Category Archives: AdWords Cost

All My Free Cheat Sheets, Mp3s, and Videos

Been cataloging and organizing the last 5 years of MP3 interviews, PDF Cheat Sheets, and Conversion Videos…

Thought I might as well give you the benefits of that too 🙂

Right click the image above and you’ll get a PDF full of links to my BEST Cheat Sheets, Interviews, and Conversion Videos…

It’s all my best stuff, all in one place!

(Don’t say I never gave you anything)

Now go turn some visitors into buyers, would you?

Dr. G 🙂

PS – If you haven’t already joined the LIVE CONVERSION WEBINARS club, you should do so now.  If for no other reason than (a) the “best conversion secrets of 2012” video is about to scroll out of the archived club recordings and become a $67 product in it’s own right; (b) the “Persuasion Architecture” bonus audio contains the crowning jewel of all my work for the past 8 years and (c) today you can still download both of these for less than five dollars

PPS – If you’ve been through the hyper-responsive club but never got around to implementing the work (or not quite as thoroughly as you wanted to)–OR–if you’re servicing clients and think whitelabeling Glenn’s hyper-responsive bulls eye research behind you might make you look stronger to your client… get your tuchas over to BullsEyeMaster.com

PPPS – If you’re spending more than $20K/month in paid advertising and would like my team to start optimizing your landing pages and conversion funnel FOR you, well, you may be in luck!

PPPPS – If you’ve got a system that converts really well online but you’ve got NO telephone follow up in place, you really ought to consider letting this funny looking phone genius do it for you on commission.

A ZILLION Ps S:  Would much appreciate you SHARING this page, posting it in your forums, passing around the PDF by email to ALL your contacts, and telling your mama’s how cool it is to have Dr. Glenn’s stuff. (Not particularly modest, but hey, I’m too old for that)

When is Crappy Advertising Actually MORE Profitable?

Q: When is crappy advertising the MOST profitable route you can take?


A: When it’s working–AND–you have bigger fish to fry!

Today’s insight is for the more sophisticated marketer…

(At least I like to think it is because I didn’t realize this until I had already burned through a LOT of cash, and the alternative is that I’m just an idiot!)

You see, when I first started building my own advertising systems, I really thought it was possible to have a perfectly optimized system.

I figured I knew how to split test, and I understood what consumers responded to in advertising…

So all I needed to do was aggressively split test every last part of my system until it was a perfectly tuned machine, making more money than anyone else’s machine on the market, and thereby becoming an unlimited traffic magnet. (Because due to the “Unlimited Traffic Theorem”,  if I’m making $3 per visitor and you’re only making $1 per visitor, I can pay you $1.50 per visitor and eliminate your reason for competing… you should just start sending all your traffic to me!)

Here’s what I didn’t take into account…

RESOURCES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN THE REAL WORLD OF BUSINESS!

I really started understanding this when I started Rocket Clicks with Jeff Hughes about 4 years ago. (As a side note, time goes SO fast and I’m SO fricking old!  I wish I could remember which comedian said this first but when I look at my receding hairline I think “that’s not a forehead, that’s a fivehead!)…

Anyway, way back in 2008 I was talking to all these entrepreneurs, constantly astounded at how much money they were making with relatively crappy advertising, seriously under-optimized AdWords accounts, and landing pages which had conversion leaks in them the size of Kentucky!

When I interviewed these people about their business, I was kind of shocked to find out that it wasn’t that they didn’t KNOW there was a problem…

They all kind of “hung their heads in shame” (metaphorically over our GoToMeeting conferences), dropped their voices and said “I know, I feel so guilty but I’ve been so busy with other things I just can’t get to it!”

But the more people I interviewed, the more I started to realize these people weren’t stupid by a long shot…

In fact, they were making BETTER prioritization decisions in their business than I was.  Because the kinds of things they were attending to were making them a whole lot more money than doubling their conversion on the front end would… at least at the moment.

