of your time, I could be a little
more convincing. And if I can use the elements of emotion in my voice to show you my enthusiasm
and excitement about that product, you might agree that you need to buy it.
Yeah, that's a very good point. When you write ad copy, it's hard to complete the whole sales process
that you normally would do in person. But when you add audio to your web site then you can make a
similar sales process as you would if you were in person.
Mike Stewart:
The part of the model is demonstrate the power. His close could be something, “You know what? You
guys really ought to get this thing. Let me show you what it's doing for me and I know it'll do for you.”
There could be some sublimely suggestive calls to action by him just being enthusiastic and honest in
his voice. Whereas, if he just typed that out, if you put it in your copy there in print, you guys need to
click here and buy this right now, of course we'd expect that in print but when you hear somebody's
voice say it, I would believe it's more effective.
So, obviously the better you are as a copy writer, the better your recorded audio is going to be because
what you say is going to make it more effective to.
Dearl Miller:
Right.
Mike Stewart:
Right it's more personal.
Mike Stewart:
But when I hear your voice and I see your picture on a static web page, all of sudden, it becomes really
a person and really a human being. And business is about relationships. I want to do business with
people I feel good about and like. And if I can do something electronically that I do it one time and it's
like a little sales person always ready to tell my message over and over again, which is what I do with
my web site. I've actually gotten feedback from people who feel like that they've already gotten to
know me because they've heard my voice.
They recognize my voice. They've seen my picture and they feel like they know me and I've never met
them. They are a brand new phone call to me and I'd rather start out talking to somebody on the phone
with them already that comfortable with me as me having to go through the process cold and try to get
them. They probably wouldn't even; I would say a lot of people wouldn't have called if they hadn't had
that opportunity to warm up.
Dearl Miller:
That's a very good point.
Mike Stewart:
So, and when you pull in multimedia into this mix, really the sky's the limit on how you can present
and that could be a whole another call.
Dearl Miller:
Mike Stewart:
Well, I have a home study course that's an audio workshop that I did and we videotaped five hours of
just introducing people to the basics of the audio based workshop. That's one resource. I've started a
membership web site, which is going just to be dedicated and a community of having support materials
of all kinds, online software tutorials. When you start producing audio content, the use of music and
sound effects is very, very effective in your presentation. I actually have a piece of software called
Front and Back Music and a lot of people enjoy the fact that they can set the mood.
If it's a serious message about a serious subject, it really is effective to get people in that frame of mind
and you can take 10 or 15 seconds of music and get people quieting down and listening to your serious
message because that may be the marketing approach that you need to do. Or if it's something very
exciting and energetic, you might want to have some very exciting music to precede it. There's a lot of
advertising techniques that don't have anything to do with written copy.
They have to do with oral elements and so my membership web site and my home study course and
some of the workshops that I'll be having around the country, we really want to help people get to a
high-end level of production quality and understand what those elements are. There's a lot of free
information at those sites too that help educate people to understand what this is all about.
Dearl Miller:
Can you talk about how hard it is to record audio? I mean bottom line, how difficult and how
expensive is it to add audio to your web site for either marketing or product creation?
Mike Stewart:
Sound Forge software is I guess what you're recording in right now. Is that correct?
Dearl Miller:
Yes, sir.
Mike Stewart:
Okay. That is a very inexpensive program compared to what I was used to in 1991. I got into digital
audio, all we knew of was this program called ProTools and the software was $5,000.00 in 1991. And
we as audio engineers thought the fact that we could actually record and edit audio with a computer
was like, was a godsend. That Sound Forge program that was 99 bucks is probably 100 times more
powerful than what I paid for $5,000.00 for in 1991. So, that gives you a perspective of how the cost of
this stuff has come down so fast.
But what's great about that software is that it has the ability for you to create pretty much anything
imaginable with national broadcast quality. And the big thing about audio software is it is pretty much
a word processor when you're doing spoken word products. It was designed to do anything, music,
sound effects, layering of sound. There's a lot of techniques in recording studios when you get into
film scoring and television scoring and sound design for movies, I mean that is pretty complex stuff.
And that's not what I'm gearing it towards the Internet because you don't need to get that in depth.
What you need to be able to do is capture information and capture it in a clean, concise way, edit it, and
also it sound professional and that skill is pretty much word processing. To edit audio is like typing in
words or paragraphs or sentences in a word processor and if you make a mistake you highlight and
delete it and if you didn't like the fact that you deleted something, you can undo it. It's the same thing
in editing software.
