Secrets of Internet Marketing

Chris Cardell reveals an important development in Internet marketing before unlocking some of Google’s secrets

Whatever type of business you are in, whatever your size, you can use this revolution in marketing to increase your profits. If you were to ask me what the single-most important development in marketing has been over the last 2 years, the answer would be clear: pay-per-click advertising.

Usually, people are either familiar with pay-per-click advertising and have a sense of what it involves, or it’s something they have not heard of before.

Over the last few months, I’ve discovered that 90% of the businesses that already use pay-per-click advertising have no idea of its real potential, so they are losing out on fortunes. I have never seen one single marketing strategy that can so dramatically improve a business’ performance in such a short period of time.

Here are the essential facts about pay-per-click advertising.

A dream come true

Pay-per-click advertising simply means paying to put a listing for your website at, or near, the top of the search engines. With a few variations, it basically means you’re paying to get to the top of the search engines.

However, you don’t actually pay a penny to appear at the top of those results; you only pay when somebody clicks to visit the site. That’s why it’s called “pay per click.”

How much you pay for each click depends on how much competition there is for the search terms that you want to use, and how high up on the search engine you want to be. Either way, you choose how much to pay—and you can also specify a maximum daily budget.

However, it is important to realize that this isn’t just about search engines and Internet marketing. The principles here involve the first and biggest marketing revolution of the 21st century.

There’s a reason why those nice people at Google have become billionaires—they have created the most effective direct-marketing tool in the world. There is simply no easier and faster way to reach potential patients. The impact for you and your business could be enormous.

Here is an example to demonstrate how this can work. How would you traditionally advertise your services? You might advertise in beauty magazines and hope that a few out of every thousand people flicking through the magazine could be persuaded to read your ad—and then buy your services.

Compare that to an ad that appears for people who have specifically searched for the term “tooth whitening.” What do these people have in common? They’re seriously thinking about having whitening. To be able to reach such precisely targeted buyers is a business owner’s dream—and now, it’s a dream that can come true.

The basics

Here are some of the basics of pay-per-click advertising. This article focuses on Google, the biggest pay-per-click company. The other main company is Yahoo. If you are new to pay-per-click, I would recommend spending some time checking out both sites.

Google charges a nominal fee to set up an account, there is no minimum to spend, and best of all, your campaign can be up and running within minutes.

Here’s how it works. First, you write your ad. It needs a catchy headline and a few words of compelling copy to get people to click on your ad. Then, you select the keywords that you are going to bid on. For example, for tooth whitening, you might choose to bid on the terms “tooth whitening”, “white teeth,” and “cosmetic dentistry.” This means that every time somebody searches using any of these terms, we want our advertisement to show up on the pages showing the results of the search.

Next, you decide how much you are willing to pay every time somebody clicks on the ad and comes to your website. The more you are willing to pay, the higher your ad will be placed. How much you need to pay to be near the top will depend partly on the competitiveness of your search term. For example, bidding on the term “ballroom dancing training New York” will be a lot cheaper than bidding on the term “Internet marketing” because Internet marketing is a very competitive area.

A word of advice

People get too obsessed about how much each click is going to cost. Actually, the cost of the click is not important. Most important is the business generated by each visitor to your site and whether it’s profitable.

It can often be worth paying what seems to be a large amount for all these website visitors because providing you have selected your keywords properly, these visitors are highly qualified leads and most likely to be at least interested in doing business with you.

Secret sharing

I would like to share two of the Google “secrets” that people are either not aware of, or, if they are, aren’t utilizing to their full potential. These secrets can make a real difference to the profitability of your Google pay-per-click campaign.

The first relates to the position of your ad. The ads on Google appear down the right side of the page, and the ones near the top, get significantly more clicks than the ones further down. If your ad is so far down that you appear on the second or third page, you are likely to get very few clicks.

So, obviously, you want to be as high as possible. Many people think that the only way to move higher up is to pay more per click. But another great aspect about Google is that the amount you pay per click is only around half of what determines your position on the page.

The other 50% is determined by the number of people who click on your ad. This is known as your click-through rate (CTR). So, quite simply, ads that get clicked on more often get a better position and, of course, that means they get clicked on even more often, and you end up in a cycle of success.

It’s the quality of your ad rather than the quality of your service or treatments that will determine the number of people who click through. In other words, businesses that write better ads get more people clicking and end up paying a lot less. If I am willing to pay $2 per click, and you are willing to pay $1 per click, but your ad gets three times as many people clicking on it than mine, you will appear above me, and only be paying half as much as I am.

People who are good at marketing and people who are good at writing ad copy do really well on Google. This is yet another reason to make the decision to get good at marketing.

The second Google secret is linked to the first and will help you get better at writing copy. Google lets you run two different ads at the same time for any of your keywords. This is important because it means you can test two different ads at the same time, and you can rest assured that one will almost certainly outperform the other.

In a nutshell

This is what you need to do to get really good at Google pay-per-click advertising.

Always run two ads at the same time. Once it becomes clear which of your two ads is performing best, delete the underperforming one. Then write a new ad to try and outperform the better ad. Keep doing this over time, and your click-through rates will continue to increase. You will soar above the competition, safe in the knowledge that not only are you getting more clicks, but you are paying far less than the competition for each click to your website.

By following these guidelines, I can pretty much guarantee that you will save hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars.

Chris Cardell is recognized as a leading expert on entrepreneurial success and advanced thinking. He shows business owners, managers, and the self-employed how to win more customers and increase profits using advanced marketing, advertising, and Internet strategies. Visit www.cardellmedia.co.uk for more details.