I’ve been thinking a lot over the past year about why people fail with Internet Marketing.  I guess since I’ve spent so much time thinking about it, this report just flowed right out of me yesterday. 

It’s geared toward people who aren’t succeeding with their Internet Marketing efforts. 

If you’re already seeing success, then I bet you’re already doing what’s in the report.  And if so, please take a minute to leave a comment for everyone else. 

If your not seeing success then I think this report will shed some light on why that may be.

Here’s the link to the report: Why You Can’t Make Money Online

If you’ve watched the site, you know I haven’t been around much lately.  So I’d like to share with you why that’s been…

I decided there’s a real lack of information on SEO as far as something people can take, digest and then follow along in order to get top rankings for their sites.  So I decided to put together an SEO training course based on my year’s of SEO experience. 

I actually built a site before I got started so that I was absolutely, 100% sure I didn’t leave any of the steps out.  And although it’s taken me a long while to get this course together, I think it will be very worthwhile to webmasters and small business owners.

It’s turned out to be a lot longer than I expected; with about 8 hours of training videos, an Action Plan with worksheets, 6 modules and much more.  Since it’s so big, and really the point behind it is to fill out the Action Plan while you watch the videos (so that you start seeing an increase in your rankings instead of just reading how to do it), I’ve decided to have it turned into a physical product.  So next week, I’ll be sending it out to Cindy at Disk.com (my fulfillment company). 

Here’s a screenshot of what the CD-Rom menus will look like:

I’ve put a lot of work into this product and really think it’ll be a great help for people who want to learn how to get top rankings.

Anyway, I’m really excited about it!  And I just wanted to let you know why I’ve taken the long break and that I will definitely start posting again. 

All the best…

Lisa

If you’ve been following the posts I put out right before the holidays, you’ve seen the Affiliate Marketing Blueprint.  The first 5 modules that I’ve posted all deal with assessing a niche.  My philosophy is that you want to waste as little time as possible figuring out which markets you can make a profit from. 

The problem is that it takes time to set up a website, an autoresponder, craft a sales letter or landing page, and put together affiliate links/banners/images, or even worse, create your own product.  If you’re not careful, you can easily waste a month on just these activities before you make any money from any given market.  It’s also possible to do all this work only to find out that you’re not ever going to make any real money from the effort you put in.

So the assessment phase of the blueprint is really important.  I put it together and use it to make sure that all the work I do will pay off.  It saves time and money.  If you don’t use this blueprint, or come up with some other way to assess markets before you spend time and money on them, you’ll likely end up burning yourself out and may give up.

If you’ve read the modules, you’ll see that I like to start with PPC campaigns, specifically Adwords.  I think it’s the fastest and easiest way to figure out which keywords directly match up with the product you’re trying to sell.  I like SEO and that’s my main method for getting large volumes of traffic, but it still takes some time, especially compared with the speed of using PPC.  You can set-up a campaign in about an hour or so with PPCS and start getting traffic immediately.  Even if you’re good at SEO and have a plan in place, you’ll be lucky to get a high volume page one ranking in several weeks.  So what I do is use PPC to find out the keywords related to my target market that will PAY me before I try to rank for anything.  Then after I figure out what keywords I’m making money from, I target those through SEO.  I know a lot of people don’t like to pay for traffic, but this is a great way to avoid wasting your time.  And time is something we’re all limited by.

I hope you’ll give the information I’ve put together in the assessment part of the blueprint a try.  And I’ve set up this post to address any questions you may have on any of the information I’ve covered so far.  I’ll do my best to answer your questions in the comments section below.

Now you have your generic domain name, your landing page as I outlined in the previous “Landing Page Intelligence” module, your keywords and the affiliate program you’re going to promote.

All that’s left is to put it altogether by firing up your Adwords campaign. Google has a wizard that makes creating campaigns, ad groups, adding keywords, creating copy, and setting up bid prices pretty easy. So I’ve just listed out the main points here…

Create a new campaign just for this test niche. You might just call it “Dog Training”.