And, so, the challenge I see with the people out there that I've talked to is that the, “Oh well, that's just
something that I can't do, so I'll just forget about it.” No, if you use a word processor and you use a
computer, you can get a microphone and start creating information products yourself. And we've got a
lot of successful case studies of people who jumped over that line and said, “Okay, it can't be that
hard.” And the reaction is that, “If I'd known it was this easy, I would have done it a long time ago.”
But a long time ago, it didn't exist because 1991 it was that system I got it was a $15,000.00 system. It
sits downstairs in my other office basically collecting dust because it's hard for me to throw something
in the trash that cost me $15,000.00. But it's a Macintosh II that's worthless but that's a whole nother
world. I mean it's just a laptop and a microphone and this software and you could do pretty much
imaginable in information recording.
Dearl Miller:
The main thing that when you're about getting traffic, getting people to the web site and some of the
techniques that we know that are proven, the Audio Generator customers have been using Alex
Mandossian's creation of Audio Postcards.
It means that you don't have to try to tell your whole story in your email. You're basically announcing
by email to get somebody to listen to something and they're having tremendous results with doing those
kinds of issues. Exit popups that talk have been very effective to collect date.
I know a lot of their sites will say, “Hey wait, before you leave, tell us why you're leaving.” And they
are collecting data that gives them the opportunity to opt in or explain to them so they can see how they
can change the web site to maybe increase their conversion. Those are marketing techniques but the
thing that really got me most excited to tell information publishers about recording is that it goes back
to that comprehension problem. The true story with me was a friend of mine years ago told me that I
needed to read Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich.
I bought the book, paperback, and I read it two or three times and nothing ever made any sense to me. I
gave up on it quite honestly. I just felt I don't know what they're talking about. It doesn't make any
sense. And then some reason about four years ago, I bought the audio CD of the book on two CDs,
audio CDs and listened to it in my car. And after listening to it one time, it made a tremendous; I mean
it all crystallized for me. And it was the same exact information but I was able to comprehend it after
one listening.
And it prompted me to take the action and go, well, why did that happen. If I read the content three
times and didn't get it but listen to it once, I did, I wonder what's going on. So, I did some research on
the Internet and found out that there's a lot of proof that people are either I forget the name, there's a
scientific name for people who learn by text alone, but there's people who learn through different
modalities and one of them is auditory learners. And it made sense to me. That's what I am.
So, I'm sitting here seeing all this information publishers all over the Internet creating ebooks and
selling printed books and that's they're only mode of selling information. It's like well, gee, you got all
this great content but 35% of us out there, even if we bought it, we're going to be disgruntled, probably
never buy anything else again because we didn't comprehend it or we got frustrated and we just never
read it. What if you were able to replicate all that same content you have out there inexpensively and
effectively in an audio format.
Not only does it create more product for you to raise your revenues, you can charge more for an audio
than you can ebook. There's lots of case studies where the multimedia products and the audio products
are getting higher accepted price points. You might sell an ebook for $29.00. You can sell two audio
CDs for $67.00 and $97.00. Steven Pierce sold one CD and some print material together for $197.00
and was very successful with it. So, CDs and audio products and multimedia products which is what
this is all about, have a higher perceived value and can get higher margins because you can charge
higher prices.
Yet they are even cheaper to duplicate than to get a printed book. So, it's interesting to me that the
print cost on a 200 page book is going to always be a whole lot more money than duplicating two or
three CDs. But you can always charge more money for the CDs than you can the printed book. So,
that's another application is being able to get higher revenues by selling less units because you're able
to raise the prices for the same content that you already got existing in other formats.
Dearl Miller:
Can you give examples of how people who are not information publishers have used multimedia?
What I mean is people, like, selling physical products and using multimedia.
Mike Stewart:
When people are selling hard products and things that they are just a reseller for, that's a great example
for me. I'm selling microphones and hardware and software that I didn't create. I'm a dealer for those
pieces of equipment that are readily available on the Internet. They're readily available in music stores
and recording equipment stores all over the country, but what I did that set me aside from those
distributors is that, when knowing how to create multimedia, I have got support materials that help
people install it, help people know how to set it up and use it, demonstrate to them everything they need
to know to get going fast. Okay?
So, when I'm able to create the support that's electronic, that really cuts down on my support time of
people calling me up with questions because it also cuts down on support time going to the
manufacturers because they are not going to support you in how do I get started on a particular aspect
of that piece of equipment. So, when you can use multimedia or audio to help somebody understand
how to consume, setup and use your products, that's going to give you definitely a competitive edge
over people who are just selling the same product with no support.
