JM: Welcome to the How to Profit from Google AdWords Teleclinic. This is Jonathan Mizel and Perry Marshall. We have a handout with some ad examples we’d like you to download at:

http://www.perrymarshall.com/923/

Right on the page is a link above the Adobe Reader logo, which is the AdWords copywriting example. You want to go to that page and download that Adobe file. That will give you a little bit more background. And I think Perry’s going to be referring to some of those ads. So I want to thank everybody for joining us on the How to Profit from Google AdWords presentation today. Perry, you want to go ahead and start?

PM: Yes! And Jonathan, I always like interaction so any time you want to just jump in with a question or comment, no problem okay?

JM: Well, thank you.

PM: So, yes, thanks everybody for being on the call. And I know you’re all busy people. And you got a gazillion things tugging on your time, so I’m certainly going to make sure that you get a worthwhile experience tonight. So what I’m going to talk about is the mechanics of making Google AdWords work and some of the psychology. And another thing that I’m going to talk about is the context of how this fits into your whole entire business and not just Internet marketing. Google AdWords is not just an interesting little toy on the Internet. It’s really, in my opinion, one of the most profound developments in the whole history of advertising, because if you think about what advertising has always been—it’s always been sticking some ad or some message somewhere where you can reasonably expect the right kind of person to come by whether it’s a billboard or a magazine or a radio ad or TV ad or whatever.

And there’s always been a lot of waste in just about any form of advertising. Or else you’re interrupting people in the form of mailing them letters or sending them e-mails.

And what pay-per-click marketing does and what Google (because of its speed of setting it up allows you to do) is it allows you to spend 5 bucks and instantaneously have access to 100 million people and specifically razor sharp target just the people you want with just the message you want. It only targets them when they’re looking for what you’ve got. The precision of that is just astounding and the fact that Google lets you do that in the space of 10 minutes from, you know, clicking on the link to having your ad running is nothing short of a miracle in the modern world. And I can only imagine how much computer stuff goes on behind the scenes every time somebody does a search. But the bottom line is if you sell a cure for some kind of a problem or whatever it might be, you can pick the exact keywords that you want. You can bid on them. You can write the ad that you want. And you can have it in front of people, and you only pay when they click. So it’s a very unique form of advertising that just never existed before about 18 months ago. Overture was doing something similar to this as long as, what Jonathan, maybe three years ago?

JM: Yeah, three even four years ago, back when they were Goto.com, they had pay-per-click traffic available. And, you know, when we started using it we were shocked at the conversion rate between other types of traffic because it was, at the time, some of the purest search engine traffic you could get.

PM: Right.

JM: Plus we talked about some of the problems that have occurred with Overture and other pay-per-click search engines, and it seems like Google—-the more we test and the more we hear and the more we have clients doing actual promotion—-the more Google just rises to the top.

PM: Yeah. Google has gotten to where they are because they give people an excellent user experience and they have very high standards. They’re not willing to compromise in order to get more dollars, and so they have a very loyal following. Now the speed of Google and the ability to make changes to, test things, to try new ideas to have a hunch, stick up a webpage, drive traffic to it, and learn something from it is so fast that what Google really is for a lot of people is the world’s fastest crash course in direct marketing.

And for our purposes today, I’m going to define direct marketing is as advertising the demand’s action. If you are in a small business, it’s my conviction that’s the only kind of marketing that makes any sense. Now if you’re Coca-Cola or some $500,000, billion plus dollar company, then you can do image advertising and branding and all that kind of stuff. And I won’t disagree for a millisecond that kind of branding, kind of advertising works just fine when you’re McDonald’s or Coca-Cola or Wal-Mart or whoever. But, if you are in a specialized business or if you’re in a small business, doing that kind of advertising is like a teardrop in the ocean. And it won’t do you any good for the money you’re spending.

Direct marketing is the discipline of putting out advertising and measuring the results, expecting the results, and refining it until you get the results that you want. It’s scientific. It’s also very psychological. It’s a blend of human psychology and arithmetic, and Google is an embodiment of all of those things in one single amazing high-speed tool. And so if you think of where the world was four or five years ago and the whole dot com boom versus the way the Internet is now is comparison of dumb money versus smart money.

If you were marketing on the Internet four years ago, there were a lot of dumb people doing dumb things. And when it all caved in, the clunk was heard around the world. And we’re still recovering from that mess. If you look at what’s going on in the Internet now, people spend advertising money very carefully. The tools, pay-per-click search engines, allow you to measure it with ruthless precision, and you can get amazing results if you track it. And so it’s changing the landscape of marketing. And I think sort of from the bottom up, Google and the whole way Internet marketing is done is going to change the way companies do marketing. And direct marketing’s going to be much more en vogue in the next five years because of it.

Okay, I’m going to jump in into doing Google AdWords campaigns. If you go to where Jonathan pointed you to, which is:

http://www.perrymarshall.com/923/

You will see a bunch of advertisements, these are all Google ads, they’re running today, I swiped off the Internet. And I’m going to use this as a starting point. I’m going to refer back to this several times, so go to:

http://www.perrymarshall.com/923/

There’s a link to the AdWords teleclinic PDF. Open that up and take a look, and I’m going to point out a lot of subtleties here of what worked and what didn’t.

Before I go into this, let’s say it all starts with the keywords. Keywords are the foundation of everything you do in pay-per-click. If you bid on the wrong keywords, you can spend a lot of money and never make a dime back, have a lot of frustration. If you bid on the right keywords, you can get tremendous results. And one of the neat things, on the Internet, most things you do are wide open to the public. Your competitors can see what you’re doing. They can look at your WebPages. They can look at your html. They can go through your sales process. But one thing that your competitors can’t do is reverse engineer your keyword selections. There’s no way they know if you’re bidding on a keyword unless they think of it first, type it in, and see if you’re bidding on it. And so it becomes this proprietary web you build inside of Google that they cannot, they don’t know what you’re bidding. They don’t know what your click-through rate is other than accrued approximation. And they don’t know all the phrases. They don’t know the negative keywords; they don’t know the razor sharp targeted phrases you’re bidding on.