Create the ad groups by theme, Dog Training, Puppy Training, Train Dog, etc… Remember that you must focus in tightly. For this example, we’ve decided to go with ‘dog training’ instead of ‘housebreaking’ or ‘dog obedience’. We’ll save the themes we don’t use now for later.

Within each ad group go ahead and copy and paste the keywords from your theme lists.

Next, start on the ad copy for each theme as you set it up. I really don’t get very fancy with the copy for my test run. The main thing is to put the ad group theme words in the copy at least twice (once in the headline and at least once in the body copy). Part of the reason I had you organize the keywords this way is that ALL the keywords in a single ad group have the same copy. Anytime a surfer searches for the words in your ad group, the words show up as bold.

So by having a central theme for each ad group and using those words in your ads, the searcher will always see at least some of the words he or she used for the search bolded in your ad. This will increase your click-thru’s significantly.

Depending on the niche, sometimes I’ll make it clear that surfers are going to a review site. Other times I’ll talk about the problem and solution. Just be sure to include the theme words in the copy. If you want, write 2 ads and split test them against each other. Make it clear one is a review and the other is a problem and solution. Most of the time, the problem and solution ad will out-pull the review ad, but not always.

Problem and Solution Ad

Review Ad

Set your bid prices pretty low, especially if you are new at this and don’t want to go broke. I know I don’t want to give Google any more money than I have to, so I still set my bid prices pretty low to start (15 to 35 cents a click unless I know it’s a hyper-competitive market like ‘web hosting’ and I’ve decided to go for it anyway).

Set your daily budget pretty low, like $5 to $10 a day. Set an end date for the campaign just in case you forget to stop it. 5 to 10 days is usually enough for analyzing whether this set-up is worth pursuing.

Within your campaign, make sure you have only English speaking countries selected and disable the content network. I would also set the budget to accelerated (to show the ads as quickly as possible) and you’ll want the ads to rotate as evenly as possible (especially if you set-up 2 ads to run against one another). All this can be found under “Edit Campaign Settings” just in case you missed it during set-up.

You are now live!

Watch your campaign for a few days. You should expect to spend about $50 to get any worthwhile results. You will need about 200 clicks to begin making any judgments at all.

Now I realize some of you reading this are going to throw a fit that you have to spend some money to get into a business. All I have to say is ‘are you kidding me?’ Compared to the cost to enter most businesses, this is peanuts. Don’t go crazy with your ad spend, but $50 to test out a niche is not a whole lot of cash. For many niches, you can get a pretty good idea with even less.

That’s really about all I need to figure out if I want to pursue a niche or not. Top affiliates I’ve spoken with agree that number is plenty in most cases (just don’t pick something like ‘web hosting’ which has a minimum bid of about $10 to get to the top of the rankings).

Analyze your results. Did any of the keywords result in sales? Hopefully you had some.

If not, pause the campaign and see if your landing page is the problem. If you think it might be, you may want to re-work it and try again. We’re shooting for credible here. If the fonts are all over the place and the copy is hard to read, you’re not looking very credible. You also want compelling. This can often be accomplished by talking about the problems your prospects are having, how you had them once too, but you found the solution in the product you’re recommending.

If you really put in some effort on the landing page, have done your keyword research homework and still have not made any sales, you may want to examine your keyword themes and try a different subset (for example, since we started with dog training, you might want to try housebreaking this time). Give it another go.

If you really are not getting any sales at this point, you should scrap the whole experiment and move onto your next niche. Seriously. If you can’t make any sales with about 200 or so clicks set up the way I showed you for a tight theme (and you’ve even tried it twice now), you might not have a good market to match. It happens.

Note that I’m not talking about making a profit; I’m talking about making any sales at all … period.

If you made a few sales with the quick set up I’ve outlined above, you’ve probably found a niche worth going after. If you broke even (spent $50 and made $50) you definitely found something with potential and should pursue it further. If you actually made money, you are onto something scorching and should be super excited to put in more work.

