If you’ve been using the Internet for a while now, you know how the ‘sponsored ads’ appear in the search results in Google. These are nothing but paid ads called Google AdWords, where advertisers promote their products/services to reach their target audience. This is an effective platform you can use to get leads and customers for your business as well as to sell your own products. We will cover the advantages of using Google AdWords as well as how it can be used to give your internet business an edge in this article.

A new course is causing quite a buzz in the Internet Marketing community and you can find more information about this on the no nonsense muscle building showcase.

If you want to create the most profitable ads, you have to split test them, something you can easily do with Google Adwords. Split testing is a crucial practice for anyone who wants to see how their ads are doing and create better ones. It was very hard and time consuming to know the relative performance of your ads before the time of the internet. When you use Adwords, however, you can easily compare different ads that are using the same keywords. When you get your results you can drop ads that are not giving you good results and write new ones that you also test, which becomes an ongoing process. You can increase your profits and conversions by this process of refining your ads and keeping the better ones. By testing your ads, you can avoid the problem of losing money on campaigns that aren’t performing well.

The fact that you can customize your budget is the second benefit to using Google AdWords. The exact amount you wish to spend on a click is also something you can customize. For instance, let’s say you set your daily spending limit to $10. Now once you reach clicks amounting to this figure, your ads will stop showing until the next day. A lot of advertisers chose to go with the flow and didn’t take advantage of this feature and ended up losing a lot of money with AdWords. You need to focus on obtaining a good ROI because you are basically making an investment.

A new course is causing quite a buzz in the Internet Marketing community and you can find more information about this on the no nonsense muscle building showcase.

There is no limit to the types of products you can advertise using Adwords. There are so many people who use Google to search for all kinds of products, and getting those people to your site would certainly make you more money in sales. If you want to promote many different products, you can get started with affiliate programs that have hundreds of products in different markets to choose from. Whatever you want, you’ll be able to find it. The harder you work, the more money you’ll make. If you’ve never considered affiliate marketing, Clickbank is a good site to check out as it’s an affiliate network that’s a good one and great for novices. The thing that’s so great about affiliate product promotions is that customer service and having a website become unnecessary.

In conclusion, Google AdWords is the best solution if you wish to obtain quality visitors without having to wait too long for it. This is a highly organized advertising method that allows you complete control and the possibility of establishing your own budget. There is no better way to get instant traffic that results in sales.

Additional Resources

• The New PPC – Setting up Google Adwords Campaigns – Part 1 | Vince Ong
• Google Adwords for Your Law Practice
• Best Google Adwords Book | Wise Startup Blog

Technorati Tags: Ads, Advertisers, Benefit, budget, Buzz, Campaigns, Conversions, Google, Google Adwords, Internet Business, internet marketing, Marketing Community, Money, Muscle Building, Profits, Relative Performance, Search Google, Search Results, Showcase, Target Audience

A while back, I told you that Google’s index will double by the year 2011 every 11 hours… The amount of pages in its database will double ever 11 hours.  That’s staggering.  It tells us two things — 1) people who position themselves now and base their revenue off search traffic will explode their businesses, and 2) people who wait will be crushed by the competition.  Gone are the low competition days of the Early Internet, but this is still the Wild West in terms of competition — especially where things are going.  The fatal flaw I see most businesses make when they are coming online is lack of planning.  You have to have a plan; you must know your outcome before you set out or you will never arrive.  Without a plan, you will throw thousands of dollars at bad ideas and poor execution and only start the process all over again with another web design firm, and another after that…

So, what is the plan?  How is your business going to take your existing website and actually make money with it?  If you don’t have a website, how are you going to develop it so you can be assured of success…?  If you’re thinking that you’ll simply build it and you’ll get traffic — because naturally, there will be so MUCH traffic that someone is bound to run into you… Well, that is not going to work.  In fact, I’ll tell you bluntly that it’s naive.  It would be like opening up a storefront on the busiest street in town, but not hanging a sign, not unlocking your door, and painting black on the windows…  People will have no idea you’re there or what you do.  You have to be open for business, and on the Internet, that means marketing your website. 

Before you start marketing, you have to look at your site.  Think about it as another business, because unless you’re already in the direct marketing business, it’s a completely different thought process from where you are right now.  I’ll do my best in the pages of this site to inform and advise, but really, consider hiring a reputable, experienced professional — of course, I think my firm would be your best choice — but hire someone who has navigated this course before and can advise you based on their experiences.  Find someone who will advise you honestly on the best course of action for your particular business, which will not necessarily be the cheapest option for you.  Find a firm that specializes in taking real world brick & mortar businesses from offline to online.

Let’s assume for the moment that you don’t hire someone like me.  There are different ways to approach your company’s website.  Think in terms of what you currently offer your community.  Do you see your website as being a business card for your existing product or service, or would you like to conduct sales on the website?  Do you have information you could share with others that would benefit them?  If so, you have the opportunity to package that information and sell it as a book, course or coaching program (among many other ideas).  Your local business can remain a local business online, or be focused on much bigger markets — it really all depends on what you want to do.  The good news is, you can do anything you want on the Internet.  That’s the bad news as well.  A myriad of choices and possibilities, but one of the most crucial things you can do online is decide who you are, decide who is your market, and be that one thing to that one market.  Diversification is death on the Internet.  Niche is success.

Here’s one clever strategy a recent client has decided to implement — consider all the different niches that are within their existing business and create separate web properties for each of them.  Buy up the domain real estate for about $7/year and then take the time to methodically develop those websites fully within the niches they serve.  There is a definitive strategy on what to name your website — the XYZ in your dot.com — which I’ll be happy to share when we speak.

