The Six-Figure Second Income: How to Start and Grow a Successful Online Business Without Quitting Your Day Job (23 page)

to your e-mail inbox if you put your contact information in the box below. . . .″ They then

get the message that if they want that special report, they must give you a valid e-mail

address because that’s where you wil send the report.

I have made mil ions of dol ars by going further than that. Most of the time I request

their ful name, e-mail, and street address, and they give it to me because I tel them that I

wil mail a hardcopy
of the
report to them. Why do I bother to do that? Because I

appreciate how valuable a good lead is and I’d like to be able to contact them in multiple

ways. Most of my communications are via e-mail, but occasional y I send postcards,

letters, or short newsletters to my prospects. By mixing up the media I employ to reach

them, I have a better chance of having them actual y receive and read my message. I

know that I’m in a tiny minority of marketers who capture ful contact information but I also

know how highly profitable it’s been to me.

By the way, even if I occasional y don’t ask for a street address, I always ask at least

for first name and e-mail. When I then send an e-mail in the future, I can personalize it

with their first name.

Step Six: When They Submit Their Contact Information, Instantly Have It Go into

Your Database and Redirect Them to a Welcome Page

Many marketers are lazy. Frequently, after visitors leave their name and hit the Send

button in order to get a report, they’re left wondering if the message even went through.

In a later chapter I talk about the e-mail autoresponder mechanism you’l use to

communicate with prospects, but suffice it to say that your web form wil instantly log their

contact details and you should redirect them to a page that says:

“Thanks for requesting my report on Schnauzer Grooming Secrets. You can check

your inbox for that information. In the meantime, if you have any questions or comments

you can reach me by fil ing in the form below. I look forward to sharing my grooming

secrets with you and maybe talking with you soon! Regards, [Your Name].”

Notice how I referred to the specific report in the thank-you message. I also opened

the door to hear from them. Who knows—you may have a highly motivated person who’s

already wil ing to buy whatever you have. That should not come as a surprise to you

because during this entire process you have distinguished yourself from the competition

by being not pushy but helpful.

GREAT SOURCES FOR LEADS

The six steps we just covered for capturing a lead are pretty much the same steps no

matter where you’l advertise, with minor exceptions. Now let’s look at each of the lead

sources that I’ve found to be the most productive.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

This is one of my most favorite methods of generating quality leads. Pay-per-click

advertising is also known as PPC. The way it works is you pay a search engine like

Google to give you visibility. First, let’s make sure you know what PPC advertising looks

like on a search engine page. Take a look at Figure 5.1.

When a visitor types a term into Google, the page Google delivers can be divided into

three zones.

The Top Zone and Right Zone contain ads that advertisers pay for. The Left Zone is the

traditional area that contains results based on Google’s estimate of how valuable those

web pages are to visitors. In other words, the top and right zones are immediately

available to you as a web site owner, provided that you pay for that access. The left zone

is known as the organic rankings, and it’s free but only available to you if you impress

Google through a process we’l discuss later.

FIGURE 5.1 Where You Can Advertise on a Google Web Page

Several search engines offer PPC advertising but we’l use Google as an example

because they’re by far the biggest player. Google’s PPC service is cal ed
AdWords.
The

way PPC works is web sites bid for visibility. Google constantly tweaks its system and

what you see on the screen varies between topics people search for, but in general the

top zone contains the first two or three PPC listings. They’re cal ed ranks.

Typical y the first to third ranks are in the top zone, and then ranks four, five, and so

forth are the ads you see running down the page in the right zone. Depending on the

competitiveness of the search term, you can have page after page of PPC ads running

down that right zone. In other words, for an extremely competitive term like life insurance,

you might be ranked #152.

What you wil pay is total y determined by an auction market for each search term.

Let’s take a relatively standard example. Say you wanted to be found for dog grooming.

Using a special interface, you would tel Google that you would like to be found for that

term, also known as a key phrase. Perhaps there’s a very hot market for that term and

25 other marketers want to be found for it—that’s not unrealistic for a term like dog

grooming.

As I said before, Google cares about two things in life—making money and delivering

a good search experience to visitors. Therefore, the company that’s wil ing to pay

Google the most wil appear in the number one spot for dog grooming. However, you can

earn brownie points for having quality ads and quality web pages. That means, if two

advertisers bid the same amount, the higher-quality advertiser wil win over the lower-

quality advertiser.

You don’t pay Google if people simply see your ad, but you only pay if people click on

that ad and Google delivers them to your web page.

Bids for key phrases range from about 10 cents to—hang onto your hat—$50. That’s

correct: For certain absurdly competitive terms like Scottsdale
DUI
attorney, the going

rate when someone merely clicks on an ad to find a drunk-driving attorney is 50 bucks.

