There are two powerful methods I use to drive high volumes of traffic and sales to my various online websites – through search engine optimization using techniques from experts such as Derek Gehl of SEO Club (this should be your first priority as it is a NO COST way to get lots of targeted traffic) and through paid advertising…BUT there’s a BIG problem with pad advertising.
Let me ask you, is there a worse feeling than spending hours crafting the ‘perfect’ ad for your new marketing campaign, affiliate product or your own product only to have it chalk-up the big ZERO in terms of response?
As frustrating and discouraging as this experience can be, it’s happened to all of us and is often the result of one or two simple factors rather than the whole world ganging up on you as an entrepreneur.
If you’ve ever had a pay-per-click, ezine, banner, text or other ad fail to produce the desired results, here are 5 recommendations to improve your results the next time:
1. Focus On What Your Customer Wants. A common mistake made when constructing ads is to target keywords that are NOT top-of-mind for your visitor. For example, you are trying to draw traffic via a pay-per-click adverstisement to your website that covers weight loss where you are selling a product on weight loss motivation. So, you construct an ad that reads…
"Lose weight fast
Discover our system for weight loss
guaranteed to work fast and keep your
weight off."
Do you see the problem?
Given that your trying to attract traffic that will buy your "weight loss motivation" information product, you have not been consistent with your message to market match.
Instead, you are likely to get hundreds of visitors who are looking for aspects of weight loss that you are not providing such as…nutritional information, information on diet pills, etc…
A better approach would be…
"Gain Massive Weight Loss Motivation"
Quick and easy system guarantees that you
will stay motivated on your way to reaching
your weight loss goals"
Now, you have targeted the specific keyword phrase that you know people are searching on AND that matches the product you are selling.
2. Are you getting their attention? Assuming your ad is on target, but you are not getting response from your ad – it could be that you haven’t gained their attention and interest. Here are a few ways you can improve the attention getting aspects of your ad…
- Use power adjectives like…massive, powerful, simple, fast, easy, complete, breakthrough…
- Tell them what they will get, have or be in the headline not a feature about your system
- If you are giving something away as an incentive for list building – tell them that in the headline
- Reference research, a current event or famous person if it applies
Keep your headlines short, results-oriented and avoid using too much hype.
3. Watch what you are asking them to do. Driving traffic directly to a sales site is often not the best approach to selling your products or services. Instead, drive them to a giveaway, a survey, an article, or your blog posting. Almost nobody is doing this, yet it can be highly effective. If you just wrote an article on the "5 Power Weight Loss Motivation Tips" which gives away great information followed by an offer – then setup a pay-per-click ad campaign to drive traffic to that page. Alternatively, if you are marketing someone else’s product as an affiliate – try sending your ad traffic to a review of the product to get better results.
4. Focus on your landing page. Without going into an in-depth expose of internet user psychology, you’re going to have to just trust me on this one…your landing page must very closely match your ad for it to be successful. Of most importance is that your exact keyword phrase used in the ads is used on the landing page – ideally front-and-center in the headline. I’ve tested this many times and even just changing that one keyword phrase on the landing page can mean a drop of 10% in response rate.
5. Test everything. When you run ads test different versions of the ads (with Google Adwords you can use split testing to simultaneously test multiple ads) with multiple versions of the landing pages (which you can test with either Google analytics or a decent 1/2 split testing software script. Even the professoional marketers and copywriters are fanatical testers – it’s the only way to get a read on whether improvements are necessary and if they are working.
Paid advertising is a way to enhance your traffic even more.
Unfortunately, most ads the online marketers use fail miserably. The good news is that with a few changes the results can change dramatically. You can go from a .5% click-through rate on an ad to 5% with one simple change. You can experience dramatic improvements in conversions by paying attention to matching your ad to your landing page content.
There’s no reason you need to be suffering with online ads that are not working…you have the power to turn your results around fast.
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