As your marketing develops over time, you have something that’s truly your secret alone. And it amounts to a competitive advantage that people can only get by doing it the hard way. When you choose keywords, the first thing you need to know about this is most people are going to make a list of 20 keywords and bid on them in a hap-hazard way. And that’s a wrong way to approach things. The right way is to bid on 200 keywords all clustered together in very tight little groups. And the reason, I mean 20 and 200 is just kind of an off the cuff number, but the average bidder is going to come up with a list of 20 things they think people would search on. They’re going to bid on them, and they’re going to find out the list they came up with is the same list that all their competitors come up with. And those keywords are

the most expensive keywords. And so they end up bidding $1, $2, or $3 on those keywords. If you bid on a keyword that nobody else is bidding on, you pay a nickel per click.

JM: Perry, you know, what you just said was interesting because and correct me if I’m wrong, we’ve got the price that we pay for the keyword per click. And we’ve got the click-through rate of which those two are a function of where we rank.

PM: Yep.

JM: And in our 20 most popular keywords or the 30, the ones everybody thinks, "these are my keywords," pretty much you only have a couple of things you can do to get an advantage. You can either bid more money.

PM: Right.

JM: Or write a slightly better ad.

PM: Right.

JM: But, you know, I just want everybody to understand keyword selection, coming up with additional keywords, which we’ll talk about in this session I’m sure and in the next session as well, it’s really the biggest advantage you can give yourself because it allows you to bid on stuff other people, they don’t even have on their radar. And if you do it correctly like you said, you might have an average click price of 50 cents or 75 cents for the normal stuff, you get in on a nickel.

PM: Yep.

JM: …on the more esoteric end, less thought of keywords.

PM: That’s right. That’s right. And another thing about those keywords is people will usually come up with a list of real general words. Like they’ll bid on the word arthritis if they sell an arthritis medication. Well, everybody that sells an arthritis medication has thought of that.

JM: [Laughs]

PM: Okay, and so you’re bidding against everybody else. But, matter of fact, I’m just going to do a little search here to get a list of arthritis.

JM: When you bid on those words you’re not only bidding against your competitors, you’re bidding against people who don’t compete against you directly, but they happen to compete for that keyword.

PM: Right. Right. Now, if you bid on arthritis pain relief, that’s a three-word phrase, think of the difference between a person who types in arthritis pain relief and a person who types in arthritis. Okay, there’s a big difference. So, number one, the word arthritis pain relief is going to be less expensive usually. Secondly, the person who types that in is looking for arthritis pain relief specifically. That keyword or that phrase will probably convert to sales much better because arthritis, that’s something that a 5th grader would type in when they’re writing a little paper. Okay? I bet most people that are suffering from arthritis are going to type in something more specific than arthritis.

I’m looking at Overture’s search term inventory tool: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

I got variations like degenerative arthritis, knee arthritis, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. Now juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, 21,073 searches on that. That is a very specific market. And think about the Internet. How many combinations of things can people type in on the Internet?

PM: Infinite. Right, there’s an infinite. Well, that means there’s an infinite number of markets on the Internet or at least a few million markets on the Internet. And so the Internet is not a place where you find anybody and everybody. The Internet is a place where you find very specific people looking for very specific things. So, you know, arthritis information: 2,028 searches. Arthritis in dogs: 15,027 searches. So, you know, don’t bid on arthritis trying to catch all those things, you’ll pay a lot of money for your clicks. You drill down, and you’ll get a lot better conversion rate.

Another thing, which I eluded to earlier is you want to cluster your keywords together very tightly. You don’t want to take all your keywords that you can possibly come up with, dump them into one single campaign and one single ad. That is a big mistake. I’m hoping everybody took a look at the example PDF file.

JM: Yeah.

PM: And, it had the child sponsorship example. I put this example together doing something very specific that a lot of people do wrong. I put a whole bunch of keywords in this one campaign: sponsor a child, poverty, third world country, child sponsorship, charity and poor people; I put all those words in the same campaign. And then the ad said: Children’s relief; we help hungry kids in poor countries. That is not going to work. And the reason it’s not going to work is because the ad doesn’t match the keywords. The ads needs to match the keywords very exactly. And the keywords are scattered all over the place.

When I did the second example, I did a little bit differently. And what I did is I lumped, let me pull this up here, I did child sponsorship as the root

word, and then I had all these variations—-child foreign sponsorship, child sponsorship Africa, child sponsorship program—-I put all those together in a single campaign. And then the ad said: Child sponsorship in the headline, which is exactly what they typed in. That’s what they’re wanting to see after the results come back. Support a needy child in Africa, get photos and regular e-mail updates.

And so the ad’s specifically written to target the things that a donor would be interested in. Is a donor interested in sending money to some continent and never hearing back from anybody again? No. I have actually been researching this, and they send pictures and letters and all kinds of stuff. I don’t know if anybody saw the movie About Schmidt, it’s got, you know, Jack Nicholson sponsors this child in Africa. And he gets letters back from him and stuff; that really actually happens with the good programs. That’s what people are looking for.

And so the ad, even though its charity, the ad promises a benefit to the person searching. It tells them what they get, not what the child gets so much. And that’s really important. And so there’s this psychological element when you’re writing these ads is you have to appeal to a person’s self-interest. You don’t want to talk to them about them or about yourself or your company; you want to talk to the person about themselves.

So, I’d like to do at this point is let’s take a look at this example at:

http://www.perrymarshall.com/923/

In the AdWord examples, there’s a whole bunch of really good things in here. I’m going to give you a whole bunch of little tips and tricks to improve the click-through rate on your ad. But the first thing we have to get an

understanding about is coming up with a hook that’s really going to get people’s attention in the first place.

If you start with a fundamentally bad ad, something that’s fundamentally and appealing, it doesn’t really matter how much you tweak it, it’s always going to perform poorly. And so what I’ve done is I’ve collected a whole bunch of ads here. And at the bottom of all the ads, it’s got this little interest bar. And sometimes it’s full. Sometimes it goes halfway. Sometimes it looks like it’s almost empty. Well, I don’t know the exact formula they use to display it. I know it’s somewhat relative to the other ads that are running.

But a really crude approximation would be to say, when it’s full, it’s getting a click-through rate of one percent or better. And when it’s less than full then if it’s halfway it’s probably getting a click-through rate of 0.5 percent. If it’s less than half full, it’s less than half a percent. And it’s probably about to get disabled. And what you can do is you can type things in, and you can look how different ads are doing.

