Category Archives: Content Network

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)

The Strangest PPC Secret

OK, so here’s the strangest clickthrough secret I’ve come across in my years…

Something which has the capacity to take your prospect OUT of a competitive environment and position you as the obvious solution to their problem…

And something largely counter-intuitive, so I need you to stay with me please.

Here’s the secret…

When you’re in a high volume traffic stream, advertising to a specific demographic segment of the market can actual increase your volume of sales and overall profits, even–and sometimes especially–when that segment represents a smaller proportion of people searching.

For example, let’s suppose you’re selling a solution to stop excessive barking in dogs.  Let’s call it the “Shut Up Machine” OK?

OK.  And suppose we’re paying $1 per click for our best performing ad on “stop barking” for this ad:

CTR = 1%  Conversion = 1%
Cost Per Conversion = $100
Conversions Per 1,000 Visitors = 10

Now, let’s further suppose–and these are just wild assumptions since I haven’t actually researched this market–that the search volume in this market breaks down as follows:

  • Women Under 40 = 35%
  • Women over 40 = 30%
  • Men Under 40 = 15%
  • Men Over 40 = 20%

Common sense might suggest you’d need to keep the generic ad, because there’s no demographic which makes up the overwhelming majority of the market.  (So one might think that advertising to women only, for example, would drop our clickthrough by 35%, since women represent 65% of the search volume).

But in many cases I’ve seen this just isn’t true.    Especially if you’ve analyzed your BUYERS and found a bias therein.

For example, suppose ShutUpMachine.com’s buyers were 50/50 men and women, despite the fact women outnumber men 2 to 1 in search.  What this says is, men are disproportionately responsive.

Now suppose we dig even further (by surveying our buyers) and discover that 80% of our male buyers are over 40. (We’d expect only a slight bias towards the over 40 range given the search volume breakdown above) .

This tells us that men over 40 are especially responsive to our offer.  Indeed, 40% of all our customers are men over forty  in this scenario (50% of all customers are men x 80% of male customers over forty = 40% of all customers) , even though this demographic represents just 20% of the search volume.

In other words, men over 40 are twice as responsive to the generic offer.

Can you imagine what would happen to the system if you optimized it for them?

Here’s what I’d do in that situation…

I’d aggressively test optimizing a WHOLE PATHWAY for men over 40.

So we might write an ad like this:

And then we’d land them on a page with a story from a man in his 40s who wants nothing but some peace and quiet when he comes home from a hard day, finally finishes taking care of wife and kids, and just wants to relax.

We’d paint a before and after picture with that story…

And because we’d knock our visitor out with the “Holy Crap!  This is exactly for me!” experience, we’d probably get an even higher conversion rate on the landing page.  Let’s assume 50% higher.

What might the numbers look like?

This is the strangest secret…

Because often when you’ve done this kind of analysis of your buyers to isolate the most responsive demographic, you can create a situation where the CTR doesn’t drop at all.

In other words, you might be targeting a much smaller percentage of the market, but their click responsiveness makes up for their lack of presence in the market as a whole. (And even when that’s not the case, you can often make up for it with increased landing page conversion)

For example, you might see something like this:

A few important things to note:

  • Even though the CTR is the same from the PPC engine’s perspective, the truth is you’re getting a 5% clickthrough from your target audience.  You just can’t SEE that because you can’t restrict the exposure to the rest of the audience in general PPC advertising. (Sometimes you CAN do this with email buys and banner advertising, but you’ve gotta be very, very careful because advertising vendors will often jack up the price for these kind of “selects” more than the increase in responsiveness warrants.  Run your spreadsheets and know your numbers before testing this!)
  • Even though the price per click is the same, we get a bump in conversion by taking the prospect OUT of the competitive environment and re-assuring them we are the ONLY vendor positioned to meet their unique needs
  • As with so many other things in marketing, going after a “higher percentage of a smaller percentage” is so often the answer
  • There’s nothing to stop you from developing ANOTHER site for women over and under 40, etc.  in order to look for more volume with additional conversion bumps.  However, by rank ordering your customer demographics in terms of responsiveness you’ll be able to estimate the effectiveness of these efforts as compared to the time and money you need to allocate to accomplish them.  (In the example above, we found women were modestly less responsive than men as a whole.  Still, you should expect SOME increase in conversion due to the demographic segmentation (assuming you’ve studied how the product plays out differently in their lives), so it’s just a matter of math to guestimate which segments are worthwhile to pursue as such, and in what order.
  • There’s also nothing that stops you from ALSO running the generic ad if it’s profitable.  (You should test  running both a generic and a segmented ad vs. running only the segmented ad)

