Online Marketing Today

BREAKING NEWS:

This is the story of how I build an optin mailing list of 17,142 readers using Google Adwords, and took home a net profit of $8,838 for my troubles.

The campaign this is related to is the “Keeping Chickens” at home niche.

However, you can apply it to ANY niche market. I’ve rolled the same thing out in several totally different niche markets and it works pretty much every time.

So, there is no reason why you can’t do this either.

It’s not rocket science.

It’s pretty easy to setup.

You don’t even need your own product to sell – although it does help to increase profit margins because you’re banking more coin per sale – as opposed to clipping the ticket on affiliate commissions.

HOWEVER –

It requires common sense.

It requires thorough testing and tracking of everything.

You’ll need to INVEST money into advertising (we’re using Google Adwords – but any PPC traffic source will work).

You WILL make mistakes – you need to be prepared to learn from them, adjust your approach and try different things until you land on the winning formula.

I hope you noticed that I mentioned it “works pretty much every time” above.

Yes, that’s right.

I’ve tried this in a few different niche markets and I couldn’t make it work the first time.

Sometimes I can’t make it work it all, so I throw it in and move onto the next niche market (but read below to see how to return your investment). Often in certain markets (when focusing on Adwords exclusively – although you can replicate this on the Yahoo and MSN ad networks to lower cost) the cost per click is just too high.

However – I don’t move on to the next “idea”, “latest technique” or whatever – I use this same technique but in different niche markets, with different products, because it does work if you can get everything to fall in place.

Also, the nice thing about focusing on this technique is that even if you LOSE money in the advertising stage, you’ll still walk away with a REAL valuable asset.

That of course would be your mailing list.

You can either; continue to nurture that mailing list and generate income for years to come (to return your investment and turn a profit over the long term); Or you can turn around and sell the entire project to someone else interested in your niche market.

A very basic website with a mailing list of 5,000-10,000 readers is worth MUCH MORE than a near identical website with no mailing list, even if that second website has reasonable search engine rankings.

The first website can always be further developed for organic SEO traffic, the second website still needs a mailing list of 10,000 readers (which can take a long time to build simply via organic SEO).

So let’s get stuck in.

Before I start however I should mention that realistically you’re going to want to invest $1,000 in something like this for accurate results and tweaking. If you can’t walk away with a loss like that, and still remain comfortable financially, then you might not want to try it until you can.

The first thing you need to do is setup a squeeze page for your mailing list.

This could be for a “free newsletter” (generally the approach I use – particularly in niche markets I really want to work long term), a free report delivered as a PDF, an email follow up sequence (mini course), a free software application – whatever.

Basically something that’s going to close the deal to get prospects to hand over their name and contact details.

The Squeeze Page…

Based on my experience the key point for your squeeze page is that it should contain no other distractions or exit paths. That means any prominent links out to other areas of your website.

You want visitors to subscribe to your mailing list or leave.

That might seem strange – you would think that if visitors navigate around the content on your site for a bit to learn more about you, they might be more inclined to become a subscriber. That’s true for those that are “teetering on the edge” of handing over their contact details BUT your OVERALL conversion rates WILL drop.

You need your squeeze page copy to do that job of converting – if it’s shit you can always tweak it, and by laser focusing like this you have fewer variables to tweak and test to improve conversions.

Here is a basic example of what I’ll begin testing with (this example actually converted at an average of 17.81% in the campaign I’m referencing. For some keyword groups we target it converts as high as 33%)…

The key elements are…

• A compelling headline to draw the visitor into the bullet copy.
• Bullet copy to highlight the key benefits of “subscribing” – the benefits the visitor will actually get if they give us their contact details.
• A call to action to fill out their contact details in the respective form – with explicit instructions on doing so (where to place their information).
• The form itself with a subscribe button.
• A footer element with copyright details / privacy policy etc (to make things look a bit more professional).

…pretty simple stuff really. Also, the list above contains all of the key elements you can tweak and test to help improve conversion rates in the future. Having said that, don’t worry about all of that tweaking stuff to begin with.

You have to start somewhere to get base statistics to work on improving in the future.

The “Thank You” Page…

The next thing you’ll need is a thank you page.

The page people land on after subscribing.

You can try different things here.

I generally include a thank you message that provides information about the email address they can expect to receive messages from, and when using double opt-in confirmation, instructions to check their email and confirm to ensure they are actually added to the mailing list.

I also tie this into a “whilst your waiting for the email to arrive” read the following message -  which then goes directly into a sales pitch for the primary product we’re promoting to try and close the sale then and there (you’d be surprised at how many people you’ll convert right off the bat).