If you didn’t find a winner this time then go back to the beginning and try again. Don’t be too upset because next time all you need to do is select a niche, an affiliate program, some keywords, and put together a landing page on your generic site. So you’re at least starting with more than you did the first time. You should also have more experience writing copy for the landing page and setting up Adwords campaigns. So you are learning. Do not take this experience as a failure at all.

While I know you can definitely earn money with these techniques, they do take a little practice.

Expect that you won’t find a winner every time and just get back to the drawing board.

When you find a winner here’s where the momentum should kick in. Stop testing niches for right now and get going.  You’ve now completed the ‘Assessment’ phase of the program.  Now you need to learn how to increase your profits.  I call this next phase, ‘Level I’… and the first module within it will show you how to “Slap Google Back”.  But we’ll get to that later.

At this point in the system, you have an affiliate program selected in a particular market and a solid group of keywords organized by theme (which I covered in the “From Chaos to Themes” module.  The idea is to use these keywords to promote your affiliate product.  

Next, you need a landing page. I do not promote anything with a direct link to the affiliate program (which is why I had you set up a generic domain to test all your niches). Here are a few reasons why I think trying to get away with direct linking is bad practice:

- You can’t always tell if your product is going to convert with a landing page and
this is crucial later on.
- You’ll miss out on building a real asset; instead you’ll just have a money maker.
- Adwords will penalize you for directly linking to the affiliate if they let it slide
at all (it’s not worth it to game the system because even if you get away with it
for a while, it will eventually stop working and your income will dwindle).
- You’ll never get much free traffic from the search engines by directly linking to
the affiliate and that’s part of the system.

All in all, I think it’s bad practice to link directly to the affiliate. It will severely limit your growth.

At the same time, we aren’t going to go out a register a domain name for this site just yet. And we’re definitely not going to spend our time building a 5, 10, 20 page site around the niche because we don’t know yet if we can make it convert.

All we are going to do to test it out initially is put together a landing page (or pages). Then we take the potential money keywords from the list we created and plug them into Adwords. We absolutely need a place to send the folks who click thru the ad so it is crucial that you create at least one landing page.  And now that Google uses a quality score, you may need to add in some good content in order to get low bid prices.

At any rate, for this task, you’re are going to need an HTML editor. I personally use and recommend Dreamweaver, but it’s expensive. If you’re looking for free, I’ve heard lots of positive comments about NVU. It’s pronounced N-View in case you were wondering.  You can probably also use a CMS like Wordpress if you’re already familiar with it.

There are several different ways to create a landing page. One popular method is to create a page that reviews a few items. Another is just to review or pre-sell one item.

I recommend you search popular keywords related to your niche using Google and see what others promoting similar products are doing. This should help you decide the best method to start with.

I would then visit the sales page of the merchant and try to distill the main benefits of their product. What problems does the product solve? How does it work? Come up with compelling bullet points.

Often, I’ll make a list of the problems the product strives to solve and I’ll list those (or incorporate them into a paragraph). Keep in mind your prospect already has a conversation going on in his head. If he’s seeking the solution to a problem, then he’s likely surfing the internet upset and desperate for that solution.

Here’s an example that should help you get in the right mindset. This mindset will truly help you create killer landing pages:

Joe came home yesterday to a mess on his floor caused by none other than ‘man’s best friend’, his pooch, Max. He’s extra mad because he only left Max for about 2 hours while he went to the gym and the supermarket. He had a dinner date with his new girlfriend that evening and wanted to have everything ready before she showed up. But when he arrived back home with his groceries (30 minutes before she was to show up) he came home to a disgusting mess.

Joe lit some fragrant candles and kept the lights down low, but he thought for sure it still smelled in the apartment. Nothing was ready when his date showed up. He had to spend the first 30 minutes of their date frantically chopping carrots, lettuce, and the like.

Needless to say, Joe was pretty mad at Max the whole evening and into the next morning. First thing that morning he starts surfing the internet looking for anything that will help him better train Max.