And so I typed in arthritis, and it shows five different ads here. And it’s interesting to see which ones have a full interest bar and which ones only have partial interest. The one with the least amount of interest in this group is one that says: pain relief without drugs; get relief from arthritis pain in the warmth of Jacuzzi premium spas. I’m going to assume that’s not doing so well because most people aren’t going to click on buying a spa. Although, that may work for the advertiser, I don’t really know.

But, a really successful one here is: "I cured my arthritis. You can too. Forget expensive meds and surgeries. Stop the pain." And then AFF,

which affiliate which if you’re an affiliate, Google requires that you put that little AFF on there. Arthritis treatment info—-information and link resources for treatment of arthritic conditions. I find generally that if the ad advertises information that has a research feel to it where they’re going to get a discussion about the problem rather than a bunch of information about a specific solution, it’ll tend to get more clicks.

If you’re in really tough keywords that are very generally, I’m going to talk about the strategy later. Usually it’s the only approach that’ll work. Now if you’ll look at the middle one, it says, Arthritis joint repair: cartilage repair without surgery. Experience the power of e-zorb.

I think this ad is flawed because it starts talking about the product before the person even clicks. And I think that’s a mistake. Now let me back up and talk about why this interest bar is so important. Google will really only have a handful of rules for AdWords. They don’t have some Byzantine complex set of rules. It’s very simple.

And the rules are: your position relative to the other bidders is a function of your bid price times the click-through rate that you get. And so the higher the percentage of people who click on your ad, the less you have to pay to be in a certain position. So if you’ve got a click-through rate of 2 percent, and I’ve got a click-through rate of 1 percent, you can bid 50 cents. But I would have to bid $1 to be above you. And so you have pay half as much by being twice as relevant.

The other thing is that if you get a click-through rate on Google of less than 0.5 percent or less than one click-through of every 200 searches, after 1,000 searches they will disable the keywords. And your ad won’t run

anymore. And so that’s how Google makes sure people’s ads match what people are actually searching for. And so you want to number one, not get disabled by having an ad that gets a good click-through rate. Number two, you want as high a click-through rate as you can because the way you went on Google is not by winning a bidding war, you do it by winning a click-through war.

JM: So that’s really the biggest difference between Overture and Google I can see. I mean there’s a few other major ones, but really, Google rewards good direct marketers.

PM: Yep.

JM: Whereas, Overture rewards people with deep pockets.

PM: That’s absolutely right. And so if you’re up against some big, dumb company. And there’s a lot of those.

JM: [Laughs]

PM: And they gave it to their Webmaster and said, "Hey, why don’t you buy some clicks on Google? You know, here’s the corporate credit card." They can be paying three or four bucks a click. They could be losing money or whatever. You’re getting a good click-through rate. You’re getting better traffic than they are. And maybe you’re only paying one fourth as much as they are. And that’s a huge advantage on Google. And another thing is because it encourages you to get a better click-through rate and because it gives you your click-through rate in almost Realtime reporting as you experiment and try different ads, you can start to figure out what the world is searching for and then adjust what you’re offering to match it.

That’s such a huge, huge advantage. And we’ll talk even more,

especially in the next session about how to even ask people what they’re searching for and a way to structure that.

JM: Yeah. Boy, that’s a big, big one. I’m reading a book right now. It’s called the E-Myth if anyone has read it.

PM: Oh yeah.

JM: You’ve read it. And boy I’ve gone this long without reading that book. It talks about the different philosophies when you’re starting a business. And I think you touched on a very important philosophy and that is, the average person, the average marketer creates their product and says, "I will sell this product; how do I sell it? I need to sell it this way. I need to sell it this way." Or they get in that mindset where they say, "These are my keywords."

PM: Yep.

JM: And you can’t ever take them away from them. The entrepreneur and the person who really understands how to use these tools and those direct response marketer says, "Here’s this market. What do they need? I’m not going to force my product on a market. That’s too hard. I’m going to find out what the market won and create products that serve their passions and solve their problems."

PM: Yes.

JM: And so this really allows you, you know, we’ve seen so many times when people have gotten involved with pay-per-click. People have gotten involved with Google. They find a whole new market hiding there under everyone else’s nose.

PM: Yes.

JM: …they didn’t know existed.

PM: Yeah, and let me take a tiny little detour here. I got this e-mail yesterday from a guy. And he goes, "Well, I’m kind of new in Internet marketing." And he mentioned some MLM company and whatever. But he said something that I kind of read between the lines. He said, "I am determined to make this work come heck or high-water." I mean I could feel the determination and consternation, if you will, in that statement.

JM: [Laughs]

PM: And I said, well… I did reply to him. I said, well I don’t consider myself some guru on Internet entrepreneurship or selling e-books or something. But I said, I’ll tell you this, the mentality you learn in a lot of sales situations of gut it up and brute force and all this energy you can muster and persistence and determination and God bless America and everything else, does not work in direct marketing. What works in direct marketing is finesse. What works in direct marketing is finding natural grooves and resonating with them, finding unmet needs in the marketplace where people already want something and you’re just going to give it to them. And then it flows like oil. You don’t have to fight people.

And I just think if you approach it like, hey guess what, see in direct marketing, in sales you look at it as rejection. In direct marketing it’s not rejection; it’s a test that failed.

JM: Right.

PM: And so in Google you can run all the tests you want. If it didn’t work, hey, they didn’t like that message. Let’s try this other message. Let’s try these other keywords, and you’ll always end up finding something that you didn’t know people wanted. Well, now you can give it to them. And so it’s not

brute force. It’s about giving the people what they want.

Okay, let’s keep moving here. Google allows you to give negative keywords in phrase matching. Let’s say that you’re, let’s stay with the arthritis thing, and you’re selling some kind of kit or information or something about arthritis. If you’re selling it, you probably don’t want people that are looking for free. And so you can put the word negative free in your list of keywords. And anytime the word free is in their search, your ad will not show up. Okay? So there’s any number of things where people type in, you know, free coupons, free music, free MP3, free this, free that. If you don’t want those people, then use a negative keyword, and you won’t get them.

