The 5 Pillar Marketing Guide

Andrew is the author of Winning Results With Google AdWords and it is a must-read before you begin advertising. His book empowers all levels of AdWords users to wring the most from their advertising campaigns.

You'll learn how to bid strategically and use the integrated tools most efficiently! Your small investment will pay for itself in your first campaign!

Andrew's Top 10 AdWords Tips

Andrew graciously provided us with 10 useful AdWords strategies to help you get the most out of your advertising dollars. Below each one of his tips you'll find specific notes to help guide you as you create your campaigns.

Take it away Andrew...

1) It helps if the product you're selling has a high enough price tag or profit margin that you can afford *lots* of clicks on your ad.

If you make $2 per sale, you are forced into a much smaller-volume AdWords campaign. If you make $75 or more, you can afford to bid and experiment a bit more.

This makes Site Build It! a great candidate. Not only do you earn $75 per sale, but you also receive commissions on every renewal.

2) You usually can't get into those "premium" bid spots (above the search results) unless you bid a lot. It's not just a matter of being the 1st or 2nd or 3rd place advertiser.

Those top-of-Google ads with the blue background are only "awarded" to advertisers who bid high and/or have very high clickthrough rates. Expect that you'll be in 4th, 5th, or 10th ad position which means lower volume. You are not here to blow a bundle. You can afford to be patient.

Re-read #2. This is an important tip. Sure, the #6 position will give you less traffic than the #1 position, but you will spend less and your profit margin will be higher

3) Most successful affiliates bid low, period. If you feel an "I-must-win-this-auction" eBay compulsion, re-read #2. Your goal is to make money, not to win bidding wars.

Part of making money is to generate a good income from each sale, which SBI! does.

I like the long-term aspect of this program a lot. And that long-term aspect reinforces the "be patient" angle. With this SBI! program, you are much smarter to spend $50-$75 per campaign very, very slowly by bidding low for the low spots.

Patience is definitely a virtue with AdWords. Use Track It! to keep an eye on your Conversion Rates. If a campaign proves to be unprofitable, drop it!

4) You'll find innovative keyword ideas everywhere. SBI!'s Brainstorm It! module will be useful -- try it for various niches, even if your SBI! site (if you have one) is about something else.

But move beyond these if you really want to score. I have some creative suggestions in my book. I get keyword ideas in airports, watching TV... everywhere. As Ken says, "Think different."

This is why it's important to take advantage of the highly-targeted business specific landing pages that SiteSell offers. You can target students, Webmasters, real estate agents, work-at-home moms (WAHMs), affiliates, and the list goes on!

Use your creativity to come up with a clever campaign that targets one or more of these specific groups. Get it right and your Conversion Rate can go through the roof!

5) Content targeting (AdWords ads that show up on web pages around the web) is a minefield unless you manage your cost per click carefully, and have a good tracking system in place. Many of you own SBI! -- you are smarter making money by selling Google ads than by buying. However, you may hit on a strategy that puts your ad on a great website, cheaply. If so, be sure by using SiteSell's new Track It! with discipline.

If you are not comfortable with having your ads appear on 3rd party Web sites, then Google allows you to opt out of that channel. However, if you find an ad that coverts extremely well, it may be worth experimenting with content targeting as well.

6) Google is taking specific aim at the affiliate community with its new AdWords rules. The old affiliate "magic" was to buy gazillions of keywords, bid five cents on all of them, and basically choke the AdWords system with irrelevant keywords because after all you pay nothing until someone actually clicks.

This won't really work anymore because Google will (a) only show one ad per domain; and (b) will reduce your incentive to bid on irrelevant keywords by assigning you a low "quality score" at first on keywords that don't seem relevant to what you're advertising.

That low quality score will require a high bid. Don't go bidding crazily just to get your ad up. Find a tighter, more relevant target instead.

Google's policy specifically states...

"We allow affiliates to use AdWords advertising. We'll only display one ad for affiliates and parent companies sharing the same URL per search query."

This is a good thing because it forces you to work the niches and go where no one else is going. Work the niches and discover your own gold mine!

7) Google AdWords customer service reps are people. If you run into editorial questions, be polite. Don't stamp your feet, etc. It's always valuable to ask Google reps for a second opinion about something, but the reality is you need to limit the nuisance contacts, especially if you're one of a large number of affiliates advertising the same products.

People work with people they like in most situations. This is no different.

Excellent advice! Minimize your contact with the customer service reps as much as possible, and when you do feel obliged to contact them, do it with the utmost politeness.

Please respect final decisions with grace. Not only is it the right way for you personally, but you do represent SiteSell here, too.

8) Look for other affiliate ads that have been running for a long time and learn from them. Can the approach be applied to give you a new idea in a new niche?

Poor performing ads by deep-pocketed companies may stay up for a long time, but you can be sure that an affiliate running ads consistently is only doing so because they turn a profit. Find out what successful affiliates are doing.