Extremely important points…

Keep the thank you page focused and distraction-less just like your squeeze page. This is a key time to push the lead down the path you want them to follow next (i.e. to read your sales letter / review for an affiliate product).

Most importantly – use the conversion tracking feature in Google Adwords (or for any other paid advertising medium you’re going to use) on your thank you page. This is the ONLY accurate way to know the conversion rate of your squeeze page.

You MUST DO THIS.

You’ll see from your Adwords campaign statistics exactly how much you’re spending, and exactly how much each “new lead” is costing you.

Here are the statistics from the campaign I’m talking about.

You can see that we’ve generated 17,142 new leads (conversions) at a cost of $0.26 per new lead (at a total cost of $4,500.69)…

…from here, based on our sales statistics we can see how much we’re loosing or profiting from with the campaign. If I’m netting $27 from a single sale, I need around a 1% conversion rate of lead to sale to cover the cost of the campaign (i.e. building a mailing list at no cost).

In addition to (or as an alternative – but it becomes hard if you’re promoting an affiliate product) you can include conversion tracking codes on the thank you page of your actual product (after ordering).

That way you’re going to see specifically how many leads become customers as well and it will give you a slightly more accurate picture, but, you can crunch the numbers either way if you’re focusing on affiliate offers.

Your Follow Up Sequence…

Whilst many of your new leads will become customers immediately after subscribing – the MAJORITY WILL NOT. You need to rely on the continual follow up of your new leads, working on developing that relationship with them to convert them into customers.

Now I could talk about this all day, but ultimately it all depends on the approach you decided to take.

You are going to need an email autoresponder in order to automate this process.

For our “free newsletter” based campaigns, we simply let the weekly newsletter develop the relationship via high quality useful content.

We then encourage readers back to the website and sales letter as much as possible to get their eyeballs back on the sales page. This is done by strategic placements of “soft sell” call to actions / advertisements throughout the newsletter.

We also have automatic follow up messages in sequence as well (on top of the weekly newsletter messages that are delivered) but that’s too complicated to get into in this free report I’m writing right now (and to start with you really don’t need to over complicate things).

If you are delivering a 7 part email course (or something like that) you’re doing the same thing but are automating the process entirely (you don’t have to produce a weekly newsletter) which is more attractive to some – and the only option in certain markets / for certain offers where a weekly newsletter just isn’t viable.

The important point here is to really focus on developing the relationship by over delivering with high quality useful information that WOW’s the new lead.

The VAST MAJORITY of your sales are going to result from this relationship building over the following weeks (another reason why you need to be prepared to invest a decent whack of coin and time into a campaign like this to get more accurate data).

The Results…

Below is a screen shot of the actual sales results from the campaign I’m talking about here. You can see that out of 17,142 new leads generated, we closed 494 sales.

That’s a VERY AVERAGE 2.8% conversion rate – so there is obviously MUCH room for improvement.

However those 494 sales produce a gross income of $13,338 and the cost for the campaign was only $4,500.69.

That’s a net profit of $8,838…

…to put that another way, we basically just got paid $8,838 to build an extremely valuable mailing list of 17,142 leads (and another even more valuable mailing list of 494 paying customers).

NOTE: There were a few refunds but these were minimal (below 1%) so for time sakes in writing this report I’m not going to dig around and work those out to the nearest half of a half percent. At the end of the day we made a very tidy profit.

If you talking about “flipping” a simple blog that might have a couple of decent rankings in the search engines and getting a trickle of traffic – OR – “flipping” a simple blog (with this setup and running on the backend) you can see which has more resale value.

You’re talking the difference between a $500-$1,000 sale and a $5,000-$10,000+ sale.

If you have both (establish search engine rankings and consistent no cost traffic, a proven system for generating more leads, and a big established mailing list) then you’re really in business in terms of “resale” value.

I should also point out that the above statistics ONLY relate to the single primary product we were offering for sale. It does not include other revenue generated – i.e. a few affiliate offers we pushed out to the newsletter list overtime.

Not too shabby.

NOTE: For those on a tighter budget understand that we didn’t simply go and donk $4,500 into our Adwords campaign from the outset. We simply had a maximum daily spend of $100 on the campaign, and then reinvested the profits back into the cost of running the campaign whilst we monitored and tweaked things. The actual campaign itself (all of the statistics I’m showing you here) ran for a total of 3 months. We did however budget $1,000 up front in order to test the campaign properly and deliver accurate results in a more timely fashion.

The Adwords Campaign…

I don’t proclaim to be an Adwords guru – far from it.

