Internet Marketing Insider

Have you ever wanted to sell “stuff” on-line? Do you dream of selling the best, high-quality products to anyone on the planet, 24-hours a day, 7-days a week? I thought so. But, I bet you don’t want to worry about shipping, and inventory control, and credit card fraud, and merchant accounts, and marketing and the rest of the “less-glamorous” side of eCommerce? Am I right? Come on, admit it.

Well, I’ve discovered a solution that meets the above criteria, that’s actually fun. I made money last night while I slept!

Here’s what you won’t need to be able to do:

• Be able to build a website 
• Inventory products
• Get involved with shipping
• Invest a ton of money up-front
• Be a marketing genius

Here’s what you will need to be able to do:

• Pick a profitable niche market
• Spend a little time learning pay-per-click (PPC) marketing
• TAKE ACTION

Seriously, that’s it!

What do you need to be successful? You’ll need the support of a huge company that can take care of the hassles for you (shipping, inventory, billing, etc.). It would also be nice to have a business model that’s been proven to work. Having 10’s of thousands of products to sell would help, wouldn’t it? Have you ever priced out a website that has all the features I’ve mentioned in it? I can’t afford one, and I build them for a living!

Well, here’s the deal. I recently became a re-seller for Amazon.com. Heard of them? I thought so. In less than an hour I “built” a website to sell Christmas toys for the holiday season. While I slept last night, I sold a $500+ Nintendo WII. While I ate lunch today, I sold another one! And I’ve got a bunch of folks that have filled their shopping cart, but haven’t checked out yet. Please go to www.toydeals.biz and see how this highly-cutomizable sites looks. It’s easy to navigate, clean, has numerous feaures common oin high-end sites, and you can even buy something! Prices are great, shipping is quick (and it’s one of the only places you can get a Nintendo WII before Christmas!). Heck, I’m selling products on the Internet two hours after I started, and www.toydeals.biz isn’t even listed in the search engines yet. 

In another hour or so, I built multiple Google Adwords pay-per-click campaigns. I used the easiest, most full featured software in the world to research the campaign. It’s called Keyword Elite, and I strongly recommend it to anyone that is serious about driving traffic to their website or Blog with PPC techniques. PPC is the fastest way to drive traffic on the Internet.

The steps were straightforward:

• Get a site name at iPower (FREE) and hosting ($3.95/mo. or FREE) – 15 minutes
• Set-up the Amazon website (fill-in-the-blanks) - 45 Minutes
• Set up the PPC campaigns – 60 minutes
• Post on a Blog, forum, Craigslist to get it indexed FAST (optional) – 5 minutes.
• Watch for emails to tell you how much money you’re making!

Speedy Sites is available to answer any questions you have about Amazon re-seller stores. Give us a jingle (sorry for the pun!) – click here to contact us.

I love pay-per-click marketing! There are few forms of online advertising that offer such complete control over where you spend your advertising dollars.

But despite the ability to control Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing gives you over your ads — how much you spend on them, where and when they appear, etc. — I’m constantly meeting savvy Internet marketers who are wasting tons of unnecessary money on their pay-per-click campaigns because they are either…

a) Making “okay” money from their campaigns and too lazy to do the work to make them really successful

– or –

b) They just don’t know any better!

No matter how you’re doing with YOUR pay-per-click efforts, here are 4 tips that you can start applying today to fine-tune your campaigns and boost your ROI.

Tip #1: Keywords… keywords… keywords!

Even if your business targets an extremely narrow niche market, your campaign should begin with at least 100 keywords.

I have yet to come across a niche market for which we couldn’t find that many keywords for the initial round of testing. In fact, the majority of businesses I deal with start in the range of 500-1000 keywords!

If it sounds like a huge challenge to come up with that many keywords, don’t worry.

With tools like Wordtracker and Google’s Keyword Evaluator, you don’t have to come up with the keywords on your own. All you have to do is identify a core list of keywords and then let technology do the work for you.

Now, is every single one of those keywords going to make you money? Nope! Some will bomb horribly.

But I’ll talk about how you deal with that in a second…

Tip #2: Never stop testing new ads

When you first start your pay-per-click campaigns, you should be writing at least five different ads for each keyword group.

Note: a “keyword group” is a cluster of closely related keywords that say exactly the same thing, in slightly different ways.

For example, a keyword group for a site promoting a bed and breakfast in El Paso, Texas could include:

… and so on.

(As you can see, the variations between each keyword phrase are very slight.)

Once you’ve written your five plus ads for your keyword group, run them all at the same time. Keep them going until you get enough impressions to determine which one is the winner — and then roll out the winning ad across the entire group.

