The Selling Blog

Pay-Per-Click – The internet’s greatest mystery… or something like that.

Thousands of businesses use it but most aren’t making any real money from it. Why? PPC is really pretty simple, once you master a few basic tenents.

1. Specialize
Make your ads very specific. Every keyword set you create (such as for drywalling) needs to have an ad of it’s own. So if someone was searching for Drywaller in Pheonix, the ad should read something like…

Affordable Drywalling
Drywall installation and repair.
Licensed professional – Free quote.
www.YourWebsite.com

2. Go for long-tail keywords
Always, always use your local area to your benefit. Most businesses that use PPC are local, so by using the city name in your keywords, you’re going to save boat-loads of money.

Instead of using “Professional Drywaller” use “Professional Drywaller In Pheonix”. You’ll get more specific searches and less wasted traffic.

3. Optimize the landing page
A landing page is where a user lands when they click your ad. Make sure this page is very specific for the ad that they clicked. Using the same example, make sure the page talks about the benefits of using your drywalling service. Put your professional foot forward and show your visitors just how friendly and honest you are.

Everybody worries about how to get a higher conversion rate on their website. If you can increase by even a single percentage, that’s a huge increase in income over the course of a year – especially if you’re selling a high priced item.

Here’s 11 ways you can immediately increase the conversions on your website.

1. Fiddle with your headline. You do have a headline – right? Your website needs a single sentence at the top of your page that grabs the readers attention,  and points out a serious problem or huge benefit to what you’re selling.
2. Create a good USP. Everyone frets about competition. Set yourself apart from your competitors and you won’t have any. Find a reason why you’re so much better than everyone else – or something that just makes you different – and you’ll sell more product.
3. Add a P.S. to the bottom of your page. Make sure that it talks about the primary benefit to your product. People always jump to the bottom of a site to check the price. Give them reasons to buy instead.
4. Keep your website narrow. People find it hard it hard to read in wide lines. Try to stay at less than 600 pixels for the width of your articles, sales letters, or any block of text you want read.
5. Irritate the problem. Spend some time at the beginning of your site to talk about the problem your prospect has. Really pick at the scabs and make sure they feel it.
6. Focus on the benefits. Too many businesses talk about features. A feature is what your product does and a benefit is how it fixes a problem. Talk about features, but suffix them with benefits.
7. Use a belcher button.
8. Have a guarantee. Always offer a guarantee with your product. Make sure it’s valuable though.
9. Create a product worth talking about. With today’s consumers, nothing will sell better than a product that’s good enough to actually sell. If you’ve got a crappy product, nothing can save your business.
10. WIIFM? “What’s In It For Me?” Always ask this question when writing your websites. If you don’t answer this in your letter, you’re losing out on thousands of sales.
11. And lastly… Talk to your past buyers. Find out why they bought from you and use that information to increase your sales.

I have a family member that’s holding on to her last days right now. It’s made me think about life a little bit.

What are we here to do? Should 40 hours a week and a steady paycheck be what I’m focusing my life on?

No, I don’t think it is.

Consider your own life. Are you taking the time away from work to be with those you love? Are you experiencing all that you can? If you’re like me, you probably aren’t.

I’ll be honest, I don’t work 40 hours a week. Once I got out on my own, I vowed never to work that much in a week again. However, I also don’t spend enough time doing the things I love.

My mind is constantly on things related to my work, which isn’t bad per-se, but it keeps me from focusing fully on the moment.

What are you living your life for? Is it just a paycheck or is it to fully live and enjoy your time on this planet?

Customers feed us. Please play nicely with them and share all your toys.

There’s nothing more important for your direct marketing pieces that getting them read. If you can get someone to take the time to read your ads, that’s half the battle.

You do this by creating what Joe Sugarman calls “A Slippery Slide”. How do you do that? Let’s go.

Step 1
Start out with a powerful headline. Joe is known for using EXTREMELY short headlines. Usually two to five words. When writing ads for the internet, they’re most likely going to be a bit longer.