Or, you know, some industry or some, you know, in my website I’ve got all these lead generation tools. One market that my stuff is not for, I mean some of my other products, my marketing tool kits and stuff is insurance. So I’ve got the word negative insurance on my keywords for giving away my gorilla marketing CD. Now, phrase matching is really important. There are two ways to phrase match on Google. Let’s say that you are selling, let’s go to another example that I’ve got on these ads – speak Portuguese.

There’s three ways to bid on those two words. You can bid on speak Portuguese with no punctuation, and your ad will show up anytime the word "speak" and the word "Portuguese" are in a search. So if somebody typed in Portuguese speak, your ad would show up. If they typed in speak Portuguese, your ad would show up. If they typed in speak good Portuguese, your ad would show up. So that’s the most general thing.

So you could even bid on the word "Portuguese" and your ad would

show up anytime somebody types in Portuguese combined with anything else. Now the next kind of phrase matching is when you use quotes. "Speak Portuguese." What that means is the phrase "Speak Portuguese" has to appear in that order. So they could type in learn to speak Portuguese, your ad would show up. They could type speak Portuguese well, your ad would show up.

JM: …how to speak Portuguese or tell me how to speak Portuguese.

PM: Right. Any of those.

JM: Just so long as you put the words "speak" and "Portuguese" in quotes. And then only when those two words together are searched for in any other word combination. But those two words have to be next to one another, and they have to be the exact match.

PM: Right. Now there’s the even more exact match, and that’s [speak Portuguese] in brackets, square brackets. If you put it in square brackets that means they have to type speak Portuguese in that order exactly like you put it in the brackets with no other words. And only then will it come up. Now, here’s a little trick that is very useful for getting your bid prices down is if you sell something that’s about speaking Portuguese, your bid on speak Portuguese with no punctuation at all and you bid on [speak Portuguese] in brackets and you bid on "speak Portuguese" in quotes, all three.

JM: Why would you do that Perry?

PM: Okay, here’s why, even though you’re marketing doesn’t have any official reason to select those different formulations, that helps you because if you’re the only guy bidding on [speak Portuguese] in brackets and they type speak Portuguese with nothing else, then you are automatically the highest bidder.

You’re only bidding against the people who bid on it in brackets.

JM: So, in other words, you know, because I got a lot of keywords, I’m open to my Google AdWords account right now for one of the promotions we’re doing. You could almost take any of these keywords and triple your keywords just by putting quotes and brackets around them?

PM: Yep.

JM: Would you recommend that to somebody who has got a bunch of keywords?

PM: Yes, I would.

JM: Prominent or not?

PM: Yeah. Can I talk about the mineral supplement thing we did?

JM: Oh yeah.

PM: …and how that played into it?

JM: Yes.

PM: Okay, when I did your client’s Coral Calcium Campaign, there were like 40 different people bidding on the word coral calcium. You know, there were eight people on page one and eight more people on page two and eight more people on page three. And if you wanted to get on the first page, you had to be somewhere in the neighborhood of two or three dollars a click. Okay. Well, I discovered something. I discovered if I bid on [coral calcium] in brackets, there wasn’t very many other people bidding on it in brackets. And I got to position number six on the first page for only about 40 cents a click.

JM: Wow. So that’s how you did it.

PM: That’s how I did it.

JM: [Laughs] You never told me that before.

PM: [Laughs] Well…

JM: I was wondering. I’m like how does he do that, you know? And the client was saying these are like $2 and $3 clicks; how is he doing that?

PM: Right.

JM: I said I don’t know.

PM: That was how, because there was only a handful of other people bidding on coral calcium exact exclusive phrase. And so turns out lots of people were typing in coral calcium with no other words. And so it was automatically a perfect match for us. And we could get in for maybe one fifth or one tenth of what everybody else was paying for the same traffic.

JM: Oh my Gosh.

PM: And so I liken it to finding a crack in the sidewalk and okay, we got something going there.

JM: Well, now I just want to clarify because again, you know, now you got me all excited. I’m looking at, I got in this one campaign I’m working on, I’ve got about I think 47 or 55 or something different keywords. I can immediately turn that into 150 keywords.

PM: Right.

JM: Just by taking those keywords. I mean they’re the same words, but they’re different configurations based on search parameters that the user is giving us and that Google allows us to modify based on actual search terminology so to speak.

PM: Right. Right.

JM: Okay.

PM: So you could take everything you’ve got as long as it makes sense. I mean you might not do it for everything. But you put all that stuff in quotes, put it

all in brackets. And here’s another thing that it’ll do for you, over time you’ll get a percentage click-through rate for speak Portuguese with no qualifiers. So if you’re bidding on "speak Portuguese" in quotes and [speak Portuguese] in brackets, and you’re also bidding on speak Portuguese with no qualifiers, what that means is that is only getting searched when people have a word in between speak and Portuguese. Or when they have a word that you haven’t thought of bidding on. And it’ll actually give you an indication of all the varieties of different ways that people are searching on stuff. And you can sort of deduce, it gives you a clue that maybe there’s some other things that you’re not bidding on that you should.

And I’ll also tell you that the bracketed version will usually have the highest click-through rate of the three different ways of doing it. And the one in quotes will have the second highest and the one without quotes. So a typical one, speak Portuguese, no diameters might get 1.0 percent. "Speak Portuguese" in quotes might get one in a half. And [speak Portuguese] in brackets might get 2 1/2 percent. Okay so now you’re getting a 2 1/2 percent click-through rate instead of a 1 percent click-through rate. And you’re competing against fewer people at the same time. So it’s like a double whammy. Okay?

JM: Amazing. [Laughs] If you can’t tell, I’m in the account right now modifying them because I want to make sure I do this in case some of my competitors might be listening to this.

PM: [Laughs] Now, let’s go back to this set of example ads. I’m going to pick out some things that make some of these ads successful. One of the first rules that I try to observe, it’s not 100 percent but maybe three fourths of the

time, what works best is that whatever the phrase is that you’re bidding on, put that phrase in the headline of the ad. That almost always works best. So, speak Portuguese, most of these ads say speak Portuguese and it’ll highlight the speak and the Portuguese. And it’ll make your ad more noticeable, and it’ll help the click-through rate go up.

