The Incredible Power Of Google And Adwords

The Overlooked Power of Negative Keywords

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Wipf) — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 23:12:00 +0000

Before I get into today's topic, a word or two about Overture's Keyword Selector Tool at inventory.overture.com.

Rumor has it that Yahoo is taking this site down. Lately it's been rather unreliable, sometimes available, sometimes not.

First, a plea for sanity to our friends at Yahoo Search Marketing: Guys, I know and you know that most people come to your site and take your handy keywords and go dump them into Google. I know that makes ya mad. 'Cuz Google passed you by 3 years ago and you've been trying to catch up ever since.

Yahoo, I submit to you that taking this keyword tool away can only drop your stock price even lower, because then Google advertisers will have one less reason to even know who you are, much less advertise on the Yahoo/Overture network. (When analysts at giant mutual funds who own $500 million of Yahoo stock call me on the phone and ask, that's what I tell 'em.)

Yahoo, the most strategic thing you can do is make your tool even better, and perhaps even put a link on this tool to some videos or something that explain how to use your own PPC system.

Oh, and just in case Yahoo decides to can this thing for good, there's a handy alternative available now at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ My thanks to Mike and Mindy Mindel for providing that.

Onward to the topic at hand.

Most people don't pay near enough attention to negative keywords. Or maybe they stick in words like "free" or "cheap" but usually that's not enough. Sometimes the total success or failure of your PPC campaign hinges on the proper use of negative keywords.

Here's an example - the keyword "soap." Here are the results you get from the Overture inventory tool:

Searches done in December 2006
Count Search Term
91393 soap opera
63090 soap
41891 soap opera digest
34895 soap central
21779 soap opera central
17220 soap making
13494 soap opera update
13439 cbs soap
12595 abc soap
7271 soap digest
6977 soap city
6794 soap dispenser
5608 soap opera weekly
5178 daytime soap
4974 handmade soap
4778 cbs daytime soap opera
4685 soap making supply
4629 soap dish
4525 daily soap opera update
4344 passions soap opera
4234 soap opera spoiler
4136 all my child soap opera
4099 young and the restless soap opera
3787 soap spoiler

If you're bidding on the keyword 'soap' and using anything other than exact match [soap] it's gonna be real, real hard to make this keyword work. If you sell soap related products, then the list you see here is actually more valuable in terms of the negative keywords it gives you (opera, digest, cbs, daytime) than the positive keywords (handmade, dispenser, dish).

So what you should do is bid this way:

[soap]
"soap"
soap

with negative keywords

-opera
-digest
-central
-cbs
-abc
-daytime
-passions
-children

....and you should go all the way down the list, plucking out as many negative keywords as you possibly can.

When you do that, your CTR on broad match and phrase match will go up, sometimes even double or triple. On a term like 'soap', broad and phrase match will probably not work AT ALL unless you have a very extensive list of negative keywords.

2-3 years ago on PPC, the name of the game was slinging a lot of mud against the wall and seeing what sticks. Today, less is more, and negative keywords are just the kind of 'less' that will sharpen your saw and make you effective.

One last thing: My bookstore book is out on the shelves now. If you give Amazon $16.47 and commit 10 minutes a day to reading The Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords, then 30 days from now you'll be smarter than 98% of all Google Advertisers. Not only about AdWords, but all essential online marketing skills.

For a blow-by-blow explanation of the book, why we wrote it (hint: I'm a self-aggrandizing egomaniac) and what's in it, go here:

http://www.perrymarshall.com/google/ultimateguide.htm

To your success,

Perry Marshall

Seven Deadly Sins & The Art Of Persuasion

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Wipf) — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 14:44:00 +0000

Seven Deadly Sins & The Art Of Persuasion

Once someone sent me a glib little marketing article with a list of the Seven Deadly Sins. It explained that the more you appeal to your customers' Pride, Envy, Wrath, Gluttony, Lust, Sloth and Greed, the more you'll sell.

I knew the guy was right... but I also knew that when you brazenly pander to the lowest common denominator, you infect your customers with a bunch of diseases that you too will catch... and eventually you suffer a wretched, miserable death.

One must be careful what one succumbs to.

I've always thought I should write something about this, and then copywriter Tony Ostian sent me a piece about the late Martin Conroy. Martin is the man who wrote the Wall Street Journal subscription letter, a 780 word masterpiece of persuasion that has now sold over $1 Billion of subscriptions (!). The very most successful sales letter of all time.

Martin, too, suggested applying the Seven Deadly Sins. But he had a different take on it.

Listen up... this is brilliant:

"If you're trying to find out what makes people tick, you might take a look at the Seven Deadly Sins from the old Baltimore Catechism. Remember them? Pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy and sloth. Of course, the deadly sins are all bad and all extreme and all no-nos.

"But there's an unsinful, unextreme side to every one of them where you can see how good and honest people act and react. On the sunny side of sinful pride, for example, nice people still take normal, unsinful satisfaction in what they are and what they have.

"Short of deadly covetousness, people have an understandable desire to possess some of the good things in life. Instead of sinful lust, there's good old love that makes the world go 'round. Without raging in anger, good people can still feel a reasonable annoyance with bad people and bad things. Without getting into gross gluttony, normal men and women can have a normal appetite for good food and drink. Short of envy, there's a very human yen to do as well as the next guy. And as for sloth, who isn't happy to learn an easier way to do things?