So, there's probably more creative ways than I have thought of that when you can talk to somebody and
explain to them how to use or consume your products that you should definitely get positive results
from that.
Dearl Miller:
That's a perfect example. That's exactly what I was talking about. Can you give some specific
examples of the support material?
Mike Stewart:
For me? That I've created?
Dearl Miller:
Mike Stewart:
Well, every piece, every package that I put together, the manufacturer has no support material on it
whatsoever. I mean for whatever reason they don't do it. And so, I go in and also the applications for
most of the equipment I sell, sometimes is set up for my market to do something that it was never
intended or built for. Right now you're using the Broadcast Host. That was a piece of equipment that
was designed for the radio industry so there support is leaned towards talk show/radio shows.
But I built a tutorial leaning towards using it for recording of teleseminars. And, so, the fact that I have
that support material creates hopefully a lot of extra added value to do business with me. Whatever
your product and your niche is, the more you can do one time and duplicate it, is going to save you time
and also create higher value to your offer.
Dearl Miller:
Many businesses have traditionally used radio. What type of techniques that have been used with
traditional radio can be turned and used with online?
Mike Stewart:
How can people learn from radio advertising and apply it to web sites?
Dearl Miller:
Exactly, yes.
Mike Stewart:
Well, we've had many years experience at testing and knowing what works on the radio because human
beings respond to audio no matter whether they are in their car or on the computer listening to a
newsletter. So, if you learn the production technique for effectiveness to create compelling messages
and advertising and product, then hopefully your reaction conversion will increase. So, what are the
things, what are just some examples of things that people do in radio that you don't hear that often on
the Internet?
Well, one thing that has been introduced is music for emotional underscoring. Using multiple voices,
characterization, in commercials you hear what is called a slice of life commercial where you and I can
be talking about something and we say, “Let's listen to what an interaction between a man and wife and
their child would be talking about this particular subject.” So, then you could actually produce like a
little play, an argument between a child and their parent. And maybe your product is a solution to that
problem between child and parent.
Well, you can relate to people when they're hearing the actual interaction between a man and a woman
and their child. So, that's just what is called slice of life advertising. Putting a conversation between an
elderly couple and their children, a conversation between a disgruntled customer and a sales clerk for
training, for just pretty any kind of presentation. I mean you create the illusion, like we do in radio that
you're really there in that slice of life. That's a very effective tool in educating and training in
advertising. You can't do that in text.
But on a web site you can say, “Listen here to what the interaction is after you use my product.” So, if
you think about all the different applications that radio uses in advertising another thing that is very
effective is getting theme music and getting the product name sung. If people start creating radio like
content, transitional theme becomes subliminal triggers to engaging that relationship. So, when you
hear on television the American Idol theme, you could be in the next room and just hear the music start
up and you know it's American Idol.
You can do that every time somebody visits your web site if you start with the same theme music. You
could actually get original theme because we've proven over the years that when you sing text or copy,
set it to melody that you use left and right brain. So, the memory retention, the reason people create
original jingles for radio is that the memory retention of the verbiage is greatly enhanced and
comprehended because it uses left and right brain when people hear text set to melody.
And the proof of that is there's 26 unrelated syllables or sounds in the world that three year olds can
memorize. That's the alphabet. The reason they can memorize the alphabet is because it's set to
melody. Try to teach a three year old the alphabet by just saying the 26 letters. It's impossible. But in
a matter of moments, they can learn the whole alphabet by just singing it to melody. That was one of
the scientific proofs that text to melody uses both sides of the brain. So, that's another application of if
you learn the radio production techniques.
And then if you sound like commercial radio, you will be perceived as commercial radio and accepted
as commercial radio. And if you're accepted as commercial radio on the Internet because your content
sounds so much like a radio show, you get to do something that you can't do on the Internet. You get to
advertise. You get to say, "We're brought to you by our sponsor." In a teleseminar, you could take a
station break and advertise a product on sale at your web site. You can't do that in any other medium.
You could have four or five commercials in a one-hour presentation and people, we're in tuned to that
because radio has set the standard that eight minutes out of every hour is a commercial and so does
television. So, if you start learning how to create this and use it on the Internet, you can steal from
radio and television the techniques that we're already accustomed to. And that's what I see the future
being able to do because email is a problem. Email advertising is a problem. And if you do unsolicited
advertising in email, it's called Spam.
If you do unsolicited advertising in an audio program, it's called your sponsor.
Dearl Miller:
Do you have any examples of people already doing the type of things, such as inserting commercials
into their audio using it on a web site that -
Mike Stewart:
Dearl Miller:
Any clients that you've worked with or -
Mike Stewart:
Well, what is something that someone starting out can do to make their audio sound radio quality?