But here’s another thing that, let’s, I don’t know if it’s a mistake, but it’s a nuance that most people miss. Try as hard as you can to put a good strong verb in the headline. Most people will, if you look at most headlines, the headlines are all nouns and adjectives. Okay, pain relief without drugs. Pain relief, noun, or relief is a noun. Pain is an adjective. Without is an adjective. Drugs is a noun. New arthritis treatment. Anytime it’s just nouns and adjectives, it’s kind of a passive statement. I cured my arthritis is a much more vivid statement. Learn German in 10 hours. Learn to speak Portuguese, speak Portuguese, learn Portuguese. I think of the word master would be better than learn. Of course you can’t master Portuguese in three hours.

Let’s look at some other ones, page two. Have constant headaches? That’s always a good strategy, ask the person a question. Okay, technology defeats autism. Research autism. Play the trumpet. Oil change made easy, okay. When you can put a verb in a headline, it creates a mental picture of something happening. And you’ve only got 25 characters of space in the first line, 35 in the second, 35 on the third. Well, you don’t have much space to make the statement that you’re trying to make. And so having some good verbs in there can really help. And you’ll see most of these ads, even though they’re pretty decent ads a lot of them, most of them don’t use verbs.

You know, can you use verbs in the second line? You know, get relief from arthritis pain. Try the microwaves program for free. Experience the power. Most people do have verbs in the second and third line, but that’s a really powerful one. And so, you know, and another thing is can you change the verb? I’ve got an example in my toolkit where we change the word easy to the word fast, and that’s the only thing we changed in the ad with just one word. And the click-through rate when up 1 1/2 times. And that happens all the time through a different verb.

JM: One little word. You just change one little thing.

PM: One little word. Okay. Now, here’s another thing you always want to do, always, always, always. There’s never a reason not to do this really. When you set up a campaign, you enter your keywords, you write your ad, as soon as the campaign is up, go back and, you know, the ad underneath in your ad manager it says, edit or delete. And above it it says create a new ad. Create a new ad without deleting the old one.

JM: Okay.

PM: Always do that. And here’s what’s going to happen, as soon as you write another ad, you write it differently. When you’re starting you might try an entirely different hook or maybe you just change one word. But, you always run two ads at one time. And Google will automatically rotate them back and forth, back and forth, back and forth evenly. So you set up your two ads. And then when you go on Google and you search for what you’re bidding on, you click search and search and refresh, refresh, refresh, you’ll see your ad waffle back and forth, back and forth between the ad number one and ad number two. And it will expose them evenly. And one will get a higher click- through rate than the other, okay?

JM: Okay.

PM: So now, you can, if you do that, let’s say one ad gets four clicks and the other one gets eight, you haven’t had enough trials to be sure that the eight is really better because if you flip a coin 10 times in a row, you might come up head eight times out of 10 doesn’t mean you’ve got an 80 percent heads coin.

JM: [Laughs]

PM: It just means that you got heads eight times out of 10. Now if you flip a coin 1,000 times, the odds are almost completely 100 percent. But you’re going to get roughly 500 out of 1000 because you had enough trials. Now a lot of people when the realize this is an issue, they’ll go, well how many letters do I have to mail out or how many people have to visit my website? Or, how many times do they have to see my ad? Well, the answer is it’s not how many impressions or it’s not how many you send out, it’s how many come back or how many clicks you get.

JM: It’s based on actions as opposed to impression.

PM: Right. It’s based on actions. So if you’re measuring clicks, here’s a rule of thumb, and you can look up statistic books and get a perfect answer. But roughly your numbers will be 95 percent reliable if you get 30 clicks, okay?

JM: Okay.

PM: So if Ad A got 30 clicks and Ad B got 25 then I can be somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 to 95 percent sure that if I run it again, that I’ll get the same numbers again. So if I got one ad that got 30 clicks, the other one got 10 clicks, there’s no question the one with 30 is better. If one ad got 31 clicks and the other ad got 29, you’re fairly sure that the 31 is better than the

29. But actually they’re so close to each other, I just leave them running.

There’s nothing wrong with having two different ads because people search more than one time very frequently, so why not have two chances to catch them? Right? I mean when I’m looking for something, I might go back and search five or ten times. Now I would recommend, you can have as many ads running at the same time as you want. You could rotate 12 ads all at the same time if you really wanted to. Usually, though, it’s best to only do two at a time. And that’s because if you’re running 12 ads, you’re going to have to get about 360 clicks between all the different ads before the numbers of every one of those ads is pretty solid.

And, you know, half of them might be losers. But you’re not sure if they’re losers until 400 impressions have gone by. But if you just do them two at a time, okay, you know 20 or 30 more clicks go by. This one’s a loser; get rid of it. Try another one. This one’s, oh, it’s called beating your control. The best one you can come up with is always called your control. And so you’re always playing deep mind control all the time. And so sometimes you’ll be in the shower or you’ll have a little brainstorm. Once in awhile I’ll like wake up in the middle of the night. I get some crazy idea. So, oh, got to get out of bed. [Laughs] Jonathan, are you as obsessive about things as I am?

JM: Yeah.

PM: [Laughs]

JM: I leave the computer running and Jules will say, "Where are you going?" And I’ll say, "I’ve got to write an ad."

PM: [Laughs]

JM: What do you mean we have to write an ad, you know, we’re watching TV or something like that.

PM: [Laughs]

JM: And what’s funny, sometimes you get a brainstorm, you’ll go ahead and you’ll write an ad and it’ll become the new control piece. But sometimes it just bites, and you get like no clicks on it. And you don’t have to worry about Google sending you an e-mail saying, "I’m sorry you didn’t get it off a click-through rate." But occasionally those late night brainstorms really do produce something.

PM: Absolutely. Absolutely.

JM: One thing that’s interesting about that, just so great about this is that if you do get a crazy idea, you know, some night you can go and you can write the ad. You can put it up on Google. And if you’re in a category that’s getting clicks, getting traffic, and getting searches, you’re probably going to know within a day or so whether or not it works or at least it has a chance as opposed to Overture where it takes them five days just to get the thing approved.

PM: Yeah. So, yeah, the ability to test headlines, titles, product names, names of books, names of seminars.

JM: Now you said something; I want to clarify it because I was not aware of this. I usually have and in this category I’m looking at, and I got about seven or eight ads running.