"The Seven Deadly Sins. If you want to know what makes people act like people, they're worth a look."

Whether you're advertising a new business opportunity or tempting your own taste buds with a steak dinner, the difference between success and self-destruction is the fine line of discernment that keeps you from taking things just a bit too far. Trespass that line and someone starts making promises they can't keep... customers get resentful... suddenly grim guys from the government in black suits show up and freeze your bank accounts.

Or you can build on the unsinful, unextreme side of those desires and have a business that lasts.

Hope your New Year is going full tilt, I know mine is. Keep swingin' that axe,

Perry Marshall

"Something Is Desperately Wrong In America..."

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Wipf) — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 04:19:00 +0000

By: Perry Marshall 2007

"Something Is Desperately Wrong In America..."

What's the first thing you think when you read that?

Does it trigger any impulses?

It's just pregnant with possibilities, isn't it? You could
go a thousand directions with it. With an intro like that,
at the very minimum you're guaranteed to start with a
hearty nod of agreement from a whole bunch of people.

Whether you fly high with your next sentence or fall
flat on your face depends entirely on how well you
read your audience. If you know what itch they're
dying to scratch, then you've got the opening shot
of a great fundraising letter... a scintillating email
subject line... a launch pad for your newest manifesto.

This wouldn't have to be about 'obvious' political
items, either. It could be a mailing list broker
ranting about incompetence and waste in the U.S.
Post Office. It could be about the latest security flaw
in Microsoft Windows. It could be about some bankruptcy
judge that just got elected in Rhame, North Dakota -
the one that's about to trigger an avalanche of
financial woes onto our unsuspecting populace.

You can have all kinds of fun with this. If the
person you're talking to agrees, you've formed
an instant bond.

The road to revolution is paved with feelings of
brokenness, rage, lost hope and spoiled ambitions,
and the politicos shamelessly exploit this. When
our very foundations of peace, freedom and prosperity
teeter on the edge of the abyss.... When the enemy
strains every rippling muscle to pull civilization over
the edge, you can't help yourself. You boil with rage,
hang on every word.

On a recent Mastermind call, we discussed the fact
that in spite of what we'd all prefer, most people do
what they do not for stated reasons but because of
anger, fear, insecurity, jealousy, boredom.... he
wants to win the golf game, not to be a
superlative sportsman but to humiliate Bill who's a
constant jerk in staff meetings.

"I can't wait to see that ball neatly fall into the hole
and wipe that smirk off Bill's face... he's gonna pay..."

Whether you sell online or off, it's this level of
understanding that separates the men from the boys.
You're not selling vacation packages or golf clubs or
quality management software, you're selling endorphin
rushes. You're selling antidotes to anger, fear, insecurity,
jealousy, boredom. Antidotes to that Bill guy who frosted
your cookie in a staff meeting.

In personal AdWords coaching we install the moving
parts for an ultra-successful online business, but there's
something much more important, more fundamental than
even that. Because in the Team Action Groups and 1-on-1
calls we explore this gritty, organic, inner psychology.
The stuff that really sets your success on fire.

--------------------------------------
Brought To You By:
Perry Marshall Coaching

First Gear - Second Gear - Third Gear - Fourth

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Wipf) — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 21:10:00 +0000

*Add $25,000 minimum to your bottom line in '07, turbo progress in 12 short weeks. Backed by a robust, gutsy guarantee. www.PerryMarshall.com/Adwords/PersonalCoaching.htm

Hello My Internet Friend,

The person who taught me how to drive a stick shift was none other than my wife, Laura.

But she wasn't my wife then. Wasn't quite even my girlfriend yet. (I was falling madly in love with her though.... still am :^> ... but I digress) It was the summer before our senior year, we were both 17 and Laura had this little brown Datsun she drove around in. She took me out to the deserted country roads in rural Nebraska where I hopefully wouldn't do too much damage popping that clutch.

I tell you, letting that clutch out just right, getting smooth acceleration from 0 to 60, tricky tricky tricky. I stalled that engine over and over again.

Those of us who have grown to like manual transmissions - mastered them - know that a skilled driver is smoother than the best automatic transmission. You got snow and ice? Give me a stick shift, baby, and I'm in control.

A savvy guerilla marketer, like the gal who's mastered that stick shift, starts from rest with a barely perceptible nudge from zero - wouldn't wake a sleeping baby - then you feel the seat pressing firmly against your back, excitement rushes through your body as the fence posts speed by faster and faster, and before you know it you're going 90 or 100. She's run through every gear and you didn't even feel the transitions.

Somebody sees that Google ad and it's so close to the conversation inside his head that it's only natural he'd click on that one instead of the others. He doesn't get bruised in the slightest on the squeeze page... it's only natural (there's that phrase again) that he'd exchange his information for yours, and then one step at a time he wises up to your way of doing things, your way of solving problems... pretty soon he's not even searching the web anymore because he's so happily
involved in *your* world.

It doesn't stop. After the first sale is a second and a third and a fourth, because you have a plan for moving those customers up your ladder, from casual drives in rural Nebraska to first date to
engagement to marriage to a beautiful baby girl being born, then....