Mike Stewart:
And that's it. That's pretty much all they need to create, and then they have to have an Internet
connection to get their content up on the web so that people can, but really that's the starting point. I
mean you can start out with a $30.00 or $40.00 headset microphone and you could create content that
would be acceptable but I think that as people start getting more in tuned to this, we've already set a
broadcast quality standard from radio and television over the last 75 years.
So, the people that are going to have the most effective and I think there's a perceived value of when
your quality is pristine versus you don't care enough to do the best you can. And it's not like it's a
$100,000.00 investment to get studio quality audio. It's not. I mean the systems we sell are under a
thousand dollars and they'll last you the rest of your life. They're not, you're not going to need a better
microphone to do radio content.
You mentioned the diaphragm size of the microphone. What are the things that people need to
consider when choosing equipment for recording?
Mike Stewart:
Well, you can't get a new computer that really isn't ready to do audio anymore. Plenty of hard drive
space, plenty of RAM, Windows XP, that's pretty much the standard new computer. Computers that
are four or five years old, I wouldn't consider. It might work. It might not but if you've got a computer
less than a year old and you've got plenty of hard drive space, you're in good shape. MP3 technology is
what allows you to store hours and hours of audio. You'll want a CD burner.
Pretty much any machine you buy today is going to have a 60 gig or better hard drive. It's going to
have plenty of RAM and it's probably going to have a CD burner built into it. And Windows XP is
probably the best operating system to do sound system for. In fact I don't think the new Sound Forge
will run on anything less than XP. So, then that just cuts you down to, you need to do broadcast quality
audio, you need a large diaphragm condenser studio mic. And that's the only one I recommend is a
brand called Audio Technica.
The reason being it's high quality, it's medium priced, it's well respected company that's been around
for many years and they're one of many companies and they're not the only company but there's prices
all over the board. There's prices of mics starting at $50.00 to $5,000.00. And if you were to go into a
professional recording center of a music store, like Guitar Center or Manny's Music, any of the big
ones, they're going to have a microphone room probably filled with 500 mics in it.
And they're all great and they all have different applications but most of them are music applications.
All you need for voice production is a large diaphragm condenser mic like the Audio Technica one I
recommend. And then because it's a studio mic, it has to go into a capture card that has the power,
called Phantom Power, to run it. No studio mic is going to run without the ability to have the power
that comes from these mixers.
And when Edirol developed this thing called the UA700, they basically took an audio mixer, a capture
card, and another element called the compressor unlimiter and all the other, all the elements it takes to
basically condense a studio into a thing about the size of a book, they put it in one box so that when I
saw that happen, I knew that would be the simplest hook up for first timers. Since they came out with
that unit, there's a few other people that make some good units, PassCam, I'm trying to remember who
else, MBox, there's a handful of them.
Rather than confuse my customers, at my web site, I say, “These are the things I recommend.” I know
they work and I can support you in them. And just don't worry that there's other choices out there.
They're all about the same price but the whole purpose is the ease of, the portability, the ease of setup
and the quality of at least having that good microphone and the electronics to support that good
microphone and get into your Sound Forge software.
Okay, so I have my microphone. I have my capture device. I have my laptop and I got Sound Forge.
What are some production tips that people can use to increase the production value of their audio?
Mike Stewart:
But editing is the number one skill for production quality. And the ability to, when you learn to edit,
you can take archive audio and mix and match and make high quality products out of old, existing
things. And then the mixing of other oral elements to emphasize, being able to break up audio files into
tracks on a CD and having transition music between thoughts, all of those production techniques really
make better audio products and really make better audio programming.
So, it's just, if you get that basic down, I think you're way ahead the curve on most everybody else, if
you learn those few things.
You said “theme music.” Is that the same thing as a jingle?
Theme music can be just an original, instrumental theme. As an example, I can't really play it over the
phone; I mean I can't play it directly into the phone because I don't have it hooked up. David Garfinkel
is a copywriter and he hired me to write an original theme that he uses in all of his programming. And
he said, “I want something that sounds like Rocky.” So, this is his theme song that I wrote for him.
"(music playing) Hi, this is David Garfinkel and welcome to another one of my teleseminars."
And so he starts every one of his teleseminars with his theme song. After repetition, that instrumental
theme becomes part of his identity, marketing identity. And, there's, when you do, the only difference
between a theme song and a jingle, is a jingle is where there's singers actually singing the business
name and a unique (USP) Unique Selling Position. You're probably too young to remember this, but
there was a jingle that used to run on television 35 years ago, and a lot of people would remember the
melody.