How could that possibly be?  Let me give you a few examples:

Consider someone selling a supplement for prostate health with a just barely profitable front end.  Maybe they’re spending $2 per click and making back $2.10, all things considered.  Now, suppose they’re a one man shop, and so far they’re able to sell 10,000 customers per month.  Might sound like a lot, but because of the margins it’s just $1000 profit.  Certainly not enough to hire a PPC agency or conversion expert.  And worse yet, he’s at the mercy of ONE supplier with limited capacity.  So even if he COULD ramp up his sales, the supplier can’t keep up!    And he’s got customer service problems (e.g. he can’t afford to hire a team but he can’t afford not to!) so refunds are climbing.  What do to?

With seriously limited time and resources, this person’s got several options for where to put his time and resources.  He could:

  • Work on striking deals with other supplement companies to eliminate the vulnerability in the business…
  • He could work on back end products to sell to his buyers to seriously increase his margins…
  • He could build a stick sequence via direct mail to get existing customers on the continuity to stay longer…
  • He could spend a month building a better customer service system…
  • Or he could dig into AdWords, learn optimization techniques, test and optimize his landing page, in hopes of making an extra 20% to 30% on the front end.

Now, it’s not that there’s no money in the optimization…

And it should be done EVENTUALLY…

But the hard reality is that the other problems really take precedence given his capital resources and available time.    Because what good will the extra 20% to 30% be if his supplier drops out of the game, can’t keep up with capacity, or if he loses his merchant account due to too many chargebacks (from lousy customer service?)

This is why all businesses develop a long list of “guilty projects” which they KNOW would make them more money if they could only find the time and resources to do it.

And sure, you can make joint venture arrangements to solve a lot of these problems, but you can’t choose these partners randomly… finding JVs itself takes time and effort. (You’ve also gotta vet the prospective partners or you could be making more trouble than it’s worth… trust me, I learned the hard way!)

JUST BECAUSE YOU CAN FIX SOMETHING DOESN’T MEAN YOU SHOULD.

The reality of business is that it’s a constant game of priorities.

“What is the highest and best use of your time and resources this week?”

As much as I hate to say it, sometimes optimizing this or that part of your advertising system just isn’t the answer.

And even when it is, it’s rare that you have the time and resources to optimize the WHOLE THING.  Rather, you usually need to pick the point of greatest leverage where you’ve got the greatest potential for increasing your profit volume…

Like your highest end product…

Or often it IS the front end, because that increases the value of the whole system.  (Hint: most people totally ignore their email follow up system when it comes to optimization… but you can often quadruple your site traffic with a well optimized long follow up system without spending another penny on traffic!)

But there’s a bright side…

Because when you KNOW and UNDERSTAND this essential business reality…

You also know that everyone else is going through it too…

And that the best we can ever do is  (as Stephen Covey taught me) is to “organize and execute around priorities”

So throw away the “guilt” from that “guilty project list” you’ve got building in Outlook…

And just put your head down and ask yourself “What’s Next?”

Dr. G 🙂

PS – we’ve got some new options and services I’d like you to check out:



Make More Money By Turning OFF Your Advertising

If the escalating expense, difficulty, and time to generate a high volume of profitable internet sales is crippling your growth–or crushing  your morale–I’ve got a very important audio for you to hear today…

Because it’s entirely possible that…

“You Can Make More Money by Turning Off Your Time Killing, Morale Crushing, Migraine Inducing, Pain-in-the-Ass Advertising System!”