Oops, I'm digressing again. Can you hit 200 miles an hour? It's possible, on the open road. There's no speed limit on the information super highway.

*Marketing Equivalents of Popping The Clutch & Stalling The Engine

-The #1 disconnect is between the keyword itself and your basic message. You'd be astonished how big the differences are between seemingly similar keywords, how different the visitors can be between, say "guinea pig" and "guinea pigs."

-Overstatement: Amateur copywriters think writing copy is all about bombast and drama. Exaggeration and yellow highlighter.

They say stupid things like "Why you should crawl buck nekked on broken glass to get your hands on these hot new secrets" and the first thing the visitor thinks is "Oh no, not another one
of those yo-yos" and quickly punches the BACK button. Throws it into revers and he's outta there. I think one of the most powerful copywriting tools is....

*Understatement.*

Here's an example: When I was in Nairobi Kenya I met a 7 year old boy who was dying of AIDS for lack of a $1 bus ticket to get a free shot. (No joke.)

A rookie copywriter might have gotten in-your-face about this unfortunate boy. I said: ....

I met another boy named Peter Githiri, 7 years old, who is also HIV positive. Peter is not doing so well. A sponsor has not been found for him yet, and lacking medical attention, he is obviously very sick.

"Not doing so well" got the point across. It left Peter's appearance to the readers' imagination. Hey, you're not dumb. You can fill in the blanks. Right?

-Treating all markets the same, or that all techniques work the same way with everyone. No siree Bob. I was talking to Tellman Knudson the other day, who sells products both to online marketers and to parents of ADHD children. He said, "What entrepreneurs respond to and what parents of children respond to are TOTALLY, ABSOLUTELY DIFFERENT."

My motto is: Talk to people the way they talk to each other and themselves.

-Know what you're going to sell them next. You know what's suicide for a Google AdWords campaign? Trying to sell one product in one shot, having no follow up before the sale and nothing to sell after the sale. You could get away with this 2-3 years ago, but you can't now.

In personal AdWords coaching we make you the master of that silky-smooth clutch, and we make the transitions between the gears seamless. And as you develop the skill to run through those gears, your girlfriend or boyfriend or husband or wife - or maybe your mom who's put up with you and believed in you for three or four decades now.... well, you do 'em mighty proud.

Show 'em tail lights.

www.PerryMarshall.com/Adwords/PersonalCoaching.htm

Perry Marshall

Sometimes You've Just Gotta FIRE a Customer!

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Wipf) — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 02:13:00 +0000

A GREAT E-MAIL I JUST RECEIVED FROM PERRY...READ ON..

--------------------------------------------------------------

***Of all the emails I sent out in 2006, this one
generated the most passionate response. Seriously,
I must've gotten 500 replies, all kinds of stories...
tales of abuse and liberation. If you never saw this, enjoy it.

And if you did, enjoy it a second time. Because as you
begin 2007 I must remind you that some customers
deserve your time and attention. And... some do NOT.***
--------------------------------------------------------------

Jack Welch, who led GE to blazing success,
had a rule: You gotta get rid of the bottom 10%
of your employees every year. Controversial,
but it obviously worked.

I say, the same applies to customers. The worst
of them are NOT worth it. And in today's we celebrate
the firing of one of MY customers. This one's a case
study in "jerk factor."

This guy (we'll call him "A") registered for the $95
application fee to come to the seminar but his
credit card didn't go through. Then when Jeremy contacted
"A" to straighten this out, "A" started demanding to be
given a whole bunch of information (almost all of which
was already on the sales letter BTW!) and then he
just got nasty:

"If the seminar isn't good or is just a sales
pitch or is a bunch of eager yahoos all running
forward to lick boots and ingratiate themselves
like whining curs, frankly I'd rather sit tight
where I am."

"I could deliver a two hours speech on AdWords
and 25% clickthru ratios in the toughest
industries out there at 5?/click."

"Your reticence to give me the information (basic:
schedule and accomodations) and eagerness to
whack my card non-refundable fees has me very,
very wary of your entire organisation at this
point. Most of the goodwill the the Definitive
Guide to Google AdWords created is down the drain."

Jeremy spent an entire week trying to be nice to this
guy. Which is really incredible considering the guy
apparently can't read - the application fee IS refundable,
and the details are on my site. But you have to
understand Jeremy, he's just about the nicest guy you
can find.

If Jeremy's sister calls him up on the phone and asks him
to pick up a gallon of milk on the way home, he'll say
"I love you, Abbey" before he hangs up. That's how
nice Jeremy is. I'm a nice guy too but I'm not THAT
nice. (Not to my sister anyway.)

Well all this was going on without my knowledge. But
when I saw his email ("eager Yahoo's all running forward
to lick boots...") I snapped.

I wrote him back:

"You are not invited to this seminar; all further
discussion about this is terminated and also
I am terminating your Renaissance Club Membership.
I will not tolerate having my employees being treated
the way you have been treating Jeremy, especially
when you refuse to pay. I am sorry for any
misunderstanding but I expect my members to use
good etiquette with our staff at all times."

