Some internet marketers would take one look at this title and declare me insane. “Making money with Google Adwords – give me a break, it’s not 2005 anymore,” they might scoff. And they would have a point. It is much more difficult to generate revenue from Adwords marketing than it once was. However, it is by no means impossible. There is a lot more competition, but most of the competition has no idea what its doing. As with anything else, generating sales through Adwords is simply a matter of really understanding the format, thinking creatively, and outmanoeuvring the competition.

AdWords 101

Most of you probably already have a pretty good grasp of what AdWords does and how it works, but we’ll have a quick refresher course here anyway.

AdWords is the premier advertising service offered by Google, and  it generates the majority of Google’s yearly revenue. It was the original super-targeted advertising service, and allows you to create advertisements which pop up when someone searches on Google for the keyword which you’ve bid on. Its an invaluable service, and many internet companies use it as their primary source of new customers.

The AdWords War

The problem is, since AdWords is so easy to use and can potentially generate such great returns on investment, it is no longer solely the domain of small business owners and independent marketers. Large corporations have gotten involved, and have sent their marketing departments, with their nearly unlimited budgets, to scoop up the prime real estate.

Since keyword prices are set by competitive bidding, dealing with a large corporate marketing department in the mix can quickly put you out of the running.

So, rather than trying to take them head-on, the key to success is making a strategic pivot and seeking out better real estate.

Find Your Advantage

The easiest place for you to find your advantage in the AdWords world is to realize how much flexibility your business really has. Keyword selection is the obvious place to start. Look at alternative keywords that you could advertise for. You can probably drive your advertising costs down by focusing on less expensive keywords, and then improving your conversion rates in order to make up for the lost visitors.

The key to driving up your conversion rates is creating a landing page that works. Consider – you’ve already got a potential customer on your site, so you know that they’re at least marginally interested in your product. Moreover, you’ve already paid the cost of getting them there, so you need to sell them the product at that point.

Go back at look at your landing page, the first page that the customer sees when they visit your site. Does it elicit a strong, visceral, emotional reaction? Does it create a need for your product? If not, what can you do to make it stronger? If you want to succeed in today’s hyper-competitive AdWords environment, your landing page needs to convert as much as possible.

The main take-away here is just to consider your customers, and consider how you are advertising to them. And remember that with any pay-per-click advertising, the price of the advert isn’t nearly as important as your return on investment.

Thanks!

Sean

Internet Marketing Academy

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The email list. Every internet marketing and small business owner out there has one, and for many of your it may well be your most prized possession.

The standard internet business model has as its aim 1) acquire email addresses, and 2) send offers to these addresses. Hence the big list – all the email addresses that you’ve acquired over the years, and with whom you regularly keep correspondence, and regularly pitch offers to.

However, you can make your email marketing campaigns so much more successful by learning how to break this list down into relevant segments and then making your product pitches and promotions only to the most relevant sections.

Learn their Preferences

The basic idea of breaking your email list down into segments is to learn the buying habits and preferences of different groups of people on your master list.

So, for instance, say that over the course of several emails to your master email list, you make a few product recommendations. Say you make one for an affiliate’s SEO book, and one for a PPC product. Hopefully you’ll get a few sales out of those recommendations. Now, based on who clicks through and makes a purchase, you’ve got valuable information about several of your readers.

So, for the people who responded favourably to the SEO book, you know that they have a strong interest in SEO. Strong enough to make a purchase based on it. So you put them in a separate sub-category, and when you have another product related to SEO you can pitch it only to them, instead of to the entire list.

Going Forward

There are two major benefits here. The first is that you learn the buying preferences of your customers, allowing you to make future recommendation to them based upon those preferences.

The second is that you also know what they are not interested in. This is arguably even more important than knowing their interests. There are few ways to get people to unsubscribe from your emails faster than by repeatedly offering them products in which they have no interest.

By properly segmenting your email marketing list, you’ll be able to avoid this problem. Over time, as you learn more and more about your readers’ preferences, you’ll be able to make increasingly relevant product recommendations, and your customers will start to see you as more of an advisor than a salesperson.

Trust me when I say that gaining this level of trust from your customers is one of the smartest business decisions that you can make.

Thanks!