Listen to this interview with Ryan Levesque, my partner in an extremely weird new marketing experiment which just might be your saving grace 🙂

2nd Most Unusual Jungle Marketing Idea Ever

* FREE PERRY MARSHALL WEBINAR:
2nd Most Unusual Jungle Marketing Tactic Ever:
February 2010 on the island of Maui, Perry Marshall unveiled a new technology for creating ad campaigns that stand out from everything else in the marketplace. The students he taught used his methodology to beat their own best ads, landing pages, and emails.  Powerful results started to emerge…
– One of his students was able to finally beat their previously “unbeatable” ad after spending $200,000 on Adwords traffic.
– Another student used the concept to increase his conversions by 79%.
But for the past several years he’s been selective about who got access to this technology.
Last week I found out that he’s telling the whole story for the first time – including his journal notes about how he came up with the idea.
The odd story behind it all is that he was on vacation in Costa Rica and was wandering through the forest admiring the efficiency of Mother Nature when all of a sudden he connected the dots to Google Adwords.
(If you know Perry – you know that it’s not at all weird for him to be thinking about Google Adwords while vacationing in the rain forest. For anyone else, very strange)
His notes are a bit cryptic but he’s doing a presentation next week and says he’ll also be
explaining his “Jungle Journal” in more detail in the coming days.
Here’s the link to Perry’s Jungle Journal notes:
* FREE PERRY MARSHALL WEBINAR:
2nd Most Unusual Jungle Marketing Tactic Ever:
Definitely worth attending in my book 🙂
(Of course, as you probably know, I’m also an affiliate, and you’ll be helping finance my “master plan” if you should buy anything after clicking and/or attending the FREE event)

The Unlimited Traffic Technique

Way back in 2003 I heard Jonathan Mizel describe something which literally blew my internet marketing mind.

He called it “The Unlimited Traffic Technique” and the essence of it was this:  IF you’re the guy/gal who makes more money off a web visitor than everyone else in the market, AND you offer a very generous affiliate commission, then most of the traffic in that market should tilt in your favor.

For example:  I make $25 per lead, everyone else makes $10.  I offer a $12.50 so the other merchants say “why the heck should I bother with customer service, cost of goods, shipping, product development, and all these other hassles when I can make  $2.50/lead more with Glenn for doing NOTHING but sending him the traffic?”

See what I mean?

And that’s what Dan Kennedy means when he says you need to “engineer the economics of your business so you can PAY MORE for a lead than everyone else in the market”.  (This is contrarian to say the least… while every other business is trying to pay as little as possible, obsessing about efficiencies… you figure out how to pay MORE  and you can dominate the market)

IF you can reach this position, the experience is literally mind blowing. Because whereas you previously had to beg for joint ventures,  eek out a profit on exhaustively optimized advertising, or expend eons of precious time on search engine optimization or social media… all of a sudden everyone needs YOU.

It’s like holding a glazed ham in a room packed with Doberman Pinchers… you’ve actually gotta take care to protect yourself, they come at you so fast.

BUT  (there’s always a “but”, isn’t there), what I want to talk to you about today is the PRACTICALITY of owning and controlling this dominant position in a market.

Because while it all sounds wonderful in theory, and it’s DEFINITELY something we should all be striving for, in practice, it’s pretty damn hard to get to.  (I’ve only REALLY done it once, and am just now putting the finishing touches on my second grand slam)

Here’s why it’s much harder to do than it sounds (followed by the SOLUTION which finally hit me in the face like a monsoon in the desert).

First of all, it’s only natural for we left-brained-electron-chasing-internet-marketers (that particular breed which clings to the seductive fantasy of having computers suck money out of cyberspace and deposit it by the millions in our electronic bank accounts) naturally gravitate towards AD/LANDING PAGE/SALESLETTER OPTIMIZATION as the quintessential solution.

Friends, I’m here to tell you it is NOT!

Which is not to say you shouldn’t be testing and tracking to optimize your conversion like a wolf on the hunt. (You definitely should).

But in the end, especially if you’ve done your research, most systems reach a point of diminishing returns on your optimization effort.

For example,  if you start with a 25% profit and you test and tweak the hell out of that system, you can frequently get it to 150% or 200%.   Not too shabby, to be sure, and you can definitely build a business on it, … but it’s usually not enough to fund the unlimited traffic phenomenon.

Because many competitors will be optimizing their sites too.

To fund the unlimited traffic technique, you’ve really got to be making at least twice as much as compared to everyone else.