There’s the background …

Now here’s the conversation going on in Joe’s head while he’s searching…

“That dang dog, he knows better than this. I want a quick solution for housebreaking him once and for all. The last thing I have time for is to take him to a class, plus he’s too old now. Isn’t there something to help me housebreak my dog?”

So Joe types in ‘housebreak my dog’ into Google.

He sees the following page …

1. The top listing says “7 Day Puppy Housebreaking”. Joe’s already thinking about how he has a dog, not a puppy, or he might consider clicking on this one. Although it sounds enticing, it doesn’t sound right to him. He figures whatever that site has to offer is not going to work on his 2 year old dog.

2. He keeps going down the list of results on the left. Nothing in the regular search results look all that appealing to Joe. The last one from Yahoo! Answers – “How to house break my dog. I have a Siberian Husky?” is one that catches his eye, but Max is a Lab, so he passes it by (notice there’s probably not a whole lot of difference between training a Husky and a Lab, but it just doesn’t speak to him).

3. That leaves the ads on the right. “Dog training” and “your dog training” are quickly scanned over and skipped. Then he spots another “Housebreak puppy” ad. “Too late for that”, Joe thinks to himself.

The next ad, “Secrets of Dog Training” sounds interesting, but again he just wants one problem solved right now, housebreaking, not everything!

*! Finally, Joe spies the fifth ad down, “House Break Your Dog”. This one sounds good to Joe so he reads the rest of the ad, “Free help from the experts. How to articles. Or, ask a behaviorist!” Joe clicks through, happy that he found something at all and even happier that it has the word “FREE” in it.

Here’s the page he is taken to…

This is perfect. The headline says “Tips for Retraining Adult Dogs”. This absolutely resonates with someone like Joe. Look at how nice the site looks. It’s not just a blurb of short, automatically generated copy. Someone went through a significant amount of trouble here.

Joe is not going to hit the back-button as he found exactly what he was looking for right on this page. He continues reading and likes the fact that they say ‘progress with an adult dog should be faster than with a puppy’ in the subheadline… so he reads the entire article.

It’s interesting stuff, but Joe does need a solution, so he starts looking at all the ads to the right. The one he likes is the No-P Housebreaking Aid that eliminates urine and feces odors. He orders a 16 oz bottle to try it out, then comes right back to the article, looking for more information.

This is what he finds at the bottom of the page … a way to ask someone how to solve his problem. So Joe gives that a try.

At this point, Joe feels pretty satisfied with the fact that he’s going to get an answer from an Animal Behaviorist. He’s also happy that he’s got a product coming that will help remove the smell from Max’s accident.

OK, back to reality. While the story is interesting at all, what matters to you as a marketer? Well what should matter is that you’ve got real people with real problems (at least what they consider real problems) looking for solutions on the internet.

They always have something going on in their mind. A conversation if you will. Think about how you surf the internet. You sit down with a problem in mind and use Google or your favorite search engine to find the answer. You come up with a keyword or keyphrase and sort of “rate” the results you’re presented with.

“No” to that one so you keep looking. “Yes” to that one, so you click. Then when you get to the landing page, you decide if it was a good decision. If not you click the back button, if yes, you read the page. You do this over and over until you find something that resonates with the conversation going on in your head.

This is invaluable to us marketers.

All surfers are having a conversation with themselves as they surf. They think out their problem and put together a keyphrase based on it. Like I said in the previous module, your Adwords ads should have that keyphrase right in the headline and the body copy. That part’s a no-brainer for sure.

If someone’s looking for info on housebreaking their dog, you want your ad to speak to them; it shouldn’t have the word puppy in it or training, but the words ‘housebreaking + dog’. Maybe you can title the ad, “Housebreaking Your Dog”. Someone in Joe’s position would have clicked on it.

BTW, this is a pretty competitive niche and did you notice how many ads we had to scan to find even one that had those words in it? Most advertisers just don’t get this.

OK, so you now have your prospects attention by focusing the ad to a keyword match. You get them to click on it. The next thing is to keep them on the landing page. If you used the word “free” in your ad, then you better give them some free information. And it better be useful and well organized. Otherwise they’re clicking away. So make sure you follow through.