Sean

Internet Marketing Academy

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Social media engagement is crucial to any internet marketing campaign. However, it can be difficult to know where exactly to begin engaging the social network. A Facebook business page is a fantastic place to start promoting your business and leveraging the power of social media today. Its straightforward, beneficial, and free. Read on to see how you can get started taking advantage of this excellent opportunity, and how to optimise your page so that you can get the most out of it in the long run.

Get Started on the Right Foot

Now that you’ve hopefully decided that a Facebook business page is definitely a step in the right direction for your business, get started with filling out all the relevant information about your company.

To start, you’ll have to select from one of six categories, including: Local business or place; artist, band, or public figure; company, organisation, or institution; entertainment; brand or product; and cause of community. For our purposes, you’ll most likely be choosing local business or company. Make sure you select this properly, as the category which you select will prompt Facebook to offer you different information fields when you finally get a chance to input more detailed information about your company. Perhaps more importantly, once you select your category, you cannot change it without deleting the entire page. Choose wisely.

Fill in The Gaps

Following this you’ll be prompted to add more detailed information about your business. What you need to add depends on your particular industry niche, but remember as a general rule that the more time and effort you put into the page, then the better it will look, and the better results it will yield.

So really take your time and fill in all of the categories. Put up a few pictures of your business place, of your products, or of yourself with community leaders or satisfied customers. Make sure to put in an email address, and if you have a physical business location, make sure that you include the address and hours of operation. The key to social media marketing is connecting the dots.

Socialise

Once you’ve filled in all the information for your business, you can start sharing your creation with the world. Begin, of course, by sharing your new page with all the friends who you’ve already connected with personally on Facebook. Beyond this, leverage the power of social networking.

Update your status regularly, and update it will valuable and useful information, so that the people who have already followed or liked your page will repost your status updates. Additionally, cross-link your new page to existing business media, such as your blog and your business website. Make sure that visitors to one are able to quickly and easily access the others.

Additionally, be sure to take advantage of a feature on Facebook business pages called Insights. Insights allow you to see how many people visited, liked, or followed your page, and allows you to break these down by time frames so that you can judge the relative effectiveness of your marketing efforts over specific periods of time.

By taking these simple steps, you’re putting yourself on the fast track to social media marketing success.

Thanks!

Sean

Internet Marketing Academy

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I write a lot on this blog about generating leads and increasing your visibility. These are essential business practices, and the true path to business success. However, generating leads is easier said than done.  One excellent way to turn site visitors into leads and potential clients is by making them an offer – giving them something of value in exchange for them taking one step towards a purchase. However, there is a right way to go about doing this, and several wrong ways.

What Is an Offer?

As mentioned above, an offer is something that you provide to your customers at no monetary cost to them. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t get anything of value. Typically, offers are provided in exchange for an email address, which allows you to open a direct line of communication with a site visitor.

When you’re designing an offer, you have a wide variety of options to choose from, and what your offers look like will ultimately depend on your industry niche and your personal tastes. Some types of offers that I’ve had the most success with in the past include podcasts and webinars, how-to guides, and ebooks. However, that for my particular industry. You may find that in your industry a free demo or a product trial is more appropriate.

This is a good time to offer a few words of warning about what you shouldn’t consider an offer. Product and company materials, contact information, and customer testimonials and case studies are not offers. They are materials that should be on your website, but they should be freely available for everyone to see. They do more to benefit you that way, and your customers will not be very likely to give you their valuable email address in exchange for something that they consider worthless.

How to Use Offers Effectively

There are two keys to the effective use of offers. First, you need to target the right people with differentiated offers, and you need to promote your offers adequately and effectively. That sounds like a lot, but it really isn’t.

To target the right people, you should begin by creating several offers – several pieces of material – and offering them to the people who you think can benefit most from each one. This means creating different offers for people at different points in the sales process, and with different buying patterns.

Promoting your offers effectively is mostly a matter of intelligent website design, and knowing where to position your offers in regards to the content that is already on your site. For instance, if you’re offering a free ebook on SEO, you would want to promote it to readers of the articles on your blog that deal with improving a site’s search engine ranking.

