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You know how sometimes you get that uncomfortable feel when reading marketing materials, especially long sales letters and hypey emails, and how that feeling can transfer to the marketer so you have this icky feeling about them and what they sell?

I think you know what I am talking about.

There’s one Internet marketer who I have never ever felt that way about and he’s actually the guy I first came into contact with (well his materials anyway) when I began studying Internet marketing many years ago now.

His name is Perry Marshall, and chances are you know him already, probably as the guru of Google AdWords.

I’ve been on Perry’s email list for a long time. I bought his Definitive Guide to Google AdWords - I think it was the first e-book I ever bought online. I also joined his Renaissance Club marketing print newsletter, which is the first product I ever promoted as an affiliate on this blog and still continues to pay me ongoing commissions.

Perry has a certain style and I like it. His information is honest, valuable - he tells a great story - and at least for me, I never have that “hype” taste in my month after reading his materials. In fact it is Perry’s style that I model my own email newsletters and promotions after. You can learn a lot from just mimicking how this guy plies his craft.

Simply put, Perry has my respect.

Work With The Best

If you currently have a Google AdWords campaign and/or a successful business that has cashflow, then you are in the right situation to consider Perry’s Google AdWords Intensive Coaching that Starts September 25.

This is NOT a cheap program and it’s by application only, most people reading my blog probably wouldn’t qualify. However if you are in charge of a somewhat successful online business and you want to take it to the next level and work with Perry personally, this will interest you.

Here are the details direct from Perry -

Is Google AdWords an important part of your business? Do you want to pay less for every single click and earn more from every visitor?

If so, you’re entitled to a rather bold guarantee: If you’re accepted as a team member in Perry Marshall’s 12 week “Bobsled Run” and if you complete the homework assignments, you’ll recoup your tuition by December 2007 (through AdWords cost savings and increased sales), and you will make at least $25K more next year than you would have without the course, or your money back.

Step by step, you will master:

-Google AdWords: Discover the nuances of the most powerful advertising medium since television, and walk away with complete mastery

-Google Analytics: Find out exactly what’s positively persuasive on your site, and what’s not, and plug all the holes (this is where much of the profit-making wizardry is!)

-Google Site Optimizer: Try different headlines, colors, graphics with ease - get double-digit improvements to your opt-ins and sales nearly overnight

-Email, Autoresponders and Copywriting - find out how to develop powerful bonds with customers over time, further distancing yourself from me-too competition

-Sales and Pricing Strategies for maximum profitability - in most cases it’s possible to increase your sales 30-40% and profitability by 60%, with my plan for extracting maximum profitability from every click

-Live workshop in Chicago, October 6-7: Accelerates your learning and implementation with hands-on, in-person expertise.

The course starts September 25. Find out all about it at:

perrymarshall.com/adwords/personalcoaching.htm

Yes this is an affiliate promotion but like I said, Perry is a guy I have no problem recommending to you and if I was a heavy user of AdWords right now I’d be signing up for this myself just for the chance to have Perry as a guy I can call a contact, even a friend, and get to know personally.

Anyway, that’s enough Perry’ lovin. You will know if this program is right for you and if so, please go check out the details and consider applying for a position in his program.

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I’m seeing this point made over and over, both in the wise words from the experts (like below from Perry Marshall), from my own experience running Internet businesses and in case study examples of business models that provide the contrary result, which proves the point.

What am I talking about? I’m talking about building an Internet business based on a sustainable, long term model.

99% of the business opportunities that I come across are focused on short term thinking and unsustainable methods of making money. It could be that they rely on using content of little value, or chasing search engine traffic using very inconsistent methods, or relying on tapping markets that are only lucrative short term.

Some of these models may make money, but as the made-for-adsense years prove, something that has little resistance to replicate and provides no real value to people, will not be making money long term.

My income curve has increased significantly in the 8 or so years that I have made money online, yet each time I move up a bracket I again realize that the entire process is about building on past work. In all cases shortly after receiving a nice boost in cash flow, I’m taking big chunks of it and reinvesting in growth and preparing for the future.

The trick is to reinvest current cashflow into sustainable business models, so you compound on your previous work and create greater overall value, even if you reduce your current profit margin - this really is a swimming strategy. This is analogous with taking equity from your current assets to purchase more assets.

Wise Words From Perry Marshall

Here’s what Perry Marshall had to say about this topic in a recent email he sent out to his Renaissance Club members (still the best marketing newsletter I know of!).

A couple of years ago, the rage on the web was clever little programs that generate thousands of garbage pages that get picked up by the search engines. You’d stick AdSense ads on them and make some money - because when people come to a junky page they either hit the back button or click on something that looks good.

It’s getting harder and harder to even find such pages as the search engines get wise to this.

As ephemeral as the web may appear, it really is more like real estate.

Long term value is built over time, and things of value are usually still there years later. There are almost a million sites that link to Amazon, and regardless of what Amazon does or doesn’t do today, those links will still be there tomorrow. Yes, there is the surface turbulence and flavor of the month on the web, but in the long run, real content and valuable links are an investment.

I cannot overstate the foolishness of fake content.

Every now and then we get emails from people that go something like this: “hey dude, i really need to make 5000 dollars in the next 3 days, can your ebook help me do that if it works ill buy your book thanks matt”

Sorry, lower-case matt, can’t help you. If you want to spend your life wandering the ghettos of the Internet, be my guest. But don’t blame me if you get stabbed by a heroin addict.

The Internet is just like real estate. So why would anyone want to build a building this month, knowing the wrecking ball is coming through the East wall next month? When you build on a solid foundation, you don’t have to start all over again next week after the search engines get wise to your game.

Oh yeah, and there’s another thing too: When you build your business on a solid foundation, when you cultivate your customer base, when you nurture your customers like watering a garden, guess what? If you need $5,000 in the next 3 days you can get it. Gotta plant the seeds first though.

Source: Perry Marshall’s Renaissance Club

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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

Read the rest of this entry >>

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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 >>

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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

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