If any of this math was hard to follow, let me restate it in simple English…

  • If you survey your customer database, you might find you’ve got more women than men, more young people than older people, etc.
  • Compare the percentages you find in your customers to what Quantcast.com and/or Alexa.com says about the demographic breakdown for search volume in your market.  (Enter a few of the top search engine ranked websites to find out)
  • If you DO find your percentages are different than what you see in Quantcast, etc, that probably means there’s a demographic group that’s MORE responsive to your offer than average…
  • Test targeting a teaser ad and landing page to THAT unique demographic and see what happens

Yah?

Got get’m!

Onwards and Upwards My Fine Marketing Friends…

You can clear away SO much confusion if you’ll just take the time to master a few fundamental conversion principles.  And now you can watch me do it LIVE on site after site.  (Get started as of the time of this post for less than $5)

Dr. Glenn :-)

Your “Web Sales Hero(tm)”

PPS – Want a simpler way to increase your conversions?   Put evangelistic audio testimonials  on your site. Listen, testimonials sell, but they’ve got to be done right.   You want to support the specific claims you make in your USP with specific results obtained.  And you need to get the customer to describe their results in contagious, emotionally compelling language that BRINGS THE TESTIMONIAL TO LIFE.   (Do It Yourself |   Let Us Do It For You)

PPPS – The above example is hypothetical.  Please don’t attempt to advertise with these specific ads.


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 🙂

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 🙂

Content Network Negatives and Risk Management

According to Jered “The Content Network Exorcist” Klima (who has managed hundreds of thousands of dollars per month), there are nuances of negative site usage and risk management on the Content Network which elude virtually all AdWords users…

Things which Google themselves point out in the depth of their documentation…

Which have dramatic implications for how you manage the content network… it’s a real paradigm shift.  Without question, it’s the most valuable thing I’ve learned about Adwords this year, and it’ll only take you 15 minutes to go through.

Highly Recommended,

Glenn 🙂

Rocket Clicks PPC Management |    Beat the $20/mo Price Increase (2/26/10)

PS – The thematic shift Jered presents is entirely consistent with the focus of my hyper-responsive club.  Essentially, you need to start thinking THEMATICALLY, which requires you to more tightly define what your entire site is about than ever before.  In fact, one way of understanding Quality Score is a recognition that if you don’t take the time to clearly outline your exact place in the world of keyword conversations, Google will define it for you!

I’ve thought long and hard about the best way to define your space, then conquer it with focus and determination in Google (both Search and Content) and beyond.   This is NOT  a technique or a fad, but a set of principles you implement with a step by step over-my-shoulder system.

I’m implementing one last price raise jumping to $97.   So if you’ve been on the fence following me, consider this your limited opportunity to LOCK IN YOUR RATES FOREVER.  (Note: I never raise rates on active members ) Beat the Price Increase

Free Content Network Telseminar

* FREE CONTENT NETWORK TELESEMINAR: Perry Marshall
http://www.PayPerClickSearchMarketing.com/ContentNetworkCall.php

Hey… I just wanted to give you the heads up that Perry’s doing another free content network teleseminar with Shelley Ellis tomorrow.

I’ve known Perry a LONG time, and there’s one very important thing I’ve learned about him… he rarely promotes ANY other marketer CONSISTENTLY (besides me that is).    So when he started repeatedly driving people to Shelley’s work last year, I stood up and took notice.

I’d strongly recommend you listen to the free teleseminar, even if you’re not at all interested in the intermediate content network bootcamp she’ll be offering at the end. (Which, by the way, there are only 29 seats left for so if you ARE interested in one of them, pay close attention to the post opt in page and grab your spot)

Anyway… the call is FREE, and if you know Perry, you know he ALWAYS provides genuinely valuable and immediately usable information on these calls. So why not?