And the much faster way to get there, I’ve finally learned after years of pain, isn’t so much by optimization, but by turning your business into a REAL business… one which cultivates repeat customers, and offers a multitude of ultra-high end solutions.

In other words, where everyone else is trying to sell ebooks and information products, you hammer the market with a high end, guaranteed, done for you service with a continuity component.   While they’re going after  $100 or even $1000 of profit at a time, you go after a lifetime value of $25,000.

To quote a line from a bad remake (of a great movie)… “There IS no defense!”

Of course, optimization plays a role in this pursuit.  But it’s not as much of an economic role as we’d all like to think.  We’ve all got the dream of finding “just the right ad” or “just the right headline” and then striking it rich, when the truth is, we should be thinking about “just the right OFFER” and “just the right BUSINESS STRUCTURE”.

Because, if I’m making $25,000 from a customer, does it really matter SO much if I pay $10 vs. $20 per lead?

What matters is I figured out how to make $25,000 per customer.

Now, optimization DOES help us figure that out, because every test gives us more insight into what the market really wants.

But optimization is just a cog in the wheel… it’s a part of the process, it’s not the goal in and of itself.

Optimization is a necessary but NOT sufficient condition for achieving the ultimate goal – unlimited traffic and market domination.

It took me a LONG time to learn this.

At first I was obsessed with my click through rates in Google, and with a psychotic energy not dissimilar to having to master Asteroids and Ms. Pacman as a child,  I learned how to get more traffic at a lower cost.

Then I transferred this obsession in to learning how to CONVERT the traffic (using my research systems, etc).

Now, you’d THINK that should be the end of the story…

Because TRAFFIC x CONVERSION = $$$ Right?

Not quite.

And that obsession almost killed me.

Because while Traffic x Conversion DOES generate money:

Traffic x Conversion x High Ticket Items x Repeat = FORTUNE

So here’s the real take-away.

Given a basic proficiency with traffic and conversion, you get a LOT more leverage, by focusing on the second half of the equation! (High Ticket x Repeat)

This usually means giving up the fantasy of getting 24 hour a day massages while someone feeds you bon bons and money is electronically deposited in your bank account.

It means embracing a real business, where you deliver high end products and services, and require some assistance to make it all run.

I really wish I knew this 5 years ago when I came onto the scene.

Because in my own struggle to relinquish this fantasy, I believe I may have erred in encouraging others 🙁

I’m sorry!

But there it is in plain sight for you above.  And I’ll say it again so you can tell your Mom something really important this Christmas (and make sure she’s listening, will you?):

Traffic x Conversion x High Ticket Items x Repeat = FORTUNE

Given a basic proficiency with traffic and conversion, you get a LOT more leverage, by focusing on the second half of the equation! (High Ticket x Repeat)

Have a Happy Holiday Everyone, … I’ve got GREAT things in store for you next year!

Dr. G 🙂

www.HyperResponsiveMarketingSecrets.com

PPC Remarketing Advice from Rocket Clicks

One of the MOST powerful (and controversial) marketing innovations of the past few years has been RE-MARKETING… your chance for a second bite at the apple… the ability to reach people who’ve visited your site AGAIN as the browse OTHER people’s sites on the Display Network.

It’s kind of a mysterious animal, and difficult to get a hold of.

In this very information dense interview filled with practical tips, you’ll learn some of Rocket Clicks best practices for setting it up, and maximizing your changes for profitable conversion.

Listen now please…

G 🙂

PS – Remarketing Cheat Sheet Here

There are NO AdWords Geniuses

This might seem like a strange thing for the owner of a PPC agency to say, but there really are NO AdWords geniuses!

I frequently hear people talking about so and so as an “AdWords Genius.”

But when someone says that, I immediately know that they don’t thoroughly  understand AdWords.   Because saying someone is an “AdWords Genius” is very much akin to pointing out a good French speaker and saying “Look at him, he’s a French Genius!”

There aren’t any French Geniuses.  “Genius” implies an innate ability unattainable by the average person.