Another point is to make sure your landing page resonates with the same conversation going on in their head. They aren’t going to change it now. So if you used ‘Housebreaking Your Dog’ as the headline in your ad, don’t use ‘How to Housebreak Your Puppy: A Six Step System’ now on the landing page. If you do, I bet most will click the back button. Make sure to stay with the same situation.

*** This does mean that if you are going to have lots of different Adwords themes, a single landing page is not going to cut it. We’ll get more into this later, but for now, you are going to have to come up with either one page that will keep the folks who click through happy or a couple of landing pages. So that means you need to focus your efforts.

If you had 12 themes now, you may want to cut out half of them and focus on the 6 that might be able to lead into just one landing page. If you only started with 6, you may need to trim that list down to 3 to start with.

Do you want to appeal to people trying to train their dog or people trying to housebreak one? It’s likely that virtually any niche you select can be broken up in this manner. Go through your themed keywords and select which ones could potentially lead to the same page. Create a landing page that makes sense for all of them.

If you decide to focus on people searching for housebreaking, then you will need to make sure you focus on that in each ad you write (we’ll cover that in a minute). Then when folks click through, you must have something like ‘How to Housebreak Your Dog or Puppy in 5 Simple Steps’ as the headline on your page. You could give them 5 simple steps and then lead them through to another link where they can get more information.

That’s really all you need to do with your landing page. Keep them interested and make them feel like the page was written just for them, give them information, and then lead them to click on your affiliate link.

After that, it’s all up to the merchant.

You may want to include photos of the books where possible or other images (in this example, a cute puppy). You can also give a blurb explaining the features of the book and include bullet points for it.

The pages I copied and pasted from the ‘housebreaking your dog’ site are actually really good, except for the fact that there are way too many links on the page. Strive for a nice, clean layout like that with a newsy feel to it and keep the links to a minimum. The major link on the page should be your affiliate link.

And I would suggest putting your affiliate link in several places on the page. Entice prospects to click on it each time.

There are a number of different ways to create a landing page, but I’ve pasted a template that works well when you’re reviewing just one product. This template is plan so it’s just to give you an idea … feel free to change it around for your needs …

Remember, this is just a guide; you can change it up depending on the product you are promoting. I do not always follow this template exactly (although I may start with this to begin with).

Now that you have your page created, you need to watch what you name it. Here are a couple of ways to do this:

Bestproducts.com/HousebreakYourDog.html
Bestproducts.com/Housebreaking.html

Or…

HousebreakYourDog.BestProducts.com
Housebreaking.BestProducts.com

Either set up a subdomain with the keyphrase in the name, or just title the page with your keyphrase. Either way will work (in my experience, the subdomains will pull higher click thrus, but remember, you are just testing for now). The important point is to make sure you put the keyphrase in the URL.

If your landing page is really short, you may also take an article from Ezinearticles.com and put it at the very bottom of your page. Set it up so that it looks nice with the rest of the site’s layout. Having this extra related content will help with your Adwords quality score.

I only suggest Ezinearticles.com as it is a way to get good content quickly.  And the Adwords quality score is based on the content of your site and whether or not it relates to the keywords or keyphrase you’re bidding on.  The quality score system is constantly being improved upon and really the more work you put into your landing page the better, but if you just want to test out a keyword for now, you don’t want to spend 20 hours of your time on a single landing page. 

I know there’s a link in the resource box of these articles, but since you’re putting it at the very bottom of the page, not many folks are going to click on it (or even read it for that matter). They’ll have hopefully clicked on your affiliate link before they even see this article (but Google Adwords will count it in the text on your page and give you a higher score which means you pay less).

You can also put affiliate links around the article and at the bottom just in case. Just do not violate the terms of service of these articles. If you’re going to use one, you absolutely must include the link.

OK, in the next installment, we’re going to put all this together and fire up your Adwords campaign.  I call this next segment, “Adwords Inception” …