Of course, yes, I’ll make a commission if you buy anything after clicking this link. So you have to ask yourself, does Glenn really mean what he’s saying? I guess, short of giving you my Mom’s telephone number as a character reference, you’ll just have to make up your own mind. Seriously though, it’s kind of a no brainer:

* FREE CONTENT NETWORK TELESEMINAR: Perry Marshall

http://www.PayPerClickSearchMarketing.com/ContentNetworkCall.php

Free Content Network Book and MP3 Interview

David Szetela, CEO of ClixMarketing.com is the author of Wiley’s upcoming “PPC in One Hour a Day”, as well as  “Customers Now – Profiting from the New Frontier of Content Based Internet Advertising”.

He’s also the host of “PPC Rockstars”, a weekly pay per click podcast with some truly valuable guests and marketing gems.

David not only agreed to an exciting interview for my listeners (36 minute free MP3 below), but also graciously donated his content advertising book (and this is a REAL, meaty book with detailed examples) for you all to freely download.

Enjoy!

Dr G 🙂

Glenn Club |   Coaching |  A to Z Product for Newbies |   Advanced Adwords Seminar

More Unusual Adwords Tips to Save Money in 2010

OK, well, the year is rapidly drawing to a close, so let me leave you with several additional quick adwords tips to save you money in 2010 (Thanks VERY much to Jerrold Burke, Jered Klima, Dan Zuzanski, Laureen Hoeft, Rob Sieracki, and all the rest of the Rocket Clicks PPC team for helping me compile this):

  • Don’t judge the success of the content network without cleaning it up first.  Aggressively look for site and category exclusions (in the content placement report AND the standard user interface for the campaign).  As a last resort consider managing effective placements discovered on a CPM basis while you gradually throttle  down the automatic placement campaign (you can drag and drop placements between two campaigns using the Adwords Editor)
  • In your most profitable adgroups, don’t necessarily split test a new ad with 50% of your traffic unless you’re very early in the game and you’re fairly sure you’ve got a good change to beat the control. Instead, use the Adwords Editor to make several copies of the existing ad, and change only ONE of them.  This way, you’re only exposing the TEST to a small percentage of your otherwise profitable traffic… if it’s a bomb, you lose a lot less.  If it starts to look like a winner, you can delete many of the other copies to increase the exposure frequency of the test ad (but be careful not to delete the CONTROL copy with all the history until the winner has been firmly declared)
  • Don’t be content using just text ads. Local Business Ads, Ad Extensions, and Ad Site Links are very effective yet underutilized media for many businesses.  (And in the content network, don’t forget to test display advertising)
  • Test something wildly and insanely different from your existing control ad. I mean, something which kind of irks you to try.   Onesentance.org is a good source of inspiration for ad copy in this light (thanks to David Bullock for pointing this out).   Another good source is to write a controversial ad which goes 100% against all the benefits your competitors are touting.  For example, in the adwords market itself you used to see ads saying “You will make money tonight”… so what you’d do instead is say “Some of these animals are lying!  Be the tortoise, not the hare”… see where I’m going?
  • Take advantage of Google’s Betas, especially if you’re a more traditional e-commerce marketing with an actual catalog of products sold through a shopping cart.
  • Don’t use the same copy or landing pages  in the content network as you do in search. Content surfers are READERS, searchers are SCANNERS.  (We’ll do more on this in a future audio)
  • Go through the reporting center once a week to see if there are new metrics available which could be of use. (These days, new data points seem to be accelerating on an almost monthly basis)

And for heaven’s sake, if you’re not a member of my Hyper Responsive Club already, get out there and join before the price increases forever on Friday (or when I hit 1,000 members, which is looking like it might happen before then since Perry Marshall decided to tell his list of 250,000+ people to jump on board today).