End of discussion. People like "A" do not belong at
my seminar. They do not belong on my customer list.
They do not belong on YOUR customer list. We don't
need "A" to deliver a 2 hour speech on Adwords.
People like "A" need to be left to rot in their pool of misery
and not smear it all over us. They need to be fired.
They eat up time, resources and emotional energy
better devoted to customers who treat you and
your employees right.

Now here's the real point: YOU have customers like this too
(right?) and truth be told you can see 'em coming a mile
away. The only thing that makes them happy is
when they get their pound of flesh out of somebody.

I'm giving you permission to fire them. Get rid of
'em. Cancel their purchase order, give 'em their
money back, send 'em packing. Then give your
precious time and attention to another customer
who deserves it. The one who deserves it is
almost always less demanding and doesn't have
this nasty entitlement complex. And spends money
with you, with less resistance.

Here's a little secret: The best-paying customers
are also usually the ones that treat you with the most
respect. You get the best of both worlds, or the
worst. You decide. I don't care how much you
think you need the business, you don't want it
from "A". Get rid of him. He's easily replaced.

Make it your celebration today. Do it
before noon and celebrate at lunch time!

Happy Firing.

~~~

Have a blessed new year, one that is not clogged
up by whining, disrespectful, morale-destroying,
time-wasting customers. May your new year be spent
with people who deserve and appreciate the best
service you are capable of providing.

Perry Marshall

P.S.: If you're accepted as a team member in my
12 week "Bobsled Run" and if you complete the
homework assignments, you'll make at least $25K more
next year than you would have without my help, and you
will recoup your tuition by May 2007 (through AdWords
cost savings and increased sales), or your money back.
Details at
http://perrymarshall.com/adwords/personalcoaching.htm

De-Constructing Google Slap II

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Wipf) — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 21:06:00 +0000

Most people will remember the "Google Slap" last July
when thousands of advertisers woke up to find their
minimum bids jacked up to $5.00 and $10.00 a click.
The official story was that it was a "landing page quality issue"
when in fact it was more like a "website content quantity" issue.

About 2 weeks ago they rolled in another change, this one
more subtle and affecting fewer people. But even if you
didn't notice directly, you can still probably see a shift if
you use the reports tab in your account to graph clicks
and / or impressions. Content traffic was affected the
most, for most people. Some people were severely affected.

***IMPORTANT OBSERVATION:
Having been through several rounds of this - and knowing
that the game is going to continue to evolve as time goes on,
with more Google slaps and more interesting twists - the
people who stay in the know always wind up on top and the
losers who get on discussion boards and bitterly complain,
continue to be losers. You get to decide whether to stay
plugged into reliable information - as well as provide
quality information to your visitors on your site - or keep
trying to cheat the system, which always eventually fails.***

OK, enough preaching. The core issue with Google Slap is:
There's a fringy aspect of AdWords where if your site is
small or if there's a mismatch between your ads / keywords
and web pages, Google will simply jack up your minimum bids.
When you call them they will NOT explain how to fix it. You're
on your own. Robots make these decisions, and the Google
rep on the other end of the line does not necessarily know the
formula anyway.

(I did *not* get a huge amount of emails about this. The
most heavily affected people were affiliates, people with
machine-generated AdSense pages, and people with skinny
little one- and two- page sites. Most of my customers aren't
doing that.)

Still, some people with legitimate, good quality sites
were slammed and today I'm going to give you some
tips that have made a big difference for some.

Here's a success story I got from one astute gentleman.
Pay close attention:

"Just FYI, in case you're still gathering info ... I beat Google's royal behind today:

- Added a site map, with a link to it of course
- Added a few low key outbound links to high page rank sites (very bottom of page)
- Removed the bullets from the penalized pages, and textualized them
- Added more SEO stuff (keyword rich anchor tags)
- Broke up my email articles and installed them throughout the site, linked into the sitemap

Nothing dramatic ... seems like they just tightened up the changes from round 1.

The thing is, WITH these changes, my quality score is better than it ever was
(I've now got 2 cent minimums on keywords which never had them, and that's
without any traffic coming through, strictly from the spider food)."

Don't forget that with most of these changes, while some
people loudly lose, others quietly win. I talked to a number
of people whose ads shot up to the top after this latest change.
Of course some people benefitted, because some of their
competitors disappeared.

Marketing Intelligence Wizard Glenn Livingston put it this way:

"Now that landing page is part of the quality score, it actually
provides a potential ADVANTAGE to smart advertisers who do it right.

"Just as with writing a hyper-relevant ad that gets high
click through, you can now improve your position and reduce
your ad costs when you do what Google wants. And even if it
DOES reduce opt in rates, you get compensated for this by
the reduced click costs. It's not just a matter of minimum
bids, ... the quality score is a continuum which influences
your position, # of clicks, etc., even when you ARE bidding
above the minimum."

One of my own campaigns - one that I could never get
below 5-6 cents a click - is now taking 4 cent clicks.
Haven't tried 3 cents yet. Google Slap 2 has been good to me.

Having been through several rounds of this, and knowing that
more are coming (as Google's senior staff assures me), this
is what goes on out there:

-The average 'man on the street' Google advertiser thinks
that Google is just trying to shake him down for more money,
every six months or so.