Hey, that’s what the market wil bear. Remember our return on investment discussion

earlier? These attorneys know the amount of money they’l make in order to represent a

person charged with drunk driving and they can do the math:
″Let′s
see, I’m wil ing to

spend a total of $900 to get a client who wil pay me $4,000 to represent him. That

means I can afford to have 18 people click on that ad at $50 per click, in the hope that

one of them wil become my
client.″
If another Scottsdale attorney can charge higher

fees or is wil ing to work on a smal er profit margin then he might outbid Mr. Fifty Bucks

and be wil ing to spend $55.

Here’s the interesting flipside: Don’t be elated if your clicks only cost you a dime

apiece—if those clicks don’t result in a sale. That may seem obvious but I’m continual y

amazed at how marketers wil be delirious with pleasure at cheap lead sources but not

calculate what real y counts—How much did I spend and how much did
I get
back?

Back to how AdWords works: Your bid and the quality of your ad and web page al

determine the rank of that ad. It’s fairly useless for your ad to be shown on page 2, 3, or

30 of the results. Think back to how you personal y use Google. When you search for

something do you scour page after page of results? I’m guessing not, because you’l

either see something interesting on page one or you adjust the search term and see

what fresh results you get. Only the most highly motivated customers wil search page

after page.

Question:

“But aren’t highly motivated customers the very ones we want?”

Good question! Yes, we want them but the problem is there are so few of

them. The other problem is, by hanging out on page 5 or 10, we’re keeping

Answer:

our fingers crossed that they get to us. I’d rather have a highly targeted ad

on page one and get to my motivated buyers faster and more reliably.

Therefore, you should pay what you need to pay in order to be in the top seven or eight

ad spots, so they are visible to visitors without their having to scrol down.

Question:

“Don’t I want to be in the number one spot? Why should I settle for less?”

The problem with the number one rank is you’re likely to pay much more

Answer:
money than the number two rank. That’s because a lot of ego drives that first

position:

“Wel done, Perkins, would you like a raise?”

The other problem is many people who click on the top ad are unmotivated browsing

people and not buyers. They’re the same guys who are click-happy during television

commercials and must scan through a dozen stations at every opportunity. They’re not

your buyers, but when you sit in the top rank, you’l pay each time they click.

You’re likely to get almost as much visibility but at a considerably lower cost by being

in ranks two through six or so.

What you say in your ads is extremely important. You have only a handful of words to

get across your message, so literal y every word and punctuation mark counts.

Entire books cover the topic of Google AdWords and we can’t cover al the principles

here, but keep this in mind: You’re not trying to sel them on anything in your ad. Al you

need to do is arouse their curiosity. Their eyes wil breeze over many ads in a fraction of

a second and your ad must stand out by being interesting. Here are three of the best

ways to do that.

One: Ask a question. People tend to stop and think when you ask a short, pithy

question. It’s a superb way to create involvement.

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Two: Feel their pain.
A short, bold statement can make them feel like,
″Hey,
you’re

one of
us.″

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Three: Give before you get.
When you mention a free report on a compel ing topic

you wil stand out from most other ads.

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When people click on your ad, they’l be taken to a page that you specify to Google.

Remember the key concept we talked about before—you simply must deliver them to a

page that reinforces just the thing they’re searching for.

That means not dumping them onto your home page, unless the site is total y devoted

to organic heirloom gardening tips. If it’s instead al about organic gardening, for

maximum effectiveness be sure to take them to the heirloom-tomato page.

If you think your customers are different and they have a much-longer attention span

and patience than other customers, you’re making a tragic mistake. Here’s a principle

that wil serve you wel .

Profit Principle: Design your ads and web pages to work for the most impatient and

distracted person you know. Don’t make that person hunt! If that person can quickly

grasp your message, then so wil the rest of your readers.

There’s another excel ent reason to deliver relevant content on your landing page

relating to the search term people typed in: Google measures how long readers stay on

your page, also known as engagement. If Google detects that many people land on your

page and immediately click to leave, they wil whack your quality score for that key

phrase. That means you wil pay more to rank in a given position versus an advertiser

with a better quality score.

Key Phrase Techniques

Remember that the entire AdWords process begins when you tel Google the key

phrases you want to be found for—in other words, when a visitor types in those terms,

you want your ad to show up.

It’s worth becoming proficient at choosing these phrases. In our earlier example, I

mentioned the key phrase dog grooming and how there’s most likely a lot of competition

around that phrase. It’s almost certainly too broad of a term for you to use because you