Congratulations… you now have a winning ad!

But don’t stop now… continue to work on your ads and try to come up with one that will beat your current front runner. If you beat your winning ad, roll-out the new ad across your keyword group and then try and beat that ad.

Then keep on repeating this testing cycle indefinitely, to ensure you’re always running the best possible ad you can.

Tip #3: Design targeted landing pages for each keyword group

Nothing will turn a visitor into a customer faster than a message that tells them exactly what they want to hear. So, if I have multiple keyword groups that target different themes, each ad should be driving visitors to a landing page with salescopy that reflects the theme of a single keyword group.

For example, if different themes an El Paso bed and breakfast owner could try targeting might be:

“family friendly bed and breakfast el Paso” or “el Paso couples bed and breakfast”

The first ad could lead to a landing page that emphasized all of the great family activities available in and around the bed and breakfast, while the second one could talk about how great the same bed and breakfast is as a romantic getaway.

By testing out different themes like this, you can see which theme gets the most sales and focus more of your PPC dollars there!

Tips #4: Detailed tracking

If you want to get the most bang for every PPC buck you spend, then simply tracking the overall effectiveness of your campaigns won’t do. You need to track the effectiveness of every individual keyword if you want to crank every cent out of your PPC efforts!

Like I said in Step #1, you will be starting your campaign with hundreds of keywords. But not all of those keywords will be profitable. It’s your job to weed out the unprofitable ones right away.

There are four different keyword performance scenarios you will encounter:

1. Keywords that aren’t driving any trafficAfter you’ve tested a few different ads to confirm these keywords are ineffective, get rid of them. They’re useless. Even though they’re not costing you any money, they are cluttering up your campaign.
2. Keywords that are driving traffic — but no salesThis is where a lot of your wasted PPC dollars go! If you find this happening to you, look at your ad and make sure your landing page relates back to the keyword.Does the landing page meet the expectation your ad creates? If yes, then get rid of the keyword. It’s only costing you money.
3. Keywords that are driving traffic and opt-ins — but no immediate salesIf you are a savvy marketer, chances are you have a good autoresponder sequence that builds a relationship with your subscribers and eventually converts them to sales.If this is the case, I would keep these keywords. The ROI is not immediate, but don’t worry — it will come!In fact, if you are trying to sell a higher-ticket product through PPC without much success, your entire marketing campaign may be more effective if it’s based around driving leads to an opt-in form or squeeze page and then working up to the sale as you establish a relationship with your susbscribers.
4. Keywords that are driving traffic and salesObviously these are the keywords we want to keep… but status quo is not enough!You need to track the conversion of each individual keyword. Some will convert higher than others, which will ultimately dictate how much you can bid on those keyword and still remain profitable.In other words, if I have a top performing keyword and I am not ranking in the top 3-4 positions, I may want to spend more to increase the position, my clickthrough ratio, and sales.

So there it is! Four strategies you can apply today. If you are already doing all of these, great!

However, if you are missing just one, there is a very good chance you are missing out on sales. And you could end up throwing good money after bad!

If you are just getting started with pay-per-click advertising, you can get far more detailed training in my exclusive Search Marketing Lab, which I will let you try for the next 30 days for only $2.95!

Happy “pay-per-clicking!”

Derek Gehl

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Derek Gehl specializes in teaching real people how to start profitable Internet businesses that make $100,000 to $2.5 Million (or more) per year. To get instant access to all his most profitable marketing campaigns, strategies, tools, and resources that he’s used to grow $25 into over $60 Million in online sales, visit: http://www.marketingtips.com/tipsltr.html

Do you use pay per click (PPC) advertising? If not, it may be because you don’t understand its purpose. Let us help you out.

In a nutshell, PPC marketing is essentially paying the major search engines to advertise your website or blog on their search engine results page and paying them a small fee every time someone clicks on your advertisement. Once a search engine user clicks on your advertisement link, they are directed to your website or blog. That click to your site can cost you just a few pennies, up to a few dollars or more. 

So, you ask, why would I want to do this? Well, for a few reasons.

• PPC advertising is the fastest way to get traffic to your site (you don’t have to wait for search engines to list your new site (can take weeks).
• PPC advertising also is a nearly endless stream of traffic, depending on how you structure your PPC campaign.
• PPC campaigns are easily justified if you sell a product that justifies the expenditure. If you structure the campaign correctly, it can provide very targeted traffic for you.  

For a great article on how to create a PPC campaign that works the best for you and produces cost-effective, targeted traffic, click here.