Entrepreneurs-Journey.com Down-To-Earth Advice For Bloggers and Internet Marketers

Perry Perry Perry! – How often can I say this guy’s name! I’ll cut to the chase, yet again Perry Marshall has some tips for us on making sure Google gives you the cheapest click prices in AdWords.

The Quality Score

The metric that determines whether Google will “slap” your ad campaigns with a high cost per click, is called the Quality Score. As usual with Google we don’t know exactly how they calculate it, but we have a good idea thanks to guys like Perry, who have a lot of clients with huge AdWords campaigns – he has some great data from which to draw conclusions from.

According to Perry’s latest update on defeating the Google slap, the main culprits for a low Quality Score are:

• Ads, keywords and landing pages don’t match very well in terms of Search Engine Optimization. For more on this, see my last article on tips for beating the Google slap.
• Too many different kinds of keywords in one ad group and too many different kinds of ad groups pointing to the same landing page are both symptoms of the problem.
• Your site doesn’t have much content, or Google’s bot can’t easily find it. Again, SEO will help this problem as well.
• You’re bidding on keywords that most advertisers have difficulty achieving relevance on.

I realize for some of you, this might seem a bit confusing, but that’s because you haven’t played with AdWords enough yet to get a firm grasp of how the system works. Once you start bidding and buying traffic you start to get a feel of how the software operates and the tips above by Perry just make common sense.

Google needs to keep the relevancy of advertisements high so you need to take extra steps to provide more value to readers when you send traffic to your sites via AdWords.

As Perry explains, here is Google’s point of view:

Imagine that you’re in the search engine business, trying to serve up good results to people who search.

Eventually you figure out that 1% of being a successful search engine is showing good results at the top of the list. The other 99% of your job is eliminating the bad results and the spammers. When Jack Welch was president of GE, his policy was to fire the worst-performing 10% of employees every year. Likewise, Google slaps the least relevant 10% of their advertisers every six months.

How To Determine Your Quality Score

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I spent some time yesterday in my jet-lagged state going through mail built up in Brisbane while I was away in Canada – that’s real normal mail, not that fancy electronic stuff we use nowadays.

I have a pile of newsletters and audio CDs from Perry Marshall’s Renaissance club that accumulated over the last six months.

I don’t know what it is about Perry but I like his style a lot more than most Internet marketers, probably because it’s more down to earth and he writes like I write. He rarely puts on a hard sell for anything he does. Although he doesn’t push himself as a copywriter (he’s generally considered the Google AdWords guru), his copy is clean and again, down to earth, and I tend to follow his copywriting style as a template for my own.

Most of the Renaissance club newsletters are about using the web for direct marketing and general Internet business stuff. Perry has the whole formula for marketing a business online down to a tea – run adwords for traffic, use a namesqueeze, demonstrate expertise to make sales and zero in on the ideal customers so they come to you rather than you going to them.

If you would like to join Perry’s newsletter (it’s paper and comes in the mail once a month, usually with an audio CD too) you can check out all the details here -

Perry Marshall’s Marketing Letter & Renaissance Club Newsletter

It’s still the cheapest way to get a copy of his Definitive Guide To Google AdWords ($29.95 as part of the welcome package for joining the Renaissance Club) and if you ever plan to do anything with Google AdWords you have to have this book – it’s the Pay Per Click bible.

Advice On Defeating The Google Slap

There was a section in one of the newsletters on the Google Slap that I want to share with you. If you don’t know already, the “Google Slap”, as it has been labelled, was an adjustment made to Google AdWords that penalized people who used a landing page with little content. It really hurt a lot of people using namesqueeze pages because they suddenly had to pay stupid amounts per click when previously it was pennies per click.

Since then Google has continued to slap advertisers whenever their system determines the site you are sending traffic to has little content.

Perry included an excerpt from an email communication with Glenn Livingston, who had some great tips for beating the Google Slap.

I summarize the tips here for you:

Read the rest of this entry >>

Duncan Riley emailed me and made a post about two new eBooks by Scott Boulch, one titled The Death of AdSense and the other Life After AdSense both available by handing over the usual name and email opt-in. Duncan doesn’t hand out praise easily, especially when it comes to Internet marketing products, so I was intrigued.

The Death of AdSense

I spent one day on-and-off reading the two ebooks and I must say I was impressed. The first book about why AdSense is not so good anymore was okay. It is basically attempting to prove a point about AdSense but since I already share much of the opinion (although I wouldn’t use as absolute language to state it – but you need absolute language to create controversy and The Death of AdSense certainly succeeded in that regard, which I’m sure Scott Boulch is happy about), it was largely a quick read with some head nodding now and then.