PM: Yep.

JM: And they’re all at about 1.1, 1.2 percent click-through rates.

PM: Are they rotating all on the same campaign?

JM: Yeah, they’re all rotating in the same campaign.

PM: Okay.

JM: It’s a group of keywords they’ve put together. And do you think I should get rid of five of them and just take the top two ones?

PM: Well…

JM: And keep testing new ones against that? Is that the answer?

PM: Are they all, what’s the least number of clicks that you’ve got on one of those through history?

JM: Well, let’s see, most of them have like I got 85 and 93 and 87.

PM: Oh.

JM: And so I’ve got two that I just wrote on the call. Actually, I take that back. The one I just wrote, two don’t have any clicks yet. But I have one that I wrote this morning, which has already got three or four clicks. So the ones that they’ve been running for a couple weeks, have 100 or more clicks on it…

PM: Right.

JM: …these are pretty solid ads.

PM: Yeah.

JM: I’ve got one of them that has 1.2 percent then the rest of them are like 1.1 or 1.0.

PM: Oh.

JM: I should take the 1.2 one, and I should start getting rid of the lower performing ads and basically do a test between one and the other.

PM: Well, I’m not sure that you’re doing it wrong especially because you’ve got several ads that are all pulling in a similar effectiveness. There’s nothing wrong with that. And you’ve got all these ads, so every time somebody searches they’re going to see something slightly different. You’ve got a better chance of catching them at least one of those times, so that’s fine. But if you’re trying to get to an answer as fast as you can, then run two at a time.

JM: Okay. Now I noticed something just this morning, which I couldn’t believe. I’ve got a bunch of different keyword phrases on here. We’ll take this big Portuguese one (or learn to speak Portuguese) as an example. If you’ve got 10 ads and let’s say they’re rotating and one of them is learn to speak Portuguese, it looks, it appears, it seems that Google is going to take the ad that closest matches the phrase that was typed in and deliver that one. Have you noticed that? Because I typed in some of my specific phrases, and in almost every case the ad that appeared first in rotation was the one that had that exact phrase on it.

PM: I don’t know. Maybe Google does something that I’m unaware of.

JM: Okay.

PM: But as far as I know, they just rotate them evenly.

JM: Or maybe, that’s the one when people type in that phrase, that’s the one with the highest click-through and therefore that’s the one that rises to the top.

PM: Well, but the position they give you is not based on the ad, it’s based on the keyword.

JM: Based on the keyword, okay.

PM: There might be something going on that I’m not aware of, but as far as I knew, they just rotate them evenly.

JM: Okay. Okay, good. Can I say something else?

PM: Yeah.

JM: …because it’s so interesting. I did that trick that you told us just a few minutes ago. And, I mean I’m sitting here in shock. I just put a whole bunch of brackets, and I took all my keywords, put them in brackets, added another set that were in quotes. For my primary phrase, I was number two position on page two. I am now the number five position on page one. I did not change anything except for adding those things, and I jumped up like four spots Perry.

PM: And going from page two to page one is like 10 times as much traffic.

JM: I mean I can’t believe that one simple little trick, just taking the same keywords and putting them in brackets did that. And I can only imagine how much more traffic I’m going to get, so thank you.

PM: Right on.

JM: So, you want to keep going? I think we can go…

PM: I’m going to keep going. The next thing is logical organization of campaigns in groups. A campaign is the biggest category in a group. Under each campaign you can have a bunch of groups. And so when you build a new campaign, you are selecting what language, what country, what your daily budget is, really global decisions. And so let’s say that you sell stuff that’s for languages. If you’ve got a bunch of Portuguese products, you’d put them in a Portuguese campaign. And you’d have different groups based on different kinds of phrases that relate to Portuguese. You might have one group that’s for speak Portuguese. You might have another group that’s for learn Portuguese. Speak Portuguese and learn Portuguese are different enough that you would want different campaigns, different variations on the same keywords, different ads, different bid prices. Okay?

Now if you sell a bunch of language stuff, you’ll want a different campaign for German in a bunch of group underneath a German category. A different campaign for Spanish. And probably, you’ll even target different countries. I don’t think, if you’re selling foreign language stuff, you’re probably not going to be selling Portuguese in Portugal. I could be wrong, but it doesn’t seem like it.

It seems like you’d be selling Portuguese everywhere else. So you want to organize it that way, and it’s a pretty simple thing. But it sure makes your campaigns a lot easier to manage. Again, you don’t want to stick like everything but the kitchen sink in one ad group and then try to make one ad carry it all. You’ve got to learn Portuguese keywords, then you’re probably going to have an ad that says learn Portuguese. And you’re going to have tracking codes specific to that group.

And then when you’ve got speak Portuguese, you’re going to have speak Portuguese keywords, speak Portuguese ad and a speak Portuguese tracking code so you can tell, do I get more sales from people that type speak Portuguese or more sales from people that type in learn Portuguese. And tools like one shopping cart’s AdTracker or AdMinder or Hypertracker, they’ll track impressions that come through different campaigns and trace them to opt-ins or trace them to sales so you can figure out which campaigns are actually converting to the actions you want and which ones aren’t.

JM: Let me ask a question because I know you can drill down very deep, and I just want to get that real clear.

PM: Yeah.

JM: A lot of people have, you know, in the old days we used to just drive all of our, with Overture we used to drive all of our Overture traffic into one page.

PM: Yeah.

JM: And that way we could say, well, I spent $500 on Overture, and I made $1,000 on Overture. And so, therefore, Overture’s a good investment. And you can do the same with Google. However, people who are more scientific about testing and people who studied search engines understand that speak Portuguese and learn Portuguese attract different people and might actually have different not only click-through rates but different conversion rates. You might have one that gets a lot of people to click, and they don’t buy. Consequently, you might get one that gets just a few people but, you know, 20 percent, 30 percent.

We had a client recently who did a (we won’t mention his name) but he had a Google AdWords campaign. And he was getting a 10 percent conversion off of his Google AdWords. And it was phenomenal just to see the differences between different phrases and what they do. Now how deep can you drill? And I guess my question is, do you have to set up 50 different AdTrackers for 50 different keywords? I mean what’s your strategy? Do you do it by group, and then you start breaking it down?

