One of the most important developments in Internet Marketing.
If you were to ask me what the single most important development in marketing has been over the last two years, the answer would be clear:
Pay per click Advertising.
Now at this point, you’re either familiar with pay per click advertising and have a sense of what it involves – or it’s not something you’ve come across.Whatever the case – read on. I’ve discovered over the last few months that 90% of the businesses who already use pay per click advertising, have no idea of its real potential and are losing out on fortunes.
Let me be clear with you about how important this is. I have never seen one single marketing strategy that can so dramatically improve so many club’s performance in such a short period of time.
This is a subject I am going to return to in the near future – but for now, here are the essential ‘s that you need to know about.
If you’re new to this, 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.
How cool is that?
But you don’t actually pay a penny to appear at the top of those results. You only pay when somebody clicks to visit your 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 (such as fitness clubs Worthing ) 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.
But what’s important to realise is 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 those nice people at Google have become Billionaires. They have created the most effective direct marketing tool in the world. Why? Because there is simply no easier and faster way in the world to reach qualified potential buyers. The impact for you and your business could be enormous.
If you’re new to marketing, the term ‘qualified potential buyers’ just means, ‘people who want to buy your stuff.’ How would you traditionally sell your fitness club memberships ? Well, you might advertise in the local paper and hope that a few out of every thousand people flicking through the paper could be persuaded to read your ad – and then visit your club and then buy your membership.
Compare that to an ad that only appears for people who’ve specifically searched for the term ‘fitness club in your town .’ What do these people have in common? They’re almost certainly seriously thinking about buying a membership – right now! To be able to reach such precisely targeted buyers is a business owner’s dream. Well for you and I it’s now a dream come true.
In a moment, I will share with you some of the advanced pay per click strategies that can significantly increase your response rate. But first, here are some of the basics.
The biggest pay per click company is Google. The other main company is Yahoo. If you are new to pay per click, then it will be well worth your time to spend a few minutes checking out their sites.
Today I’m going to focus on Google. It only costs 5 pounds or dollars to set up an account. There is no minimum spend. And best of all, your campaign can be up and running within minutes. In one hour from now, you could be sending a steady stream of qualified visitors to your website.
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, if we are selling our memberships , we might choose to bid on the terms ;fitness clubs’, weightloss clubs ‘ and ‘Lose weight.’ This means that every time somebody searches using any of these terms we want our ad to show up on the pages showing the results of their search.
Next, we need to decide how much we are willing to pay every time somebody clicks on our ad and comes to our 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 how competitive your search term is.
But here’s 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 what is important. What’s important is the business generated by each visitor to your site and whether it’s profitable. If the membership of the club is worth £500 and the average length of stay of a customer is 18 months then each acquired customer is going to generate £750. I could be paying 5 pounds per click, and if only three in 100 of the people who clicked on my site, ended up buying membership it would be a very worthwhile investment. 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 highly likely or at least interested in doing business with you.
Now, I would like to share with you two of the Google ‘SECRETS‘ that people are either not aware of, or if they are, are certainly not utilising to their full potential. These can make a really big 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 left hand 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, you obviously want your ad 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 thing that is really great 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 or 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.
Well, guess what is going to determine the number of people that click on your ad? It’s not the quality of your product or service. It’s the quality of your ad!
In other words, people who write better ads get more people clicking on those ads and end up paying a lot less. If I am willing to pay 1 pound per click, and you are willing to pay 50p 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!
So people who are good at marketing and good at writing ad copy do really, really well on Google. This is yet another spin off on your decision to get good at Marketing.
Our second Google secret is linked to the first and will actually help you get better at writing copy. Google lets you run two different ads at the same time for any of your keywords. Why is this important? Because it lets you test two different ads at the same time, and you can rest assured that one will almost certainly outperform the other. So here, in a nutshell, is how 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 to outperform the better ad.
- Keep doing this over time and your click through rates will go up and up.
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 them for each click to your website.
You may like to re-read that last paragraph. I can pretty much guarantee that it will save you hundreds, if not thousands of pounds.
By the way, this form of immediate testing has been a dream of marketers for decades. In the past, the only way to do this was by spending months testing your direct mail or advertising campaigns, seeing which worked best, and then testing new versions. But it obviously took months or even years to perfect a campaign. The fact that you can acquire this knowledge in days and weeks is making many smart marketers a fortune.
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