If you are not a regular AdWords user you may learn something that partially explains why AdSense payouts are dropping. Recently AdWords advertisers were given the ability to have different bids for content and for search, meaning that for most advertisers what they pay for content placement dropped a lot (it did for me!). If you want more explanation of how this works, read The Death of AdSense.

I prefer to think of any lost AdSense revenues being a result of Google attempting to ensure they continue to deliver value to their AdWords customers, which are way more important than there AdSense customers, in my opinion. This change to AdWords simply meant that AdWords users pay for quality clicks, and not junk clicks from mass produced spam sites. Anyway, I digress, this is not the point of this post and I’m sure Scott’s eBook will entertain the AdSense debate enough without me dipping back into it. It’s the second book that I really want to discuss, so…

Life After AdSense

The second book, Life After AdSense, I was very impressed with. It covers Scott’s technique which he calls “Click Flipping”, which in a nutshell is using AdWords to send traffic to a landing page which is an opt-in form to a cost-per-action pay-off – in other words, you get paid for lead generation. This is not the first time I have heard lead generation pop-up this year, another well known Internet marketer did a product launch earlier in the year for an elite group course on setting up a lead generation business. Scott really impressed me because he outlined what he does in clear detail and charged nothing for it, so if you want the full spiel download the ebook.

The second ebook is certainly something he could have charged money for although I think he is smart giving it away free because it will reach more people and create more buzz and position him as an expert in this area. My initial reaction was to assume the two books were lead-ins to a product launch of some sorts, which I still think they are, except Scott hasn’t decided what he is going to launch (perhaps) and I believe he is using feedback from these two ebooks to base his decision on how to move forward. Sort of a protracted launch formula, which I like, it’s a good strategy to build some buzz and then refine your product so it closely matches what people want.

After reading Life After AdSense I must admit I would love to sit down with Scott and watch as he puts his system into place, some 1-on-1 time with this guy would be great. The only thing I felt I was lacking after reading the book was a practical example. A video that shows how he sets up everything including the landing pages, the AdWords campaigns and how he selects the CPA programs he promotes, would be a great start and no doubt given enough time he will provide something like this.

Is Click Flipping The Next Craze?

I’m not sure if I was just very “sold” on the whole click flipping idea, but overall it did seem quite easy, although I probably shouldn’t comment until I try it. Scott’s formula for making money makes a lot of sense and I’m eager to learn more about cost-per-lead and cost-per-action monetization. Scott presents a nice and simple breakdown of the Internet business “food chain”, which I really appreciated and was nodding my head in agreement the whole time (I’m a whale!). It clearly explained where everything fits in and I agree, his position is enviable. My criteria for an Internet business pretty much lines up with his, however he has executed it and I’m still working towards it.

Click flipping has some significant potential. I don’t like that it relies on AdWords for traffic, but that’s certainly a selling point too and of course strictly speaking you don’t have to use AdWords with CPA monetization, you can use any traffic generation strategy, just as Scott mentions. AdWords is instantaneous and reasonably stable and affordable (for the moment), and as long as you do your time optimizing your keywords and your landing page elements, success is almost guaranteed – again I want to try it myself before saying anything more about how effective it might be since I have no proof or experience.

What is great about click flipping, and what worries me, is that there is no barrier to entry. Based on what Scott describes the only potential barrier is knowledge – how to optimize AdWords and landing pages. Every single other business idea I have been excited about (distracted more likely!) includes some component that slows you down – whether it’s getting an eBook written, or developing content or attracting search traffic or researching a niche, or hiring people, or getting software developed etc etc – all amount to barriers. It’s because of these barriers that I have not run off and started every single business idea that’s come way, and I’m thankful for it otherwise I’d be no where (you gotta focus remember!). With click flipping you just need AdWords, an account with a CPA provider and a landing page. Only the landing page development presents any real time delay and it’s not a big thing – landing pages can be popped out pretty quickly once you have your basic template done.

Most business models promoted by Internet marketing gurus will only work for a handful of people who execute well. The knowledge as we all know, is not enough, and putting things into practice is what counts. Click Flipping seems almost too easy to action, which will see a lot of people give it a go and I suspect Scott feels that there are enough niches out there to satisfy all the people who decide to follow him into this business area. I hope that’s the case, it would be a great thing if nearly everyone who tries Click Flipping starts earning six figures – that would really be a success story and in that case, yes, I think Click Flipping would be the next Internet business craze. The signs are good but I’ll withhold judgement until I start earning six figures from it.

In my case this business idea goes on the backburner but sits atop as one of the most compelling future business models I’d like to try out post-BetterEdit and maybe even post blogging (or in tandem with). It will be interesting to see how other people go with it so please let me know if you give it a go or already make money from it. For the time being I’ll sit back and absorb everything Scott throws at us, which I hope is on par in terms of quality, based on what he has released so far. Thanks Scott!