-Marketers who truly understand Relevance - who create
sites that are so sticky that nobody wants to click the BACK
button - continue to do better and better. When Google
introduced Quality Score a year and a half ago, my tuned-in
Renaissance Club Members got cheaper clicks. When Google
Slap happened this past summer, they got more clicks for
less. When Google Slap happened two weeks ago, they got
even more.

Losers lose. Winners win.

If you're not a Renaissance Club member, give it a test drive.
It's a hard deal to turn down - you get $500 of stuff sent to
you in the mail for $29.95, just for giving it a good College Try:
http://www.perrymarshall.com/club

Have a Great Thanksgiving Celebration.

Perry Marshall

The Google Quality Score Fiasco

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Wipf) — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 08:16:00 +0000

Google just made sweeping changes to their "Quality Score" for keywords. A lot of people (including me) woke up Wednesday morning to discover that hundreds or thousands of 5 and 10 cent keywords were inactivated and now Google's system is asking for $5.00 or $10.00.

Today I'm going to give you the latest intelligence I have on this - and also solicit your input if you have valuable data to share. There are a lot of serious advertisers in the coaching programs and Renaissance Club and all of us together will crack the code on this.

Judging by the individual conversations I've had and from discussion boards, for thousands of legitimate advertisers this change has shifted Google from friend to adversary. When you have a very successful website that is monetizing cheap keywords (i.e. ones that other people obviously have a hard time monetizing) and Google suddenly jacks YOUR bid prices up 100X - BUT crappy, low-quality, irrelevant ads from Ebay, Amazon, Shop.com and other large advertisers are still showing ---- for example

St Peter
Whatever you're looking for
you can get it on eBay.
www.eBay.com

...when ads THAT dumb are running, and you get whacked for having a site that your prospects and customers actually like, that really sucks.

I'm not suggesting a victim mentality, not suggesting that you just take your toys and go home. I'm gonna give you some serious input on this today. However I would say that the 'Google Honeymoon' is over. Google wants its advertisers to put out, and Google doesn't feel particularly inclined to explain what makes Google happy. If Google's been a 'free ride' for you for the last couple of years I suggest you get your butt in gear and structure your business so it's not dependent on anybody giving you a free ride.

You'd better make sure you've got 3-4 major ways of acquring customers, not just one, and you'd better sure you're getting customers to come back again and again, not just one time.

Competition on the Internet is only going to get thicker with time. If you're not sharpening your saw, if you're not keeping up with the changes - and most importantly if you're not exercising Kaizen continuous improvement to make your conversion rates better and better, you're in for tough sledding. If this update has been a wakeup call for you, then don't miss the lesson.

Onward with some strategies to get you over the hump.

First, here's what I've seen:

-Low priced keywords appear to have been hit the hardest, especially below 25 cents, although there are certainly people who've been inactivated even with 50 cent and $1.00 keywords.

-Content syndication is not affected by this quality score. They'll still run your ads on other people's sites, even if they don't run on Google. (But - important - you also have to make sure you bid on content separately, so IF you do raise your bids on any of your keywords for search, that you don't also pay extra for content.)

-I have some students (Sunny Hills for example, who has quite a few AdWords campaign management clients, AND buys a lot of 3, 4 and 5 cent traffic for his own projects) who have NOT been affected by this AT ALL.

-I have other students who have been hit very hard, often losing 3/4ths of their Google traffic. The thing most of these people have in common is 1-page websites and squeeze pages with very little other content.

-My own campaigns have been a mix of both - most not being affected in the slightest, one burning down like a forest fire came through. Since I don't have any secrets I'm terribly concerned about hiding, let me tell you about those. I'll give you a few examples.

Almost nothing I'm doing for PerryMarshall.com was affected.

Let me tell you about three side projects and some experimentation I did with them. These are all campaigns based more or less on 5 cent clicks. (This is especially relevant because the people hit hardest by this seem to be people using a 'long tail' strategy to scoop up cheap keywords overlooked by others.)

I have a bare-bones, 1-page website www.CoffeeHouseTheology.com which was hit very hard. Almost all the keywords were inactivated and went from 5 cents a click to 5 and 10 dollars a click literally overnight.

I have a website www.CosmicFingerprints.com which, on the surface looks about the same - one page squeeze page, you either opt in or you leave - but it's got some Non-Obvious links on the bottom, to other pages on the site. There's actually a TON of content on this site. This site was not affected AT ALL.

I have a website www.RandomMutation.com which is a 2-page website, and the 2nd page has a modest amount of content and a few links going elsewhere. Not affected at all.

Now here's what's interesting:

I took the Squeeze Page from CoffeeHouseTheology and put a copy of it on CosmicFingerprints. I created a new Google campaign with the same ad and the same keywords, but pointed it to the new page on CosmicFingerprints instead, and - Viola! - Got my 5 cent clicks back.

Yesterday and today I am hosting my Renaissance Club Roundtable meeting in Chicago (an exclusive mastermind group, membership costs ten grand a year), and the members of this group have been comparing notes. One member whose ads got inactivated (and who does have a decent amount of content on his site) pointed his ads to a competitor's website (a Very popular site with tons of content) and Google accepted the 5 cent bids immediately.