Remember, a customer’s email address is a valuable thing – treat it as such. Give them something of value in exchange for the ability to communicate directly with them when you want to. You’ll be happier, they’ll be much more satisfied, and your business will be much more profitable as a result.

Thanks!

Sean

Internet Marketing Academy

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The rise of social media is undoubtedly the most powerful trend to shake the marketing world in recent years. As I’ve discussed on numerous occasions before, it allows you unprecedented levels of marketing and brand awareness that costs nothing but your time, it allows you to connect directly with your customers, and most importantly, it allows you to incorporate their feedback into your marketing strategy to present each potential customer with a sales pitch specifically targeted to meet their needs.

However, all the doesn’t come without a downside. The cost of social media marketing is that you have to constantly create new, engaging, informative content, you have to constantly stay abreast of the latest trends and industry conversations, and you have to build relationships not only with your potential customers, but with industry peers and thought leaders as well. None of this is extremely difficult, but it can be a black hole as far as your time goes. Bloggers and internet marketers who want to stay on top of the game are finding that just keeping on top of social media is taking a larger and larger share of each day. Take the head off the beast before it consumes your whole day by implementing a few simple changes.

Prioritise

At the end of each day, decide what you want to accomplish the next day, and prioritise it. For example, say that you have 2 hours each day to work on your social media strategy. Decide ahead of time what the make-up of those 2 hours will be, and what you will accomplish during the time frame.

For example, you might say: 0.5 hours – write a blog post, 0.5 hours – read RSS, 1 hour – read and respond to Tweets and Facebook updates. Unexpected diversions will come up, but just incorporate them into your priorities. This will allow you to minimise their negative impact.

Schedule

Set times for certain activities, and stick to them. Productivity is negatively affected by anxiety, and if you’re worrying about your emails while you’re trying to generate new content for your blog, you won’t generate the content as well. Set a time for each activity, and set a maximum amount of time that you’ll spend on each one.

Typically it makes sense to check your email twice per day, and definitely no more than once per hour. I like to opt for first thing in the morning, as reading email is typically one of the easier tasks of the day, and then again in the afternoon. But don’t just take mine – make a schedule that works for you, and stick to it.

Focus

As the old cliché tells us, multitasking is simply doing several activities poorly. Don’t confuse yourself into thinking multitasking is a valid option. It’s definitely possible, but your performance will suffer and things will end up taking you twice as long.

Thanks!

Sean

Internet Marketing Academy

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Every small business owner out there is working hard. I see that every day. However, not every small business owner out there is getting the results that he or she deserves for all their hard work. Why is this? Is it because they’re marketing an inferior product? No, far from it, its just that too many people are not focusing on what makes their product or service unique. The results is that customers are seeing that same sorts of advertisements from companies that all look the same, and they’re not interested in any of it. If this is a mistake that you’re making, it’s time to fix it.

Understand the Problem

Before you can fix what’s broken, you need to understand exactly what the problem is. When a potential customer looks at their email or Twitter feed, they are probably being bombarded by all manner of offers, promotions, and special deals. That is to say that when you send a proposal or a product offer to a lead, it is probably not the only lead that they are looking it. Which means that you need to really put in the extra effort and differentiate yourself.

To remedy the situation, look at it from your customer’s point of view. They don’t know, or care, how much work you’ve put into your product, or how badly you want them to purchase it. All they really care about it how your product can make their life easier, more productive, or more enjoyable. So sell to them in terms that they understand.

You Unique Selling Point

This is where you make sure to emphasise what makes your product unique. Explain to your customers why they can’t get your product anywhere else on the market, or why your competitor’s products are nothing more than cheap imitations.

If you don’t have a unique selling point, then you need to put in the work and re-tool your business such that it is unique. Define your niche, and move into it. The market is a crowded place, and everyone is looking to sell in the middle. So define your product in terms that nobody else is using. Once you’ve found your niche, the customers will come to you, and you can enjoy the high road to high profits while your competitors bash each other around in the middle of the market.

Thanks!

Sean

Internet Marketing Academy

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If for some reason your business doesn’t have a blog yet; stop reading this article and go make one. As we’ve discussed on numerous occasions previously, blogs are one of the most potent online marketing tools available, and essentially form the platform from which a social media campaign can be launched. And they cost nothing but your time.