Yaro Starak
Eager to flip some clicks

I’m sure many of you already heard about the recent changes made to Google AdWords. Advertisers logged in to see their keywords disabled with huge minimum bid prices in order to reactivate their campaigns. Personally none of the campaigns I look over were affected however based on the amount of emails I received flying around about it, there were a lot of other people who got hit hard.

Google’s intentions, as always, is to increase the relevancy for it’s end users – the people conducting searches – so that when they click advertisements they get answers to their questions or solutions to their needs. Logically then the recent changes made were designed to increase ad relevancy, but what surprised me was the lack of any official instructions from Google on how to deal with the changes. The first I heard of the changes were from the Internet marketing email lists I subscribe to.

Then again, if Google did release advice on how to deal with the changes they wouldn’t really have any effect, since the campaigns they want to penalize – those with poor relevance – could manipulate the system to remain active. I think Google intends for advertisers to figure things out for themselves, always with the notion that to win with Google AdWords you need to have the most relevant advertisement for the end user based on the keywords searched for. If you can do this, you don’t get penalized.

AdWords is not my specialty and more experienced AdWords experts have done the research and provided advice on how to deal with the changes. I’m not going to look at this problem in depth – I’ll just draw for you the conclusions I have reached based on what emails I have received from the experts.

As expected, Perry Marshall was the first person to provide me with a real credible answer, which I believe was sent out to his mailing list, however I have heard that it may have only been his Renaissance Club (aff) members who got the email about it. No matter what, his information pretty much summed up why the changes were made and how to combat them so your campaigns don’t get penalized.

I also received some great information about dealing with the problem from Daryl and Andrew’s mentoring program. John Reese sent through an email but it largely just said he was still “looking for answers”.

Why Did Google Make These Changes?

In a nutshell it appears Google instigated this round of changes mainly to deal with the relevancy of landing pages. Basically if the content on the page that your Google AdWords ads click through to – the “landing page” – has poor relevancy to the keywords you include in the campaign, you got penalized by having your keyword minimum bid prices shot through the roof to prices Google doesn’t expect you can pay.

This largely affected two groups of advertisers -

1. Those who use namesqueeze style pages, with very little content on them (designed just to capture an email address or some other form data) and standard Internet sales pages, again with little content besides sales copy.
2. And people with AdWords campaigns set up poorly where keywords aren’t broken down into niche keyword groups, often resulting in the relevancy of your keywords not tightly enough matching the content on your landing page. For example if you only have one adgroup and pile all of your relevant keywords into the one campaign. This obviously is a poor tactic to begin with and would normally result in low click through rates and even worse conversion rates.

Essentially what I took away from the advice I received was that if you build your campaign well and really drill down your adgroups into sub-niches with small sets of keywords and highly targeted adcopy that – and here’s the most important part – clearly matches the keywords on the landing page you use to go with that adgroup, you will be fine.

Of course the smaller the landing page the less content you have to play with so it’s always going to be most difficult with a namesqueeze style page since they often only have 50-100 words. My Blog Traffic King page is a namesqueeze but as you can see it has a lot of content and I only use very focused keywords in my AdWords campaign to drive traffic to it. Consequently it was not penalized.

If you are having problems some possible solutions include breaking up your AdWords ads into even more focused groups, adding more keyword relevant content to your landing pages or making sure your landing pages are hosted on full websites with lots of content. Google doesn’t just look at the content on the landing page, it reviews the content on the entire domain, so if you have a landing page sitting as a subpage on a large content site or blog, you can get away with the landing page itself not having much content. As Perry said though, you have to experiment and see what happens, we are dealing with Google AdWords afterall, the one place were testing really makes a difference.

Dazed and Confused

If all this is flying over your head it probably means you haven’t studied up on Google AdWords yet and you aren’t a disciple of Perry Marshall like me. The only reason I could even explain as much as I just did regarding this problem is because Perry keeps me updated with all the Google AdWords changes. I have bought his book, taken his free course and I read his Renaissance Club newsletters.

If you are planning to do anything with online marketing Google AdWords is your first port of call to start driving targeted traffic to your site and Perry Marshall is the master of this topic. Try his free 5 Days to Success with Google AdWords E-Course and then upgrade to his Definitive Guide to Google AdWords E-Book (aff).

I’ll have a full review of the Definitive Guide sometime soon, but you can rest assured it’s going to be a glaringly positive review because it is a top class book.

Yaro Starak
AdWords Campaigner

Yahoo! Search Marketing’s Failure

I’ve cancelled my Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM) pay-per-click (PPC) account. It’s a terrible product and I’m not afraid to tell you why.