This and other experiments tell me that Google's Quality Score for landing pages is NOT so much a guage of how well the landing page matches the keywords and whatnot. (In fact I can show you lots of examples where there's hardly any match at all between keyword and site, and the bids are still 5 cents). Rather, it is a measure of how much content Google thinks that site has.

Bottom Line: There are some sites that Google judges as having "enough content" or "lots of content" and other sites Google judges as having "poor content" or "no content." If they think you've got no content, Sorry Pardner - You Lose. You pay ten bucks a click for 5 cent keywords.

An obvious workaround is to take whatever you've got that's been working and move it to a site that has "enough content" or "lots of content." At this moment in time it doesn't appear that the new page and the old site have to even be about the same topic. In the short term at least, this does work.

Let me add that it's as important as ever before, and probably more important, that you structure your Google campaigns properly, that you use narrow bands of tightly matched keywords in any one group, that you don't dump thousands of basically unrelated keywords into one group. You can't be sloppy about this. Do what the Definitive Guide tells you.

And as of late: make sure you've got content on your site and Google's spider knows about it.

Alternate Strategy: One of my Roundtable Members managed to get all his keywords re-activated by moving his landing pages to a different domain (which BTW did NOT have much content on it to begin with), creating a separate landing page for each ad group, and changing all of his "short bullet" copy to complete paragraphs.

In his words: But for the moment, I think the conclusion is "separate ad group = separate landing page", ... with at least a few paragraphs of hyper relevant, keyword dense, REAL ENGLISH that draws people in right away.

Here's what I don't know yet: I don't know how long it takes for Google to re-evaluate your site's "content score." I would like to get feedback from Renaissance Club members about this. If you add 20 pages of content to your site, and put links to it, when do they forgive you? Same day? 3 weeks later? We'd like to hear back.

Also I know that some advertisers are getting a manual override from their account rep. Can't hurt to call Google, though most people get non-answers from the AdWords staff. Would be interested in hearing from someone who got a real answer.

Oh, and since I was ranting about Ebay and Amazon, note once again that what seems to matter is not relevance of the ads and the content, but just the fact that they have lots of content.

(Oh, and I'm sure they're getting an override from their account rep, too.)

Strategy Tip: Ken Giddens, whose focus was always more on the SEO side, had a great content strategy. If he was selling a book or ebook, he'd slice it up into 100 pieces and use those pieces to make content pages for his site. Great, original, keyword-rich content. And he said it never hurt sales, it just got him more visitors. You might wanna do that too, if you're a publisher (or even if you're not.)

General Observation: A lot of people are speculating that Google is trying to get rid of "Made For AdWords" pages, maybe that's true. Maybe they're trying to get rid of 1 page websites and Squeeze Pages. It's possible they get complaints about those. In any case what I do see is that they're trying to make the right side of their pages more like the left side. Content is King on the free side and they're trying to manually force advertisers to do the same thing on the right side.

Now in some sense I disagree with this because if the advertiser has to pay for the spot then the advertiser has to let his audience tell him what pays, not let a Google bot decide based on some arbitrary formula. However, we don't get to make up the rules, Google does, and they wield their power by not telling you what's going on.

It's my job, of course, to shed light on these things.

If you've got data and experimentation that sheds light on some of these questions, you can email Bryan Todd {bryan} {at} {perrymarshall dot com} and our next update will be even better.

Meanwhile - do everything you can to make your business NOT dependent on the whims of Google.

Perry Marshall

P.S. If you'd like to schedule a 30 minute Google ad campaign consultation with Bryan, who is staying on top of all this stuff, you can do that at http://adwordscoaching.com/

Join Perry's Newsletter & Renaissance Club and get $640 of bonuses - just for trying it out!

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Google Drops the Hammer on Landing Pages

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Wipf) — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 22:04:00 +0000

Words Of Wisdom from Perry Marshall this July 17, 2006

Last Week a whole slew of advertisers woke up
and saw their 5, 10 and 25 cent clicks go up to
$5.00 and $10.00.

Reactions to this were typically curses and
statements like "This is totally asinine" and
"Who do these people think they are, totally
screwing up my business and giving me, like,
no explanation whatsoever?"

Welcome to the land of Google, who pretty
much leaves it to others (like me) to explain
to their customers the logic of what they do
and how their system actually works.

I picked up the phone and start comparing notes
with Bryan and some of my coaching members....
Plus we had a Round-table meeting Thursday and Friday.
By Thursday afternoon we'd pretty much cracked the
code on this thing.

I sent a detailed update to Renaissance Club
members on Friday morning, and got even more
confirmations, based on a lot of experimentation.

-->Here's the deal:

If Google thinks that your website in general has
"a lot of content" or "a fair amount of content" then
you probably didn't get whacked.

If Google thinks that your website in general has
"very little content" or "no content" (as defined by
what their bot thinks when it spiders your site),
then they just jack your bids way, way up.

The easiest workaround is just put your landing
page on a different site, i.e. one that has a lot of
articles and stuff on it, and normally they'll accept
your bids. Instantly, if you do it from a different
Google account.

If your landing page has no links on it, which is
generally the best way to make a landing page,
it might also be good to add some. (Not that
those links need to be obvious to the naked eye.)