The idea of the headline is to grab attention. You can do this by using ‘power words’, metaphors, and comparisons. Take a look at some of the world’s most successful headlines to see if you can spot why they worked so well.

• A Little Mistake That Cost A Farmer $3,000 A Year
• How To Win Friends And Influence People
• You Can Laugh At Money Worries – If You Follow This Simple Plan
• How I Made A Fortune With A “Fool Idea”

Can you spot the power words and metaphors in those headlines?

Step 2
Be short, punchy, and conversational. The beginning of your ad always needs to be written in very short (often incomplete) sentences. Grammar isn’t important here. Being conversational is.

This is where you really catch the readers imagination. Pose a question to them. Relate a funny story to your product. Do something out of the ordinary.

Step 3
Use cliffhangers. The end of paragraphs should almost always leave the reader with a question. What’s going to come next? Don’t overuse this, but sprinkle these through your copy and the reader will be drawn through your text like a fat kid to cake.

Step 4
Use subheadlines. Every now and again you should have another headline. Especially if you’re running your ad online. This gives the scanners something that’s very easy to read. A good objective is to plant the benefits and questions the readers might have into the subheadlines. This will make sure the scanners know what your product is and why they should be aware of it.

These are just a few of the ways that you can create a slippery slide. Take the time to impliment these and anything else you find in your swipes and you’ll be well on your way to creating copy that makes you rich.

Can you come up with any more? Share them with your fellow business owners and marketers by posting them in the comment box below.

Boy do I love Minisite Frog. Best web site designers ever.

A drunk badger? What the hell does that have to do with advertising? Let me show you.

Recently, a badger came across a patch of over-ripe and fermented berries in the UK. He gorged himself on this delicious find, only to realize later that the berries turned to alcohol in his stomach… getting him completely wasted.

The badger ended up wandering into traffic, where he passed out. A driver stopped and called the local authorities to have (what he thought was) a dead badger removed from the road. The man stopped his car in the lane and caused quite a jam in the two lane road.

Once the police got there, they tried to remove the badger, only to realize he was passed out drunk, not dead.

So, what does this have to do with the ads that you’re running? Not to mention, it’s Money Monday, how can a drunk animal help you make more green stuff?

Is your ad stopping traffic like a drunk badger can? If you’re like most business owners, probably not. Because of a lack of training, business owners tend to throw together ads that barely pull any money in. It’s nothing new and there’s nothing wrong with it. That’s just the way it is.

If you really want to make extra money this week, you’re going to need to redo those old stinky ads. Make sure they are STOPPING people in their tracks.

Use something off-the-wall, like a story about a drunk badger. (It actually happened by the way)

The key to stopping traffic is to do something unusual. Whether that’s a massive promise, an insult, or a wacky photo, you need to grab attention in order to sell more product or service.

Having trouble coming up with ways to do that? Shoot me an email through the “Contact” button above, and I’ll give you a couple ideas., gratis.

Money Monday’s. What’s that?

Starting today, every Monday I’ll be posting a technique that you can use TODAY to increase the money coming into your business.

These will all be tried-and-tested by yours truly, so you can be assured that they can create real cash-flow for you.

Today’s tip: Repurposing content

If you’re in the service business, this will be especially useful to you.

What content do you have laying around? Maybe you did a seminar a year or two ago. Perhaps it’s an ebook that you wrote.

As service professionals, we do a LOT of teaching to our clients. Put the information that you give them to good use. You can very easily sell that information in many formats.

You can take an ebook and turn it into a thousand dollar a head seminar. Put on a free tele-seminar. Turn the seminar into an audio series and give it away to your newsletter subscribers.

Do you see the potential here? The same content can be used over and over again in all sorts of ways.

How can you take the content you currently have and turn it into something profitable?

It’s amazing what trust will sell. Even with a poor excuse for sales copy, if the readers trust you, they will buy.

Hmm. Apparently the 4th of July is the biggest beer sales day of the year. Nifty.