Obviously there is room for much improvement in this aspect as well (if any Adwords masters are reading this) – however one of the key points I’m trying to get across here is that sometimes you just have to get stuck in and test.

Sure you can go an invest $500 into an Adwords advertising course and spend many hours learning all the advanced stuff, but if you invested the same thing in an actual campaign and learned from trial and error you’re going to learn things even faster from real world practical experience and application.

In the second instance – at least you’re doing something and taking action.

So I’m just going to go through the basics of what I do here with Adwords.

The first thing I do is to identify the primary keyword terms people are searching on related to my niche market.

In this instance those are terms such as…

• Keeping Chickens
• Raising Chickens
• Chicken Coops
• Chicken Keeping
• Etc. etc.

…stuff that people interested in keeping chickens at home are likely to be searching on.

I use the Google Keyword tool to do this. No secrets there.

I’ll then create separate ad groups within a campaign for each primary keyword term.

Inside each of those ad groups I’ll place all longer tailed variations the primary term (as suggested by the Keyword tool). I’ll load them in as “phrase match”.

This grouping keeps things more theme relevant.

So for example, for the “chicken keeping” ad group it would include keywords such as…

• chicken keeping
• chicken keeping book
• chicken keeping guide
• chicken keeping for beginners
• etc.

It also allows me to modify the specific ads slightly for each group, ensuring that the primary keyword term is included at least once in the ad text for the respective group to improve ad relevancy (thus reducing cost per click and increasing click through ratios).

Here is one of the ads for this ad group…

…of particular note is that we have included the primary keyword term here “chicken keeping” in the title to improve ad relevancy. For the “Keeping Chickens” ad group we include that specific term in the title (or at least in the body of the ad) and so forth.

The other benefit of doing this is that, should you choose to in the future, it allows you to setup multiple squeeze pages tweaked specifically for those ad groups to help improve conversion ratios.

Again this helps to increase the relevancy of the landing pages to reduce the overall cost. However, I consider this a more advanced step (so don’t let this over complicate things and concern you) – it’s not something we even did for this campaign.

Other important points…

• We set our daily spend at $100 per day. This ensures things are kept under control whilst we’re gathering our data. You don’t want a massive spike in traffic and expenditure if what you’re testing isn’t working well.
• We set out maximum cost per click to the lowest possible ($0.05) EXCEPT where there is a higher minimum bid required to actually display the ad. In such a case we’ll set it to that and test the specific keyword term for a while to see if it’s actually worth targeting or simply dropping. You do need to monitor these keyword terms closely otherwise they can suck up your budget quickly. If you’re uncomfortable setting something at $0.50+ per click – ignore that keyword term for now and simply see how the campaign unfolds without them.
• We create a “control ad” to run across all ad groups.
• We create multiple ads per ad group (tailored to the individual ad groups as mentioned above) to see which out performs the others
• We let Google automatically push out the best performing ads.
• We also create and run image ads to advertise on websites that have a preference for displaying image ads. We create an ad for each format (size) and we generally create different sets of ads to test click through rates.
• We advertise on the “content partners” network BUT we only ever pay the minimum cost per click to begin with for any keyword term until we have solid data to analyze.
• We ONLY target First World Countries whose primary language is English. This is the audience we are trying to reach and the audience that is more likely to have money to spend – as opposed to getting thousands of leads from India etc that are never likely to convert into customers at a rate high enough to cover the cost of the total lead acquisition from that country. You can of course expand and investigate this in the future, but it’s best to just stay away to begin with.

…ultimately that’s it.

During the first 2 weeks we also login and analyze campaign results on a daily basis just to ensure we’re not pushing too much money to the more expensive keyword terms that don’t convert as well as the others (and can potentially turn things very negative).

To ensure you have accurate data when testing a campaign like this, ideally you want to push 1,000 new leads through your lead funnel. Once you’ve achieved that, you can then pause the campaign for a few weeks (whilst your email follow ups etc do the job of converting more leads into customers) if you become worried.

This will give you a better indication as to how effective the overall campaign is in terms of total sales – sales ocurring as a direct result of your campaign.

Also, as I mentioned at the start, you can use this same setup on the MSN ad network or the Yahoo ad network. You can even drive PPV (Pay Per View) traffic to it, or any other form of paid advertising.

The main reason I like to start with Adwords is simply because they can generally drive more “high quality” traffic to the lead page faster and you’ll end up with your data / results faster. Also, if you can turn a decent profit (or at least break even with your list building) on Adwords, then you are almost guaranteed to make a profit from any other source.

You just need to ensure you track everything and keep all of your data (particularly if you plan on reselling a project).

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