If your site has no content, then.... you'll need
to add some. Surely this can't be terribly hard!

The overall picture here is that Google wants the
right (paid) side of the page to deliver an experience
more like what they already reward on the left (free)
side of the page. Which, I guess, is a whole bunch
of free information and not asking people to do anything,
like opt-in, register or buy. Google's guidlines say this,
too, BTW.

Now when I'm advertising and paying for the clicks,
I prefer to decide what the visitors get. And you should
too. But at the same time, Google gets to decide what
the rules are and they don't even even have to tell you
what they are.

Hey, at least I told ya. And remember, you can have
plenty of content on your site and still maintain control
of the user experience from the landing page. This you
must do.

--->Is Google Evil?

On this change in particular I've seen a LOT of
people angry about Google's attitude that they
think they own the world.

The reason Google has this attitude is... because
they DO own the world. At least a big part of the
Internet world. Right?

If I were you I would not expect Google to get any
friendlier anytime soon.

What you can expect is that the game will
get more mature with time, that it will be harder
for new people to enter markets easily. And people
who continually sharpen their axe will win big.

Remember this: Every time Google makes a
Big Change, the weak-willed get thrown off the
bucking bronco and the strong become stronger.
You get to decide which you are.

Meanwhile you need to diversify your advertising
strategy (Overture is still important, and MSN is
finally becoming a real player) and you need to focus
on increasing your conversion rates and improving
your sales copy. You need to own the customers
and prospects, not be solely dependent on Google
to bring you new ones.

Renaissance Club members get the inside scoop
faster than everybody else. And if you'd like to get
$500 of bonuses just for taking my $29.95/month
subscription for a test drive, get in on it here:

The Perry Marshall Renaissance Club

Rap soon,

Perry Marshall

Google AdWords vs. Free Search Engine Rankings

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Wipf) — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 20:48:00 +0000

This Article Was Written By Perry Marshall

A lot of people ask me about the merits of buying clicks on
search engines with AdWords, vs. getting free visitors with
what's called "search engine optimization" - loading up your web
pages with strategic keywords so you can get ranked #10 or
#3 or #1 on Google's free search.

Well at first glance free is certainly better than paid, but
there are some big IF's that you need to consider first!

Remember: you can only optimize a website for maybe ten
words and phrases - not hundreds - so you should choose
very, very carefully.

But the most important thing is choosing the RIGHT
words and phrases to optimize for.

Now here's the kicker:

If you don't use a pay per click strategy to determine which
words and phrases actually attract paying customers first, you will
almost always choose the wrong keywords. The words you
initially think you want are almost always different than the ones
that actually work - believe me, I've made that mistake many
times.

Considering it takes 30 days to several months to see
results when you're playing the search engine optimization
game, you CANNOT afford to target the wrong keywords.

When you do pay per click campaigns properly, you'll
see that there are almost always a few really productive words
and phrases that only 2-3 people are bidding on, instead
of 10 or 20 bidders. What that means is that those people are
not optimizing their websites for those same keywords either.

Well just like pay per click, search engine phrases have
varying degrees of competitiveness. If you want a #1
ranking for the phrase "Digital Camera" it's going to be
a LOT harder than getting a #1 ranking for "Kodak DX6340"
which is a popular digital camera. And the traffic will be
much more targeted, too. When you do search engine
optimization, you must pick battles you can win.

So here's the lesson: Use my Definitive Guide to Google
AdWords to properly set up a pay per click campaign,
determine which keywords are productive, THEN do
search engine optimization based on what really works.
Then you'll get all kinds of free traffic and even more
income from your website:

Recommended Tools From Perry Marshall...

The Definitive Guide To Google Adwords

Recommended Tools From Perry Marshall...

Best,

Perry Marshall

The 1Step System Is A Work Of Genius.. Shocking 1StepSystem Facts. on Squidoo

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Wipf) — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 01:07:00 +0000

The 1Step System Is A Work Of Genius.. Shocking 1StepSystem Facts. on Squidoo

I use Adwords to help me with the 1Step System..

Google 'Don't Be Evil' and all that..

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Wipf) — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 04:57:00 +0000

Hello..

(Here is a newletter from the great Perry Marshall)

You might be aware that Google offers a service
where they'll set up a custom campaign for you
to get you started with Adwords. It costs $299.00
and comes with a $299.00 credit towards clicks.

Well, just yesterday I had a chance to see one
of these very campaigns, because they built it for
one of my customers.

I kid you not - it was a walking disaster.

This customer is in the education market, and the
kinds of keywords he's bidding on go for about 25 cents
a click, if you build the campaigns properly.

Not only did they set his campaign up the wrong way
(not split testing multiple ads, not using matching
options, syndication set up the wrong way) they set
his bids at FIVE BUCKS a click.

Bidding $5.00 in a $0.25 market? It was nothing short of
asinine.

We were doing a paid consultation, and I gave him extra
time on the clock just so I could gawk at the wreckage.

Now maybe I shouldn't have been surprised - I'd already
had one of my coaching students tell me they offered
to "optimize" his campaigns. So he gave them a less-critical
one, just to see what they'd do, and sure enough, his
click cost went up and the performance of his campaigns
went down.

After they screwed it all up, he put it back to the way it