PM: Well, in a perfect world, you’d have a different tracking code for every single keyword. Practically speaking, that would be a nightmare. Okay. You could bid on 500 keywords and have 500 tracking codes, and you could pay your Webmaster $5,000 just to set it all up.

JM: [Laughs]

PM: It’d be a mess. So here’s what you should do. I’m on http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

I typed in learn Portuguese, and I got this whole set of variations. I got learn

Portuguese. Learn to speak Portuguese. Learn Portuguese online. Learn Portuguese for free. Learn Brazilian Portuguese. Learn Portuguese language. Those are all so similar that I would put those in one group, and I would assign a tracking code to every group.

JM: So you would take all those similar keywords…

PM: Really similar.

JM: Really similar, and then you’d have one AdTracking code whether it’s through one shopping cart or hypertracker or AdMinder or ProAnalyzer. It doesn’t matter which code.

PM: Right.

JM: …because Google with you using an AdTracker.

PM: Right.

JM: And you would lump the similar ones together and try to find trends within those groups.

PM: Yes.

JM: Okay.

PM: Now Google has a new interface. When you log in, they say, would you like to try our new AdWords Manager. And you can click on that. And they’ve got an old one and a new one. And the new one gives you a lot more capability than the old one. And two of the things it lets you do is it lets you pick out individual keywords in a campaign and specify a different bid price because in general when you setup a campaign, you’re setting up a bid price for that campaign. And it applies to all the keywords. While Google has this feature where you can pick any one of those keywords or all of them that you want. And you can specify a specific bid price. Maybe it’s higher; maybe it’s lower than all the other ones in your group. And then can let you specify a unique tracking URL just for that keyword.

And so what I would do if I really wanted to drill down, see 90 percent of your traffic is going to come from 10 percent of your keywords. And so what you can do, let’s say we got learn Portuguese. No punctuation. Learn Portuguese in quotes; learn Portuguese in brackets. And all three of those will get quite a bit of traffic. I could go, okay, I’m going to add a tracking code for every one of these three because they’re getting a lot of traffic. And I’m going to track it all the way to sales. And when you do that, here’s what’s going to happen.

A week will go by, and you’ll find out that two thirds of your keywords when you break it all down and you divvy it up and you track them all the way through, you will find that two thirds of your keywords don’t convert to sales even though you’re paying for them.

Now this is what really separates the men from the boys. I mean I got all these cool tricks for improving your click-through rate and everything like that. A point’s going to come where you can’t really get it any higher. I mean you could come up with all these ingenious things, but you can’t get it any higher. But what happens when suddenly you just stop bidding on two thirds of it? Your sales stay the same.

JM: Yeah, the dollars in stay the same. But your dollars out go way down.

PM: Right.

JM: It just increases your profitability.

PM: Right. Now I’m not going to pretend that it’s fun to set up tracking codes and to muck around with all that stuff. And the average guy is not going to do it, okay? I’m not going to pretend that it’s fun, but I’ll tell you what, if you go to the trouble of tracking every ad campaign and maybe you’re tracking 10 or 20 or 30 different groups and campaigns, you’re going to find there’s drastic, huge differences between what you are paying for the traffic and what it’s actually worth to you, which is yet another thing your competitors simply are not privy to you. It’s proprietary to you alone. And so you let it run enough to where you’ve got 20 or 30 actions just like you needed 20 or 30 clicks to see if the click-through rates was good.

You know, 20 or 30 sales or 20 or 30 opt-ins and you go, well, this is working; this ain’t. I’m going to shut this off and stop buying this lousy traffic that doesn’t work.

JM: Well, I would imagine if you’ve, let’s say you’ve got 200 words. And let’s say you’ve got 10 groups.

PM: Yep.

JM: And you have 10 tracking codes. You’ll find that there are probably whole groups that don’t convert.

PM: Entire groups. Yeah.

JM: It’s not like you’re going to end up having to make all 200 tracking codes anyway.

PM: No.

JM: You’ll find that whole sets of groups don’t convert, and you can just dump them.

PM: Yep.

JM: …like the ones for the coral calcium. But we found some amazing ones that just generated thousands and thousands of clicks and not one sale.

PM: Right.

JM: [Laughs]

PM: That was exciting.

JM: And then there were others that generated virtually all the sales. And by just drilling down is the idea creates the 10 groups or the five groups of the similar words. You put a tracking code in each one. And then the ones that do perform, then you can either break those up into separate groups or you can put a different tracking code on each one. But it’s a matter of five or 10 tracking codes, not 2 or 300.

PM: Yep, that’s right. That’s right. So you don’t have to track everything. You’ve read it long enough to see what you want to track a little more closely, and you break it out. And again Google’s advanced interface makes that real easy to do. Okay, let’s see, I’m going to give you a list of things to change when you’re writing ads. Here’s a fast process for you. You set up a new campaign and these keywords. Oh, let me talk about where to get the keywords, you want every possible variation of learn Portuguese that you can come up with. And so Overture’s tool is good. A better tool for that sort of thing is WordTracker:

http://wordtracker.com/

It’s a monthly subscription deal, and you can try it out on a one-day basis or a week or whatever. But, that’ll give you a lot more phrases than just the obvious ones. And they’re based on what people actually search for.

Okay, so you got all your keywords in your campaign, and you’re just getting started. What I’d start out doing is write ads with two different hooks. One is learn to speak Portuguese, and the other one is speak better

Portuguese or something like that. Well, one of them is going to win; one of them is going to lose. So you stick with the winner. Then you change one thing at a time. And here’s a list of things to change…

JM: These are different elements that affect the click-through rate of the ad that you found.

PM: Right. Right. And all of these things can bump it up and down a tenth of a point, two tenths of a point, three tenths of a point. Number one, any of the verbs or adjectives (or for that matter) the nouns, but especially the verbs and adjectives—-any one of those could change your response plus or minus half a percent. Change the word fast to the word easy. Or change the word simple to the word quick or something like that. Those little changes can make very significant differences.