With that said, blogging can be a difficult and time-consuming endeavor. It’s a self-replicating cycle, really. As you write more quality content, your blog gets more popular, and you have to manage increasingly more comments and readers who are looking for increasingly frequent updates. Before long, it can get to be way too much for one blogger to handle alone.

Guest blogging provides a convenient solution to this conundrum. Aside from saving you the trouble of creating and writing a new update, a guest blogger can effectively provide your blog with some free promotion, exposure to a new audience, and possibly a positive relationship with an important blogger in your industry.

However, before you get too excited and start soliciting contributions from guest bloggers, be aware that there are a couple of pitfalls that you need to avoid. First off, one of the biggest problems that successful bloggers take with guest blogging is that guest bloggers often take the opportunity to use your blog as a forum from which they can promote their own blog.

They might offer up an article filled with links back to their own blog, or simply promote their own blog, drawing readers away from your site. There is also the issue of needing to reject content that is not up to par. This is not only awkward, but could make your look unprofessional and possibly jeopardize important industry relationships.

By keeping these three guidelines in mind, you should be able to take advantage of the benefits of leveraging a guest blogger while avoiding any potential problems.

Manage Expectations. Explain everything up front. Explain exactly what you’re looking for, approve the topics before the posts are written, and explain where the posts will be published, and what you want them to achieve. And put a rough limit on outbound links and promotional bits in the article. This not only makes it easier for the writer, but gives you something to refer back to if and when you need to make edits or reject the article.

Ask For Outlines. This will make your editing process much easier. Without creating too much of a burden for the writer, ask them to provide you with an edit early on in the process, or to run the article by you a couple of times while they’re writing it. This makes it easier for you to push them in the direction you want, or to make edits as they write.

Lastly, Don’t Settle. If, after all this, you ultimately end up with an article that you do not feel is up to that standard of what you normally publish, then by all means reject it. Just reject it in the most tactful way possible. Make an earnest attempt to edit it, and if it still isn’t up to standard, explain to the writer that it just doesn’t fit the style that you’re looking for at the moment, but encourage them to use it on their blog, or to submit it to another blog.

By keeping these guidelines in mind, you should be able to leverage guest blogging while avoiding any potential problems.

Thanks!

Sean

Internet Marketing Academy

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In this blog, I constantly stress the importance of quality content creation. Whether its blog posts, tweets, web copy, or ebooks, your website has to constantly offer new content.

Consumers are used to getting so much quality content for free on the internet, that they expect something in exchange for visiting your site. By offering them high quality, informative, engaging content, you can keep people coming back to your site, and ultimately bring them on board as clients.

But this means that not only do you have to constantly add content to your site, but also that it must always be top-quality content. Follow these tips to make sure that you’re generating content for your site that will keep your readers coming back day after day.

Keep the Ideas Coming

Inspiration is the most difficult part of content creation. Often, once you have an idea for the article, the actual content just flows out naturally. But where do you find the ideas? Surround yourself with potential inspiration, and capture the ideas when you think of them.

The best ideas are rarely entirely novel. Regularly read other industry blogs and follow industry leaders on twitter. When you’re constantly taking ideas in, you’ll find that your output naturally increases.

The second key is catching fleeting ideas when you think of them. When you read a marketing blog articles which gives you an idea for an article of your own, you need to record it in some way before you forget it. A notebook, a memo on your phone, anything works. Record everything that could possibly inspire you.

Thom Yorke, the front man for Radiohead, keeps a an ‘idea box,’ into which he puts a piece of paper with a word or phrase on it every time he’s inspired by a new idea. When he’s stuck for inspiration on a song, he pulls an idea of the idea box and gets writing.

Details, Details, Details

Nothing matters more than professionalism in marketing. Even the best content in the world will fall on deaf ears if the presentation is poor. Top content creators obsess over spelling and grammar, and make sure that their article titles are perfect.

If you’re not exactly a grammar pro, have someone else look over your articles for you before you publish them. It’s much easier to find the mistakes in someone else’s writing. As far as titles go, always rewrite your articles titles at least three times. The first one will rarely be the best. A great title should read like a newspaper headline – punchy, informative, and intriguing.