was and he's doing fine now.

Then there are quite a few customers lately who have
emailed us and said "They told me I don't need to use
quotes and brackets, don't need mis-spellings or hyphens
etc etc and you say I should, why are you giving me this
bad information Perry?"

And I reply, "Because it puts more money in their pocket,
that's why, and their job is to get more of your money,
and my job is to help you give them less."

Now I realize that Google is the darling of the Internet
and every week they're coming out with some cool new
thing and it's kind of hard not to like Google.

But don't forget who pays for all those whiz-bang
technological developments: YOU.

You and your ad budget.

And considering that you probably run a small business,
your success is probably a bit fragile and you don't have
money to burn... I'm guessing you have better things to
spend your money on than pushing Google's stock above
300 bucks a share. You think?

Bottom line is this: Google is NOT going to go out of their
way to help you squeeze every last drop of performance
and every last dime out of your ad campaigns. You're
being naive if you think they will.

Now it doesn't make a huge difference to me whether you
purchase my Definitive Guide, or Andrew Goodman's ebook,
or Chris Carpenter's.... or even if you're willing to squander
your valuable time scouring the Internet for hours upon
hours, hunting for "free" education.

But regardless of where you get your information, you
better make sure it's accurate. And you'd better get it
from someone who's on *your* side, not theirs.

You can get my Definitive Guide, plus $500 of bonuses
for $29, just for trying my Renaissance Club. $29, that's
less than six of those five-dollar clicks. And the
improvements you make will pay you back every single day:

Read Full Story Here..

Perry Marshall
Google Adwords Expert

Perry Marshall

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Wipf) — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 01:53:00 +0000

Need a Google Mentor.

I highly recommend Perry Marshall. He is the #1 EXPERT when it comes to google.

Sign up for his free newsletter and for goodness sakes..Read it when you recieve it.

Here is the link to Perry's Free Newletter Click Here to subscribe now.

Conversion Rate Increase

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Wipf) — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 05:15:00 +0000

The best way to increase conversion rates is by doing some of the following.

Number 1: Try to have your keyword in your headline
Number 2: Try to have the keyword in your URL as well.

Domain names are cheap these days and it woulf probably be a great idea to buy a good domain name, especially if you have a good conversion rate with a certain merchant.

I also like to include my keyword in at least on e more line of my ad.

The nice thing about adwords is the fact that when your keyword triggers your ad it also bolds all the words in the ad which contain that keyword.

Example:

Keyword: "Sun Goes On Strike"

The Sun Goes On Strike
Mr. Goober shoots at the Sun
Because Sun Goes On Strike
http://SunGoesOnStrike.com

I have found that my conversion rates have really increased when I use capital letters in my domain name.

On Your Side
Jerry

The Incredible Power Of Google And Adwords: Content Network

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Wipf) — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 22:40:00 +0000

The Incredible Power Of Google And Adwords: Content Network

Content Network

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Wipf) — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 19:58:00 +0000

You will notice that your Conversion rate drops dramatically when you include your ads in the content network.

Don't panic. That is normal.

I went from 3.2 to .7 when I included the network.

I am tweaking it as we speak to improve the bottom line

Another Audio Post

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Wipf) — Sat, 18 Feb 2006 06:28:00 +0000

The Mistakes

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Wipf) — Sat, 18 Feb 2006 06:18:00 +0000

I Feel Sad Today.

Sad because nice folks, and maybe you are one of them, place a adwords ad and loose money right of the bat because they did not do it correctly. I was fortunate because I placed my first ad only after I had read extensively on the topic. I researched several "experts" on the topic but I only felt the BURN in my heart about one of them, and that was Perry. Anyway, I wanted to take a break from reading his book tonight so I thought I would write my Blog an e-mail and here it is.

Gotta Place An Adwords Ad Now

Jerry

Audio Post

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Wipf) — Sat, 18 Feb 2006 04:53:00 +0000

The Adwords Guide

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Wipf) — Sat, 18 Feb 2006 04:22:00 +0000

I did it.

I broke down and bought that KEWL guide known as 'The Definitive Guide to Google AdWords" and wholy smokes. This is some crazy stuff. I will keep you posted here how I do with this.

Thats it for now thanks for reading..

Gotta Go Write An Adword (smiles)
Jerry

Student of Perry Marshall

noreply@blogger.com (Jerry Wipf) — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 05:04:00 +0000

The Google Adwords system makes it possible, for the first time in the history of the world, to deposit five bucks, write a couple of ads, and instantly get access to over 100 million people - and all in less than 10 minutes.

It's called Google AdWords and it's my new found obsession. In fact I beleive it is the first and best thing anyone should do to get traffic to their site.

But it's not always as easy as I just made it sound -AdWords has some kinks, and most people have a rough time at first. I AM NO EXCEPTION.

But then...I found someone who changed all that..

Perry Marshall to the rescue...Perry had written a very helpful e-course called "5 days to success with Google AdWords" and there was no charge for it.

So I thought "What the heck" I got the course and within the first 24 hours I had my first sale from this website: Click Here

Yeah...You read right. I figured if I could find a product, in a book format, that most people would be embarrased to buy in public, such as in a bookstore, etc.. I would have a hit.. I WAS RIGHT..ENJOY THIS BLOG..and check back again. Bookmark this site.