The Authentic Eccentric

There reaches a time when, in order for your business to prosper, you have to let go of the notion that free website traffic is all you need. I’m not knocking free traffic, mind you, but I’ve seen lots of people waste hours trying to work “free” traffic systems when plunking down $100 to Google would have returned faster and more profitable results.

If you are serious about succeeding in business, you must accept that you will have some cash expenses to build and create that business. If you are just starting an online business, look back to your projected sales goals - you should aim to spend 1-2% of your total sales goal on advertising and marketing for your business. No projected sales goals? Go back and set some - starting a business without any idea of what you want to make from it is just a fancy way to go broke. Need help? Leave me a comment or contact me via the contact form; I have business planning templates and budgets that I can give you to help with the planning process.

Back to getting the clicks in.

One of the tricks to a powerful paid traffic campaign is your use of appropriate, targeted keywords. As I’ve mentioned previously, you should research a lengthily list of possible and appropriate keywords. One of the reasons that I am a huge SBI fan is its amazing supply and demand keyword feature; if you can’t use that, I highly recommend a one day subscription to WordTracker to dig out all possible variations. What is lengthily? My average campaign uses between 150 - 300 keywords; one of the attractive features of Ad Words is that you can change your URL and cost per click by term, now, so you don’t end up paying for words that don’t perform well without your whole campaign being stopped.

When you’re paying for targeted traffic, you want the biggest bang for your buck. The most recent Ad Words project I did was for Darlene’s new Identity Theft piece; here are some of the ads I ran.

The first ad I created was this one:

Free Report - ID Theft
Detect & Prevent Identity Theft
Fast, Free - Download Now
www.ProtectYourGoodCredit.com

The 2nd ad was:

Prevent Identity Theft
Detect & Prevent Identity Theft
Fast, Free - Download Now
www.ProtectYourGoodCredit.com

Since Google loves its marketers, I was able to do an A/B split test on which ad would pull more clicks. The clear winner was the first ad, which pulled a respectable 3.8% click through rate (ctr), while the 2nd one struggled to average a 1% click through rate. Since the only changes to the ad were the headline, it was a reasonable conclusion that is what made ad 1 work and ad 2 fail.

I’m still tweaking the ad - now that I think I have a solid headline, I’ll test a version with the 2nd line changed and a version with the 3rd line changed - once I know I have a solid improvement with either change, I’ll test that against my control ad so that I am always improving my ctr.

Writing short, compelling copy is an art form. Before you embark on a paid search campaign, I encourage you to research the ads that appear in response to your target keyword phrases and study what your competitors are doing. Once you think you’ve got the hang of it, test your own versions - don’t assume that your competitors have tested theirs.

Tomorrow - using paid search campaigns to test new product ideas.