This doesn't mean to copy their ads verbatim, but take some of their ideas and apply them to your own ads. For example, are they using a benefit-rich title? Are they asking a question? Do they use humor to draw attention?

Remember, the key is to experiment until you find the right combination that works for you!

9) When it comes to ad copy: test key elements, such as the call to action, the tone of your language, features and benefits, and anything else you can.

Write a "totally different" ad, and test it. Remember, you can split-test ads instantly within the AdWords interface by simply running more than one ad in an ad group.

What are you testing for?

Clickthrough rate, first, but ultimately, sales/ROI. This depends on having a good tracking system in place that will tell you which ad or keyword converted to a sale.

So SiteSell's Track It! is an absolute necessity. It allows you to track each campaign to sale. You can't afford not to use it.

Enough said. Don't launch an AdWords campaign without tracking its effectiveness. Pay-per-click advertising can deplete your cash quickly so you have to continue to monitor your return on investment.

10) The number one determinant of whether someone will click on your ad remains the ad's headline.

The dilemma: matching exactly what the user types in can lead to lots of clicks but weak sales (people see what they typed, and click). Poor matching or overly complicated titles can lead to too few clicks. You need to find a happy medium.

Work to discover ad headlines that pull a decent number of clicks, but which speak only to targeted customers, and not to every single person.

When in doubt, just match what they typed. :) When in doubt, err on the "don't get a click" side of the coin (see Tip #2 above about patience).

Finding the right headline is all about experimentation. You may not get it right the first time... or even the second. The key is to keep tweaking until you develop one that works best for your ad and target audience.

And my "bonus tip" (actually, I couldn't chop to 10):

Most people aren't buyers. They are looking for background info first. How can you leverage that knowledge to create indirect sales?

You can use AdWords to drive traffic to your site which might create its own repeat audience, with tools like newsletter signups, etc.

Building your audience before you try to "monetize" with offers that lead to affiliate or advertising income is a healthy way to build an online business, as Ken teaches.

Think hard about that audience, and the information they need. Can you provide it? Use AdWords as a supplement to build that audience. You won't rely on it 100%.

To Sum It All Up...

With the above tips and techniques in mind, you can begin creating your Google AdWords campaign to send well-targeted visitors directly to one of SiteSell's subdomains.

We have cleared them of popunders and restructured the entire SBI! site to make this possible. We were convinced after seeing what some successful affiliates were doing with the limited "no popunder" subdomains that we had created especially for them some time ago.

Then we developed Track It! because, as Andrew points out, you really need to be able to track each and every campaign. ("Drop the losers. Keep the winners.")

In short, we've developed the environment and tracking software for you to be able to make Google AdWords work (if you are right for this kind of project!).

Andrew's bonus tip takes us into new territory. It is especially relevant if you already own SBI!. If you are an SBIer, do you have a WWW It! landing page that PREsells SBI! with flair, specificity and creativity, as outlined here?...

http://sbitips.sitesell.com/promote-SBI.html

If so, terrific. You can even use Track It! to see how it's doing. Between Google and Track It! reporting, you have all the tools you need to know how it's doing.

If you do not own Site Build It!, do you have a site or a landing page that does a great job of PREselling SBI! anyway?

If so, it may make sense to try a few campaigns where you land visitors ontoyour site. (Remember, unless you can track how much other monetization occurs on your site, you won't get the full picture from Track It! alone.)

You will get fewer clicks through to SiteSell, but your PREselling on your site might (might!) give you a higher Conversion Rate at SiteSell.

But remember, this approach means you have to get that second click, so far fewer visitors will reach SiteSell. "Try-try-try" is not a bad motto.

But my recommendation is that if you try Google AdWords to sell Site Build It!, land them directly onto one of the Subdomain Landing Pages in the Track It! drop-down.

After all, these SiteSell sites do a strong job of PREselling while selling.

The Bottom Line?

Use Google AdWords to find the right niche, the right approach, create the right ad that lands the right person on the right landing page... all with the goal to make a positive ROI.

Yes, it can be done. It's being done. And you can do it.

The best way to learn? By doing it.

Everyone learns by doing. Google's online help is excellent. If you really get into it, you can build substantial returns without ever building a Web site.

But it's not for everyone, I can tell you that right now.

Either know that you are very analytical and can brute-force-left-brain your way to success. Or know that you are creative enough to be inspired with a clever idea that gets attention and targeted clicks.

Google AdWords can literally become the equivalent of turning $5 into $10. Work at it. Work at the niches. Experiment. Test. Keep what works.

Be clever.

Think out of the box.

Make use of the high-converting landing pages such as The Video Tour, Case Studies, and I Love SBI!. Mine The SiteSell Promotion Center and begin experimenting with various RR URLs.

You will steadily build a sharp portfolio of AdWords campaigns that keep on working, turning a dollar into two.

And that, should be your main goal.