One problem, the first big problem most people notice especially if they have been using Google’s AdWords system, is how terrible YSM’s system is to use. The interface is awful and after using Google’s system it’s almost physically painful to navigate around YSM. You would think after all this time and so much negative feedback that they would work to update and clean their many-years-old system. It’s not like they can’t get access to Google’s system and see what Google does so much better.

YSM has a monthly minimum spend of $25. That means if you can’t generate enough clicks you will get charged a minimum fee of $25. To combat this you have to struggle with the system to enter in new campaigns in hope of attracting enough clicks to get your moneys worth. Then the quality of the clicks starts to drop because you chase less relevant keywords and your conversion rate suffers.

Of course why this is a real problem is because Yahoo’s network just doesn’t get the traffic that Google does. You can’t get the clicks because Yahoo’s network can’t deliver the impressions.

That’s a fantastic combination for customer dissatisfaction.

To top it all off YSM forces you to pay a $100 joining fee which I have just found out is not refundable. They probably do this so they at least make *some* money from you before leaving dissatisfied.

Okay, I’m being a bit harsh, but I’m frustrated and I’d like Yahoo! to do something about it. The blogosphere is powerful and I suspect there is a good chance my comments may get back to someone who matters at Yahoo!.

Why Google Owns The Pay-Per-Click Industry

I suspect Yahoo! is well aware of the shortcomings of their PPC system, I’m definitely not the first to complain about it. The underlying problem is that Google owns the lion share of the search traffic and is leaping far ahead of every competitor with their ever expanding publisher’s network (Google AdSense). Consequently Google can deliver more impressions and clicks and combined with a far superior system, which is regularly updated and simple enough to be used by small business owners, and you have a recipe for market domination.

Of course Google depends on their PPC system for 90% of their billions of dollars of revenue so as you can imagine, their interest is certainly in retaining a leadership position in the PPC marketplace while MSN and Yahoo! don’t depend on PPC to keep their businesses going (thank goodness for them!).

As you may have heard, MSN and Ask.com have also recently launched pay-per-click systems. Ask.com survived previous years because it made use of Google’s system to generate revenue while it was getting back on it’s feet. Now that it has some momentum it’s decided to try an internal PPC system. Of course MSN could never consider making use of Google’s system so they have been busy playing catch up to launch their own PPC technology, but like Yahoo!, I suspect their system will suffer from low traffic levels since their network just doesn’t have the reach that Google’s does.

And that’s the problem.

Google wins because of the long tail. Google makes such a tremendous amount of money because millions of businesses all around the world operating in millions of markets all use AdWords to promote their wares. The other search engines just can’t service as big a long tail as Google can and can’t offer the results where it matters – targeted traffic – like Google can. Their reach is shorter so their tail is shorter too.

Consider The Typical Small Business Owner

I’m a pretty good example of a reasonably average Google AdWords user. I don’t spend much but I keep at it month after month in my little niches. I use AdWords and get customers. Google understands the end user is millions of average joes like me and works to meet my needs.

PPC needs to satisfy the long tail of users, the average small business joes, who only have so many hours per day to devote to PPC campaigns. Since I follow an 80/20 rule I’ll spend my time where I can get the best results with the least effort. That is Google AdWords.

I don’t want to have multiple options for PPC. I want one system with maximum reach. I want to manage one set of campaigns in one well constructed interface with my ads going across every network to as many targeted searches and content as can be delivered (or that I can pay for).

The Big Boys Playing Together?

Ever since Ask.com (back then, Ask Jeeves) worked with Google in an effective relationship I’ve thought about all the search engines working together. Google will likely remain dominant in the PPC marketplace as long as the market is viable since it depends on it so much. Google has the best technology and provides the best service. Instead of cluttering the market with inferior competitors, who create more systems for small business owners to struggle with in order to market their businesses, why can’t everyone use Google’s system and share the revenue?

Why can’t we just tick a box in AdWords if we want our campaigns to run across Yahoo!, MSN and Ask.com? The customer gets the best experience and therefore more customers come on board and the size of the market increases. With a larger market the revenues increase for all participants. A utopian solution where everyone benefits or am I dreaming or misinformed?

I couldn’t begin to speculate whether working together would be more lucrative for the search engines instead of each having their own PPC system. Certainly based on Ask.com’s decision to create their own PPC system you would think it is more profitable than working with Google since they must have done the numbers.

In this case, unfortunately, I think this is a situation where the customer loses because the big boys have to compete. In most circumstances competition benefits the consumer but I think in the PPC war, as the current market sits, it would be better if there was only one system to service the entire industry so the little guys like me can keep it simple.

Yaro Starak
Average Joe