PPC for Return Traffic

If you are serious about starting an online business, then you should realize that just like a traditional brick-and-mortar company, an investment of time and money is almost always required. We aren’t talking about going to the bank and taking out loans here, but we are talking about a lot of sweat and small monetary investments over time. The strategy discussed in this article is one avenue that you can use to promote your business and is meant to be used in conjunction with other standard online marketing practices such as search engine optimization and affiliate marketing.

One of the best ways to get your website off the ground is to utilize pay-per-click advertising to generate traffic that you can turn into return traffic and possibly an up-front sale here and there. People very often try pay-per-click and then, because they did not make an up-front profit, they deem the campaign a failure and stop funding the effort. This is a strategic flaw.

We are going to approach our pay-per-click campaign from this angle: Our primary goal is to generate subscriptions to free services (otherwise known as list building), our secondary goal is to generate a small number of sales to help offset the costs of acquiring new subscribers via an inline upsell process (on the thank you page of our initial subscription), and our auxiliary goal is to attempt to diversify our marketing channels as much as possible by making additional value propositions for all applicable direct marketing channels (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc.).

Notice that we have only one soft sell in this entire process after our initial free subscription. We are not trying to turn an immediate profit in this campaign. We are trying to generate a diverse lead base that we can build relationships with and over time turn into loyal customers that trust you because you have delivered value. Everyone has value to give to society; this method helps us deliver that value through many very diverse marketing channels. In using all of these different channels and methods of delivery, we greatly increase the likelihood that someone will be exposed to your value proposition in a manner that they find attractive.

This pay-per-click strategy also takes into account an industry-wide paradigm shift that has become apparent over the last few years. Online businesses have come to realize that customers can no longer be evaluated in terms of the single up-front sale. To be successful online in today’s market you have to evaluate your leads in terms of the lifetime value of a customer. In other words, you have to start employing the same tactics traditional businesses have been using for centuries to keep your customers coming back for more.

I am going to walk you through an example of how someone might implement this strategy and the specific tools used in the process. If I went into how exactly to use every tool in the process, I would have to write a couple of books. If you don’t know how to use some of this stuff, then some learning will be required. The information is readily available for free, it just takes some effort.

1) Keyword Research: We do our keyword research (determine what search terms people might use to find the free information we are offering) using the free Google AdWords keyword tool. I recommend starting this campaign with twenty or so different keywords. Make sure that your keywords represent exactly what you are offering or you will find yourself paying for clicks that do not result in subscriptions. Those that do subscribe will be less likely to find your content of value and thus less likely to ever purchase anything from you.

2) The Google Adwords Campaign: Google AdWords is an easy-to-use platform that usually delivers the highest quality pay-per-click leads available. If you do not have a Google AdWords account, then you will have to set one up. It’s relatively painless and pretty easy. Using Google AdWords, we will bid on our keywords (found using the Google AdWords keyword tool) and display text ads to Google search users that search for the specific terms we are bidding on. I recommend turning AdWords for content off during your initial testing. This simplifies the process and makes it easier to gauge response. You can start to add sites from the content network for testing after you are up and running and generating an acceptable number of actions (in this case subscribing to our various marketing channels and eventually purchasing). When you create your AdWords ads you need to make sure that the headline and verbiage you use in the advertisement represents exactly what is on the page.

3) The Squeeze & Delivery: When a Google search user clicks on your ad they will be taken to a page where we want to subscribe them to our free service. We incentivize this subscription with a value proposition such as, “Subscribe to the Awesome Deals Newsletter and Get the Shopping Secrets eBook Absolutely FREE!” Again, if you are not familiar with sales copy and squeeze pages, you may have to educate yourself a bit in this area. The tool we will use on this page to capture the lead as well as deliver the promised content is called Aweber. Aweber is an email auto-responder system that is low cost and easy to use. You place the Aweber opt-in form on your page (a form that your prospects can enter their email address into) and then set up an initial auto-responder series that delivers the content you promised in your value proposition first, and then delivers additional value propositions for subscriptions to all of your additional channels like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc. An email auto-responder series is simply a series of automated emails that go to your subscribers. The first email is an automated system email from Aweber asking them to confirm their email address and the second email is sent immediately and delivers the link to your giveaway ( in the case used above the Shopping Secrets eBook). Over the next several days (spread out with at least a couple of days between mailings) we will deliver our value propositions for your other channels (Twitter, YouTube, etc.). An example of one of these mailings could use copy like, “Follow me on Twitter for the latest deals as soon as they are released and before they expire!” We also use the Aweber platform to deliver our email newsletter or content when we are ready to send.

4) Build Relationships & Trust: Now that we have subscribers and followers we want to break down the trust barrier by offering free value and personal attention. Deliver great content in your email broadcasts (newsletter or otherwise), monitor all of your Twitter followers and respond to their specific needs with something useful, monitor all of your YouTube subscribers and engage with them via video and text responses to their videos, and monitor the content of your Facebook fans’ pages and deliver useful content for their individual needs, etc.

5) Facilitate the Sale: Hopefully at this point we have built up some trust. We have convinced these people that we have something of value that they are interested in. We are now going to sell them something that they need in a manner that makes them feel special and fosters the relationships that we have built. A example of some verbiage (used in tweets, videos, Facebook posts, email broadcasts, etc.) employed here could sound something like, “Over the last several weeks I have noticed an overwhelming need for information regarding the use of the new Ka-Ching Network rewards and cash-back system. When used properly you can save a ton of money on products you use every single day, so I put together this comprehensive guide that walks you through the entire process in an easy-to-understand way. To thank all of my followers and subscribers, I am offering this coupon code: 24HOURSAVINGS that will get you $10 off the regular $29.95 price. This coupon is only good for 24 hours, so if you put through your order before 12:00 PM MST tomorrow, you will be able to get the discount.” This verbiage is just an example, but I think that it makes my point.

6) Analyze: Analyzing this process is very easy at the highest level and very complex as you dig deeper and deeper into the specifics at play. The highest level metric is pretty obvious: I spent $X on these leads and over the course of six months I sold them X number of products for a profit or loss of $X. The beauty of this model is that you have generated an asset. When you reach a point that you are not profitable (after a significant amount of time and effort, you can stop reinvesting by buying new leads and remarket to the ones you already have until you reach a position you find tenable.

7) Rinse & Repeat: After you have analyzed your results and have a long enough span of time invested in the process, you can implement the new ideas you find to increase profitability and repeat the process. One of the keys is starting with dollar amounts that are low enough to repeat while you fine tune the process. If you spend all the money that you are willing to invest up-front on the first round of clicks that you pay for, then you are very unlikely to reach a point in the campaign that is optimal because you have no funding left to implement your changes.

Tools
Aweber
Google AdWords
Google AdWords Keyword Tool
Twitter
YouTube
Facebook