We've tested this several times. People that are in their 50s can hear the melody and remember the
lyrics and the positioning statement of the jingle because the repetition and hearing that text in melody
just, even though it hasn't been broadcast in 35 years, people still remember the product name and
something about the product because it was associated with melody. So, that's what a jingle is. A
jingle is when advertising copy is sung to melody. A theme is just an instrumental melody that when
there's a repetition and it's not, it becomes associated with a person or a show or a thing.
And Hollywood has been great at that. They would take certain instrumental aspects and after
repetition we would associate something with it. (da dut, da dut dut dut dut doo doo.) What is that?
What's that got to do with a shark? Technically that's a low C to a C sharp on a cello and because of
Hollywood, of repetition, every time we hear that we know shark. So, they have associated a theme
with an entity and that's the power of music. There's millions of examples like that where instrumental
themes have become branding.
They have become audio logos for businesses or individuals. So, I think being, just listening,
information marketers should listen to what radio, television and what Hollywood has been doing for
years to subliminally sell us and create the feelings and emotions that they want us to do to be the end
reaction. The minute we hear that da dut da dut da dut, we're thinking oh what Jaws movie is coming
out. So, that was psychologically crafted for a reason from a creative composer.
Dearl Miller:
A graphic designer can look up and see what the different colors mean. They can look up at a table and
say, “This table is associated with this feeling or this thought. Is there any place where someone can go
to find what sounds are associated with different things?”
Well, there's clipart music that is categorized by emotions. And that's how we used to sell archived, not
archived, what's called library production music. Basically what is the emotion you want to underscore
and you research the music by the emotion. There's one great company called www.MusicBakery.com.
They are a great example to see how that works.
What you do is you start looking at emotion, just like a good graphics designer asks the customer what
kind of emotion they want to portray, well a good composer would say, “What kind of feeling do you
want to create? We know what combinations of sound, what key signatures, what chord progressions
consistently create emotions in a human being.” That's the power. We could spend a whole nother two
days on film scoring. But that's what Jaws was all about, using orchestra instruments to create emotion
and branding with objects that didn't normally have that branding.
Dearl Miller:
Where can someone go to find people to do this type of thing for them?
Mike Stewart:
Dearl Miller:
Can you do a quick walk through of the process of adding audio to your web site? The process would
be figure out what you want to say, record the content, edit it and produce it. Then use Audio
Generator, Instant Audio and upload it to their servers and then use their wizard to add it to your web
site.
Mike Stewart:
I've actually got some tutorials that are free on my web site and I believe you do too of how you make
sure that you save out of Sound Forge to that format of MP3. It's just a standard format. Once you
have it reduced or compressed to that format of MP3 file, it's still a one-hour content. If you have a
membership at Audio Generator, you log into Audio Generator and they have an upload and encode
feature and then you basically find that file that you've created in Sound Forge and you name it.
And tell it to send it up to their server and then once it's done, you can click a couple buttons, picking
the color of the button, the play button you want to do, you've got several choices on that page on their
wizard. And then it creates a little line of HTML code that gets pasted somewhere on your web page
and you can have as many of those as you need. And that to me is probably the most effective,
simplest way for somebody starting out to get an audio screen from their web site.
To me, Audio Generator is an Internet audio or Internet radio broadcasting system. And all you have to
do is create the content and let it sit on their servers and then when you put that little piece of HTML
code embedded on your page, then you have the link to make sure it plays flawlessly. So, that's pretty
much it.
Dearl Miller:
It really is quick and easy when you follow those simple steps. In fact, what you're listening to right
now was recorded, produced and delivered using the exact equipment and techniques that were talked
about today. Any last thoughts, Mr. Stewart?
Mike Stewart:
Or don't do it and the people that do do it are getting benefits from it. So, it's your choice. If you
communicate with people verbally in person, why wouldn't you do it online?
Dearl Miller:
This has been Trafficology's Spotlight on Multimedia Content with the Internet Audio Guy, Mike
Stewart. Now that you've learned how easy it is to create multimedia and how multimedia can help
your business, make sure that you take the time to watch the tutorials provided below and check out the
other recommended resources. They'll help you quickly and easily add multimedia to your web site.
And if you have any questions, make sure to send them using the link below.
Thank you for listening and thank you, Mr. Stewart, for joining us today.
Mike Stewart:
Well, thank you and I appreciate it and I hope everybody got a lot out of this today and I look forward
to hearing everybody in their own voice on the web.