Because without the information in this club, I can virtually guarantee you haven’t carefully defined a very specific keyword target to conquer online with focus and determination.  And if you haven’t done that, I know you’re suffering with much lower click through, conversion, and quality scores than you’d otherwise have. Join now

I know everyone hesitates to join a new monthly club, and no one wants to commit to a new monthly expense. (Note: you can cancel any time, and even the first month is refundable if you decide you don’t like it for any reason, or no reason at all)

But the thing is, hardly anyone is sorry once they’ve joined mine.  Join now

That’s because:

1) YOU’LL SEE A REAL BUSINESS BEING DEVELOPED: This club is one of the very, very few places you can actually watch a real business being developed from scratch. In other words, I don’t only TALK about what to do in some electronic classroom in the sky, I actually SHOW YOU me DOING it as I develop a REAL business.  Join now

2) YOU GET 6 To 12 HOURS FOR MUCH LESS THAN WHAT OTHERS CHARGE FOR ONLY 1 HOUR: While most other gurus are charging $97/mo for only an hour or two of  THEORY, Glenn’s delivering virtually a whole seminar (6 to 12 hours/mo) for much less.  Join now

3) YOU’LL LEARN FROM AN AGENCY OWNER: I’m not only a marketing educator, I’m a Rocket Clicks founder and I’ve seen hundreds of business models from the inside out. Which means, I don’t just guess about what’s working and what’s not, I’ve seen the dollars in vs. dollars out reports. I’m not talking theory, and I’m not going to pee on your back while I tell you it’s raining.  You’ll get the straight truth, even when it’s not sexy.  Which is what you NEED in order to succeed, rather than just to feel good for a few months while you consume another piece of intellectual entertainment.  Join now

4) I’VE LIVED IN THE REAL WORLD: I’ve consulted for dozens of real companies … Lipton, AT&T, Novartis, Panasonic, Whirlpool, Colgate-Palmolive, Bausch & Lomb, Nextel, etc. I might be known in our circles as “the guinea pig direct response guy”, but my techniques are explosive in these circles because they come from an entirely different industry.  Join now

5) I’VE DONE WHAT I’M TEACHING: I’ve launched over 17 markets profitably, the vast majority of which had nothing to do with the IM crowd. I’m not a guru who’s done nothing but be a guru.

6) I’M HONEST: You won’t get rich next month using my work. It’s not even within the realm of possibility. But you WILL learn how to build a secure foundation for your business so it can grow and grow and grow.  Join now

7) YOU’LL LEARN A DIFFERENT WAY TO THINK ABOUT MARKETING: Perhaps most importantly, I’ll teach you a different way to think about marketing which will last you a lifetime.

BEAT THE PRICE RAISE (On January 1st): Join now

And have a Happy New Year!

Dr. G 🙂

3 more ways to save money in Adwords

Here’s a few more simple tips for your AdWords checklist which may help you find some extra money this year:

  • For successful content network campaigns, never turn them off for a few days during a slow period (for example during the Holidays).  Instead, use bid scheduling and/or reduce your budget somewhat to slow your traffic. (When you turn OFF a successful content network campaign, you have to fight for your placements again when you turn it back on)
  • Never let a successful content network text ad run in a high traffic adgroup without testing a display version of same.  You may find (especially if you’re willing to increase your bid at first) that you’re able to garner 300% more profitable traffic with a display ad.
  • Never run content network campaigns without regularly processing the content placement report, at minimum to identify poorly performing sites and pages to exclude as negatives.  (Simple, yet a surprising number of people don’t do it).   If a site gets 500 impressions and zero clicks it probably doesn’t belong in your campaign.  Oh, and be sure you’ve evaluated whether Gmail and/or MySpace is performing for you in content, and switch them off if they’re not!

More tomorrow,

PS –The hyper-responsive club price is going up again on January 1st or when I reach 1,000 active members, whichever comes first.   Lock in your rates today.  hyper-responsive club

PPS – I’ll be SPEAKING in Hawaii at Perry Marshall’s Advanced Adwords Seminar.

PPPS – If you’re a content network advertiser, you might seriously consider signing up for Perry Marshall and Shelly Ellis’ Intermediate and/or Advanced Content Network Bootcamps.    The content network really still is a wonderful opportunity for those who know how to use it.

PPPPS – Thanks to Rob, Loreen, Jered, and Nicole at Rocket Clicks for today’s tips.