Tag Archives: sales

3 Laws of PPC Success

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Image: nokhoog_buchachon / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

If you can do well on PPC, you can drive a lot of profitable traffic to your website. PPC allows you to bypass the long, somewhat random and often expensive process of trying to get your websites ranked in the search engines.

Instead of trying to get rankings, you can just pay for the traffic instead. These three laws of PPC will help you ensure that you’re earning a positive ROI on this traffic.

==> Law #1 – Track Every Sale Back to the Keyword

The most important thing to track in PPC is the keywords that brought you the conversions. If you can identify converting keywords, you’re 90% of the way there.

Usually you’ll start with a large keyword list, the majority of which won’t be profitable. As you run traffic, it’s critical that you have tracking software which allows you to see where your sales are coming from.

You can use Google’s in-house tracking solutions, or you can use your own third party solutions. However, never ever ever run traffic without some sort of mechanism for tracking each sale back to the keyword that generated it.

==> Law #2 – Test Broad and Minute Ad Copy Changes

Always keep split testing. An ad that starts out with a 0.3% CTR could in a few months be getting a 3% CTR – effectively giving you ten times the traffic. In addition, with a higher CTR you’ll be paying a lower CPC, further driving up your profits.

Start by testing huge changes. For example, start by testing drastically different headlines and different kinds of ad copies. Try putting the price in your headline, for example, or using a shocker versus a how-to ad. Your ads should be completely different animals.

Then once you find a type of ad that seems to work best, gradually test more and more minute changes.

==> Law #3: Understand Quality Score

Each PPC engine has a quality score that’s slightly different than the other. Google AdWords’ quality score is different than Bing’s and both of them are different from Facebook.

On Bing, your quality score depends on your keyword relevance, landing page relevance and landing page user experience. The score is calculated on each match type. Unlike AdWords, they offer suggestions to improve your score.

AdWords’ quality score also takes relevance into account, as well as a high emphasis on CTR. They take the quality of your brand into account as well. There’s a large element of AdWords’ formula that’s secret.

Facebook’s is highly CTR centric. The higher your CTR, the better your CPC. The landing page quality guidelines are binary: it’s either good enough to be displayed or not.

If you follow these three laws of PPC success, you’ll be well on your way to a profitable campaign.

Landing page sales copy pt 2

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Image: Tim Beach / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In addition to careful copywriting, there are other important things you must take into consideration when writing a landing page that converts. For instance, it is important to build a compelling case for a time-bound offer.

Now, this doesn’t mean you have to invent fake deadlines and constantly revise them each week. This is a good way to guarantee your complete loss of credibility in the shortest amount of time possible.

However, when planning your copy, you will want to make sure that you constantly urge the reader to act immediately by inserting a number of “calls to action,” as I’ve mentioned previously.

You may want to consider using fly-ins or pop-ups to create more urgency – or to make a time-bound offer. Perhaps you can use a countdown to build urgency (i.e., when someone arrives at your landing page, they have five minutes to purchase the product at the lowest price).

Now, if you’re creating a squeeze page, you might want to employ slightly different tactics. Rather than building a compelling case with multiple triggers and calls to action over the course of 1000 words, you may want to simply condense that all into a compelling headline and one paragraph of “benefits.”

For a completely free-to-join squeeze page, you more than likely wont have a considerable amount of resistance to joining, unless the visitor a) doesn’t see any benefits; and b) suspects that you will sell their email address to spammers.

Both of these problems are relatively easy to overcome. In your headline, simply state the exact benefits they will receive for joining – as always, mixing in psychological triggers. In your first paragraph of copy, give them a compelling reason to join now (i.e., the price might go up, the list might become private, you’ll get this amazing report).

Now, to overcome the second problems, simply include a short line under your opt-in form that explains that you will not – under any circumstances – spam them or sell or give away their email address and name.

Landing page sales copy

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Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Most people have no idea how to write a landing page that converts. Instead, they slop together elements that they have seen used in other landing pages – but usually do not put them together in the same way the owner of the successful landing page did.

One major problem is copy. And that’s fine. Not everyone is going to be an excellent writer – nevermind a copywriter. But as someone selling a product or trying to build a list, it is important that you know your strengths and weaknesses – and that you either spend the time to overcome them or hire someone else to do it for you.

With copywriting, for instance, it is important to use a mix of compelling sales points with powerful psychological triggers. Most people who create a salespage miss either one or both of those elements.

For instance, they might concentrate so much on building hype that they don’t actually explain what solution they are providing – and for whom they are providing it. If I don’t have a specific problem that your product solves, why would I buy it? I wouldn’t.

Now, if they fail to sprinkle in psychological triggers, such as “scientifically proven,” “guaranteed,” and “shocking,” no one will feel compelled to continue reading, as the benefits will have a low or average perceived value.

In addition to these two problems, some salespages lack coherency and direction. The copy looks amateurish and it doesn’t slowly grind forward, breaking down the visitor’s resistance to the sale – and compelling him or her to buy more and more at each sales point.

Additionally, if there aren’t multiple calls to action – another form of psychological trigger – then a potential visitor might never feel compelled enough to pull out his or her credit card on the spot and make the purchase.

Sales Funnel 101

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A proper sales funnel will keep customers buying!

A sales funnel is a very powerful tool for a growing business. A traditional sales funnel as the photo shows, starts with many prospects, and as you move down the sales process of interest, pre-qualification, all the way to final sale, you lose out on a lot of customers. So you end up with a lot less sales then prospects.

We will look at a sales funnel in a slightly different way. A sales funnel to me is an optimized plan of sale to take your customer from a prospect to a buyer. As I always advocate a systematic approach will give your business the best results. Planning a sales funnel takes planning, but isn’t difficult.

First think about the products you currently offer. What are there price points? Are all of your products hanging around some “magic” number, say $997 because that’s what the guru’s charge? Do you have any products above and below that point? If you don’t you will need to re-think this. Try to have your offerings at a variety of price points, low, medium, and high ticket.

Having products or services available at different price categories will effectively widen out the funnel for your business. Less customers will be lost from step to step as there are now more options. If I use the example above of only offering a price point of $997 for Product X, out of 100 prospects, there are perhaps 10 people that will able and willing to purchase Product X during any given sales period. But what if I offer a basic Product IX that is $597? This could bump up our paying customers to 10 out of that 100 prospects. So now there is 20 sales, 10 at $997 and 10 at $597! Now that’s exciting!

 

Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

But I don’t want to stop there, human psychology teaches us people are creatures of habit and tend to go for the middle value. So to really make the sales funnel effective we need to have a mid value, so we need at least 3 price points. Say we really like getting $997 for our original price point. We’ve added a lower offering already, so let’s add a really high ticket item at $1697. This is the cream of the crop, deluxe, Cadillac version of our product or service. You may even think, heck no one will buy this, people skoff at the $997. But back to that buying psychology, people lean towards the middle. I know when I buy say a new computer, I don’t go for the top of the line and definitely not for the bottom, I stay right in the comfortable middle. Most people do, I think it may be herd mentality. Who knows? I just know it works.

Want to learn more about creating a profitable sales funnel? Profit Funnel Idea Manual will be available soon! Now available! Join my mailing list for advance notice on this and other guides.

Sales funnel manual only $7

 

 

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