If your website offers regularly updated, quality content, customers will come naturally to you.

Sean

Internet Marketing Academy

Internet Marketing Training – Internet Marketing Course – Internet Marketing Blog

One of the first lessons that I learned as a young internet marketer was that 9 times out of 10, your customers do not want to be using your website. They would rather be on the beach, or at the pub, or watching the football. But they’re using your site because they think it has some information that they need.

With that in mind, the best user experience is the simplest and most intuitive experience. By optimising your website and making its design more intuitive, you will improve the experience of your customers. They will respond by spending more time on your site, building a better relationship with you, and ultimately purchasing more of your products and services.

First Impressions Count

As with everything else in life, your first impression typically matter more than the rest of the relationship taken together. The two impressions that you want to immediately convey to your customers is that you are reputable and professional, and that they will be able to quickly and painlessly find the information that they are looking for. The ways to convey this are through an intelligently designed site layout, and through an intuitive navigation system, respectively.

Site Layout Conveys Professionalism

Site layout refers to the physical appearance of your website. Where are different pieces of the site located, how do you use colours and fonts, and what is your use of images like. As a general rule, avoid anything that is not strictly necessary. Too many colours or fonts makes your website looks less like the public face of a professional business, and more like a yard sale flyer.

Think about the most successful websites, like Google, Facebook, or Wikipedia. In all cases, they just use two or three main colours, and keep the site clean and easy to read.

In no case, should you ever use music or animation on your site. This is a business website, not a teenager’s blog from the 1990’s.

Intuitive Navigation Gets Your Customers Where They Want to Go

Imaging a supermarket which could instantly transport you to whatever you wanted to buy as soon as you walked in the door. Chances are, you would do quite a lot of your shopping at that supermarket. Make you website do the same.

Label all the different sections of your website, and list them in tabs along the top or the left-hand site of the site. If your customers can spend less time on your site while still finding all the information that they need, then you’ve done your job properly.

Thanks!

Sean

Internet Marketing Academy

Internet Marketing Training – Internet Marketing Course – Internet Marketing Blog

Any savvy internet marketing or small business owner knows that blogs can be an invaluable resource when it comes to free and effective marketing. A blog provides an avenue for you to showcase your expertise while providing something of value for free to your customers and anyone else who visits your site. There are a few things that you should be doing with your blog to make sure it is providing optimal value to your site.

Open a Line of Communication

One of the things that really differentiates a blog from most traditional marketing resources is that it can be used to open a direct line of communication between you and your readers and customers. So if you don’t have comments enabled on your posts, change that right now.

Encourage your readers to comment by writing about controversial topics, and respond to their comment immediately. Be prepared to deal with criticisms, and have remarks and remedies prepared. People like to see the face behind the business, and are more likely to buy your products and services if you’ve established a rapport with them. A properly utilised blog is one of the most effective ways to do this.

Personalize Your Product

One of the fundamental truths of marketing is that people prefer to buy from people. Nobody wants to buy a de-personalised widget from a faceless corporation. This is why successful companies spend so much time and money on branding – making their products more relatable.

Thanks to blogging, you can do the same thing for little or no cost. Take an informal tone with your blog, and allow people to see the human being behind the product. They’ll thank you with their business.

Drive up Your Search Rankings

You should absolutely be using your blog to optimise your site for search engines. Search engines reward sites that are regularly updated, as well as sites that contain a lot of relevant and well-research content. Blogs thus give you an unparalleled opportunity to optimise your site. You can update your blog as often as you like, and since you can write about whatever your heart desires, you have a lot of leeway to include relevant keywords, and to write about controversial subjects which will be commented on and linked to.

Stay on Top of Your Game

This is an almost incidental benefit of blogging, but a sizable benefit nonetheless. When you’re blogging on a daily, or even weekly, basis, you’ll constantly be doing industry research. Whether this is reading other bloggers, following industry leaders on twitter, or keeping updated with podcasts, you’ll be learning tons of new information about recent developments in your industry.

The internet can change overnight, and if you’re not constantly following the changes, you can become a dinosaur surprisingly quickly.

Thanks!

Sean

Internet Marketing Academy

Internet Marketing Training – Internet Marketing Course – Internet Marketing Blog