In French, there’s  a basic level of fluency which becomes progressively more natural and embedded in a speaker’s brain the more time they spend in France interacting with native speakers in the culture.

Pretty much ANYONE could attain this level of fluency if they decided to spend enough time in France.  (Or Montreal!)

It might APPEAR to an outsider, struggling in their first few hundred hours of studying the language that this other person was a French Genius, but the truth is, it’s just a reflection of the time and energy they spent in France.

Moreover, an argument could be made that the person who chose to spend just a few hundred hours studying French to achieve basic fluency has a more balanced life, and will achieve more in their business dealings in France than the one who dedicated all their time and energy to appearing like a French Genius.

You wouldn’t spend a lifetime studying French if your goal was only to be  comfortable enough in the culture to do business profitably with the locals. There’s definitely a point of diminishing returns… there might be 80,000+ words in the French Dictionary (I’m guessing), but the masses rarely use more than 5,000 or so.

It’s the difference between efficiency and effectiveness!

Similarly, there are NO AdWords Geniuses.

Rather, there’s a basic level of fluency which most people reach by spending a few  months immersed in the machine.  From there, there’s only an incremental ease with which they work in AdWords depending upon how much time and energy they put into practicing.

There certainly ARE hundreds of nuances to AdWords, but many of them can’t be leveraged by anyone who properly considers AdWords only PART of their business and doesn’t intend to be a full time PPC manager.  There are only about a dozen AdWords things you really need to master to achieve a basic fluency. (Campaign Settings, Keyword Groupings, Match Types, Spit Testing, Basic Content Network Logic, Placement Targeting, Conversion Tracking, etc)

Anyone can do it. (Well, any detail oriented person… a lot of purely creative, right-brain types have trouble, in my experience)

The REAL leverage point in AdWords isn’t in AdWords at all.

To maximize your AdWords profits you really need to understand what’s on the customer’s mind BEFORE AND AFTER the click.

Knowing what’s on their mind BEFORE they click helps you get the customer at the most efficient rate (high CTR, OPT IN, and SALES RATES), but more importantly shows you how to TAKE THE PROSPECT OUT OF THE COMPETITIVE ENVIRONMENT.

(AdWords is brutal… you want the customer to feel that you’ve almost psychically read their mind so they stop their search and start studying what you’ve got to offer in the context of a “go to relationship” with you, and hopefully you alone!)

Knowing what’s on their mind AFTER the click is critical so you can maximize the value of every customer.

And THIS is perhaps the most important part.  Because Adwords is such a competitive auction environment, no matter how good you get at efficiency, it’s effectiveness, or maximum visitor value, which wins the game in the long run.

In other words, if you’re running Adwords at only a small profit and plan to just let it ride, you’re probably planning a losing game.  To truly dominate your market in Adwords, you’ve got to engineer your whole business such that you’re the one who can afford to pay the MOST for clicks.

Yes, you read that right.

Sure you want to buy them efficiently, but you want to be making so much from every visitor that no matter what happens in the auction you can afford to outbid the next guy.

And here’s the thing…

YOU control what happens after you’ve got the opt in or the customer, NOT GOOGLE!

So why get sucked into spending all your time inside a machine someone else controls?   Get it running profitably and then turn it over to an agency to achieve maximum efficiency and volume (e.g. Rocket Clicks), then spend the majority of your resources maximizing the VALUE of each visitor by researching what they want, building back end products and services, segmenting and servicing your list, doing joint ventures, etc.

That’s where your leverage point really is, and that’s how you build a solid and secure business.

Ask yourself this question… no matter what the price of the highest end product you’re currently selling in your business, how can you add a zero?  What would you need to find out from your market?  What would you have to deliver to  be worth 10x what people are currently paying?

And if that’s TOO outrageous for you, how about, what would it take to achieve  DOUBLE OR TRIPLE the price?

Because that’ll change the whole economics of your business, and you’ll find yourself thinking quite differently about the Google PPC auction.  (You’ll probably also find other advertising vehicles open to you which you previously thought were not cost effective)

Worth thinking about, right?