Keep it tight, keep it focused.  Be patient.  You will reap the rewards with your online business(es).

Technorati Tags: Bound, Business Internet, Competition Days, direct marketing, Google, Marketing Website, Money, Poor Execution, Search Traffic, Sign Painting, Storefront, Success, Thought Process, Thousands Of Dollars, Web Design Firm, Website Focus, Wild West

One of the simplest and most overlooked aspects of online marketing is that it’s not complicated. Or more to the point, there are a lot of “experts” who try to make it complicated. Aside from whatever motivation they might have to do that <COUGH: SELL THEIR STUFF>, online profits happen as the results of one simple equation –

Traffic + Conversion = Sales

– performed over & over & over again

There are MANY ways to get traffic (visitors) to your site and get them to take some action (convert) which will either result in more leads or (less frequently) result directly in more sales to your business.

So here’s the other simple rule — you only need to master 1 or 2 traffic methods and 1 or 2 conversion methods, and you will make money. You don’t need to master the entire kitchen to make a grilled cheese sandwich, and you don’t need to know EVERYTHING about internet marketing in order to add revenue to your business.

With that in mind, there are a few basic traffic techniques I’ve implemented in some of my sites and client sites that have universally and consistently WORKED. Here are a few of those methods — but remember, you only need to pick one or two:

Traffic Generation

1) Twitter is a highly effective means of targeting your niche and developing the conversation with your customers and prospects. There really is nothing like it. However, most businesses don’t know how to use it effectively. They spam with “sales tweets” — “Look at the cool new thing I’m selling.” The 80/20 rule is highly effective — 80% of your tweets should be about something interesting, funny or otherwise engaging… a question of the day (“What’s for lunch?”)… anything to get people talking, laughing, thinking… Also, keep it consistent and be generous with re-tweets. A few tweets a day go a long way toward establishing a rabid list of followers. The wrong thing to do is to Tweet like a madman for a day or two and then disappear for a month. Or worse, don’t reply when someone direct messages you or @messages you. That’s like ignoring someone at a dinner party when they ask you to pass the gravy. You WON’T get any dessert.

2) Video marketing. This is still a very fast way to rank your site and get lots of inbound traffic. Keep your videos consistent — don’t show up one day in a baseball cap and dark lighting, talking about the rain, and another day bouncing in a jungle gym screaming about business leads. Consistent message, consistent tone, consistent look & feel. Also, be sure to put a call to action in your video’s description, as well as the full URL of your website’s landing page, and use appropriate keywords.

3) Article marketing. This is an evergreen method for outstanding traffic generation, with one HUGE caveat — mix it up! Putting the same article on 400 article directories will get you nowhere fast. You will get a bump in traffic from all the inbound links until Google figures out they’re all the same article and basically count it as one link. There are content spinners out there that alter the content of your articles automatically, but you have to be very careful here as well. Most content spinners change a word or two to replace it with a synonym, or they mash up the article randomly to the output is basically junk that cannot be read. It has to pass human review. So if you’re looking for a quality content spinner, ideally you want to be able to change the entire sentence, do that with many sentences in the article, and then have it spin those into hundreds of different articles. That’s the professional way to do it. At the bottom of your article, have a call to action in the information field; a blurb about you (the author) and a link to a free guide the reader can pick up at your website.

Conversion

1) Keep it simple. The landing page has to do ONE thing — get people to ACT. For this reason, it’s been called a SINGLE ACTION PAGE. Pear it down to the bare essence of what you need the visitor to do. Consider placing a video on the page with a very simple message, “Hey thanks for stopping by for my free whizbang. Just type in your first name and e-mail address and I will rush it right over to you. In just a moment after you send your information, you’ll get an e-mail with a confirmation link. Click that link and I will instantly send your free whizbang.”

2) Direct, direct, direct. Notice the video script in #1 above — see how we instructed the user on exactly what they need to do? And then we told them what to expect next, and what they would then need to do. And we closed with a reminder of the benefit — the free whizbang.

If you have trademarked the term “whizbang,” then I apologize in advance.

3) Test, test, test. ALWAYS have two versions of your landing page operating at one time. You can optimize your landing page using freely available Google tools in the Web Optimizer toolbox. You really can’t go on “gut” here — the data will be you every single time. Even on PPC ads, we have literally seen the addition of a question mark in the ad increase conversion by 16.8% So test, test, test.

Conclusion

These methods work on any business in any industry. Here is some social proof –

• Local landscape designer increased her traffic by 7,342% (yes seven thousand percent)
• Local artist went from three visitors a day to an average of 41 visitors a day
• International digital publisher had zero e-commerce and started converting 16% of all traffic to revenue within 72 hours of implementing one traffic strategy and one conversion strategy
• Changing a landing page to a simple design on an e-book site turned conversion from an anemic two sales per week to eight sales a day — on the same traffic.

I hope this helps your business. The average business fails to do what it takes to drive traffic or achieve conversions to their website. While they exercise 20-30 traffic methods on average, they don’t do a single one effectively.

I have written a definitive guide listing 750 traffic generation methods that’s available here. Choose one or two and do them effectively.

Technorati Tags: Amp, Article Marketing, Conversion, Conversion Methods, Cough, E-Commerce, Followers, Google, Google Web Optimizer, Grilled Cheese Sandwich, internet marketing, Landing Page, Lead Generation Methods, Lt, Lunch, Madman, Money, Motivation, Niche, Online Marketing, Online Marketing Strategies, Online Sales, opt in page, Pay Per Click Campaign Management, PPC, Profits, Prospects, Question Of The Day, Single Action Page, social proof, Squeeze Page, Traffic, Traffic Generation, Traffic Visitors, Twitter, Video Marketing