Your humble (OK, not so humble) AdWords servant,

Dr. G 🙂

Important Split Testing Innovation

Like everyone else in direct marketing, I spend a lot of time extolling the virtues of split testing.  As well I should, because with ongoing, small improvements, implemented like a bull dog, you can radically change the performance of your whole sales systems.

Unlike everyone else, I urge people to have the patience to do their research and competitive intelligence thoroughly and precisely, so they’ll have the RIGHT INPUTS for their tests, to maximize the probability of results.

But here’s something I haven’t talked much about, which I really should (but Howie beat me to the punch)…

“Testing Juice” is a limited resource.  We only have so much traffic and money to pay for it, and every test we do eats some of it for a while.    Accordingly, it’s vitally important to PRIORITIZE your tests correctly.

Howie Jacobson, author of Adwords for Dummies, has developed an excellent paradigm for doing just that.  In this MP3 interview (and accompanying slides) you’ll hear him walk you through it.

Of course, I won’t hide the fact that this is also a blatant attempt to get you to attend Camp Checkmate via my affiliate link (which entitles you to the EARLY BIRD pricing if you order soon, even though the deadline’s passed). But as always, both Howie and I took extra special care to ensure the content itself should be immediately valuable to you.

Enjoy!

Dr. G 🙂

Hal Varian – Quality Score and The Google Ad Auction

Hal Varian is the chief economist at Google, and certainly one of the main forces behind the economics of the Adwords Auction AND Quality Score.   Google’s had this video available for over a year now, but NOT ONE PERSON I’ve spoken with about their Quality Score concerns had watched it. (Thanks to Rob Sieracki, Chief Operating Officer at RocketClicks.com for pointing this out to me)

In any case, it’s definitely THE starting point for understanding the components of Quality Score, especially the key role Click Through Rates play, and the VERY specific economic impact Quality Score has on bid price.  It’s something which EVERY AdWords advertiser should watch.  (Especially since it’s under 10 minutes!)

In my humble opinion, Quality Score is all about “Getting them there and keeping them there with relevant content”… which means (mathematically) a high Click Through Rate, a Long Time Spent on the Site, and a Low Bounce Rate.  What that means in Plain English, however, is that you simply have to know what your best prospects want, on an adgroup by adgroup level, if not down to the keyword.  What’s the best way to do that?  Join the hyper-responsive marketing club of course!

“So Little Time, So Many Liars” (Recorded Consult with Glenn)

Know the biggest problem we face as internet marketers?

LIARS.

A Darwinian economy creates ruthless temptation to lie, exaggerate,  distort, and mislead.  And the PPC auction puts that on steroids.

Every time you look at the results of a split test you’re faced with a moral dilemma.   Because the majority of the time, strengthening your claim beyond what you can actually deliver raises your click through and conversion.   And sadly, outright lying raises it stratospherically.

Of course, the smart marketer knows that lying creates only trial, not repeat. (It can also lead to being married to a big smelly guy named Bubba, and spending a lot of time lifting weights in the yard)

So what’s an ethical marketer to do?

I’ve known Chuck Batson for years, have had dinner with him, and in my judgment he’s one of the most ethical marketers around.  Chuck  operates in a market you’d think is more traditionally known for honesty and compassion… the vegetarian/vegan/raw-food world. (Which means, you know… he refuses to eat fried kittens and stuff, no matter how good they taste)

But he’s up against LIARS too.

Thankfully, he used my old How To Double Your Business course (predecessor to the hyper-responsive club) and found an honest way into the market, but he’s only making a few bucks and because he works full time as a programmer, he can’t seem to find the time to expand.

I really like Chuck, respect his values, and appreciate what a dedicated customer he’s been for almost 4 years.

Listen carefully and you’ll learn a few things about dealing with the Liars in your market too!

Dr. G 🙂

PS – Chuck asked a few very valuable questions towards the end about the difference between free and paid content.  It’s definitely worth listening to the answer if you’re following my model.

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