So I create a new ad; it’s an exact duplicate of the old ad except one word’s different. I let it run for awhile. I pick a winner. Then I change something else. The order of the lines of the ad, sometimes you can reverse line two and line three. And it basically still means the same thing. I did a campaign where I was offering a report on some technical information, and it said something like, guide to difficult terminology, three pages, free PDF download. I reversed line two and line three. And it said: Three pages, free PDF download, guide to difficult terminology. That’s the only difference, the same headline. Line two and line three changed. The response went from 3.7 percent down to 0.2.

JM: [Laughs]

PM: And I thought about it; I thought why is that? It’s because people want a benefit before they get a feature. It was just a feature benefit thing. And you can see that live on Google. Now if you were in direct mail, if you were doing e-mail campaigns for the most part or if you’re doing other kinds of media, it would take months—-sometimes—-to find things like that. But on Google you can find it in a day or two. And so, you know, just that one little change. So reversing the order of information, maybe you take some information that was in your third line, put it in the headline. I don’t know.

JM: Yeah, I’ve done that. And I’ve actually done really well by taking line one and switching line one of the copy and actually putting it in the headline.

PM: Yes.

JM: In fact that’s how I found the 1.2 percent click-through one is just by tweaking that one day. I think I might even did it by accident. But then I thought, oh, whatever, you know, it doesn’t cost anymore money. Google really does encourage you to do it because they want you…

PM: Absolutely.

JM: They want you to get the most number of clicks that you can because A it helps them give their searches a better user experience. And two it helps them make more money because you’re buying more clicks.

PM: Yep. It’s really cool.

JM: [Laughs]

PM: Hey, I’d like you to go to page three of the collection of ads here. I want to show you something I think is really interesting. I decided to do some US Presidents. So I did a search on George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Hilary Clinton. I thought it was interesting to see what I find here. There were two ads running for George W. Bush—-Bush 2004 shirts and stickers. George W. bottle head. It looks like the bottle head is less popular than the hats, shirts, and stickers. I thought the Bill Clinton deal was interesting because this isn’t Bill Clinton. This is a company called Clinton products that makes medical stuff.

JM: [Laughs]

PM: So it looks like there’s some market for George Bush. There’s no market anymore for Bill Clinton. But then look at Hillary Clinton, this is hilarious. I’ve got Hillary for President, buttons and pins supporting Hillary’s run for the Whitehouse. That’s got a full interest bar. We’ve got enemiesofhillary.com, search engine for conservatives. Proceeds go to Hillary’s opponent. Enemiesofhilliary.com…

JM: [Laughs]

PM: But I like this one: How to destroy a village. Notice that powerful verb destroy. That is a power word. If you can use the word destroy in your ad.

JM: And also the words how-to are extremely powerful.

PM: Yes. How-to is a great. Yes.

JM: Because actually I think Gary Halbert did a newsletter issue. This must have been 10 or 15 years ago where he took the entire books in print, which is all the books in print that exist in the world.

PM: Okay.

JM: And the number one most popular way to start a title of a book are the words "How-to". And the reason is because people want to know how to do something. And so it’s a very clear indication that if you have a problem, this is a way to overcome that problem. This is how to fix that problem.

PM: How-to is great. Oh, and you know what Jon? It’s a timeless formula. It’ll never wear out.

JM: Ever.

PM: When in doubt, you can always use a how-to. Now here’s another trick…

JM: These are things that you’re giving us that are the ways to, we’ll call them response modifiers.

PM: Right. Right. Now here’s another response modifier, in addition to speak Portuguese, learn Portuguese, you should bid on the phrase "how to speak Portuguese." And here’s what I found—-if you bid on the phrase "How to speak Portuguese" and you have an ad which says: How to speak Portuguese in the headline, you will usually on that combination, you won’t get one or two or three percent response. You’ll usually get a 10 or 20 percent click-through rate. Okay? When your ad is an answer to a question, and you answer the question directly—-How to take better pictures; how to improve your golf swing or whatever, people type in things like how to improve my golf swing. You know, you should bid on not just your golf swing but my golf swing. They’ll type in how to type in how to improve my golf swing more often than they’ll type in how to improve your golf swing because they’re not talking to the search engines. They’re telling the search engines what they’re saying to themselves.

JM: That’s great.

PM: Okay. That’s a killer formula and, you know, for obvious reasons. I’m not going to tell you what it is. But I’ve got a campaign where I get hundreds and hundreds of clicks. It’s a niche product, but I get hundreds and hundreds of clicks every week (let’s say the noun) and I get a few dozen clicks on how-to. But I get just as many sales from the few dozen clicks of the how-to as I get on the hundreds of clicks that’s just about the idea. It’s something that people want to do. It’s kind of like how to speak Portuguese. And so that right there can make or break somebody’s campaign.

JM: Wow. And, you know, that’s so important because a lot of these campaigns, once they reach profitability and once they break even (I should say) then it’s just a matter of tweaking to get them to profitability.

PM: Yes.

JM: Hardest thing, though, is to get them to break even.

PM: Right.

JM: And that’s what these little tricks do. Now I’m looking at the clock, and I don’t want to keep people for too long.

PM: Oh.

JM: No one is going to mind that we give extra value, but let’s keep going on the response modifiers. And I think we can even continue the discussion in the next session.

PM: Yes.

JM: You got a little bit more for us?

PM: Well, I got a killer one that I just came up with like a week ago. I’ll save that for the next session. But here’s one that makes a big difference, very easy to experiment with. And that’s the capitalization. And it’s the capitalization of any word in the entire ad.

JM: Now, when we talked originally, Perry, you had said that if you have a site like BeAMysterShopper.com…

PM: Yeah.

JM: …but you in the URL, you noticed the tweak when you capitalized the Be A Mystery Shopper, so those individual words in the URL. You’re talking about words in the ad now, correct?

PM: Yes. Yes. Anything in the URL like if the URL is composed of several words, capitalizing the beginning of every one of those words, it doesn’t always increase the response. But it usually does.

JM: Wow.

PM: And you should just test it.

JM: Does Google let you use all caps?

PM: Not all caps all the way across unless you have a really good reason to.

JM: [Laughs]

PM: What?

JM: Increases my response. [Laughs]

PM: Well, yeah, it has to not look gaudy. That’s what their editorial staff is looking for. And I haven’t talked much about their editorial stuff. Usually they stay out of your way unless you’re just doing something that’s a violation. But we can take every one of these ads here, you know, how to destroy a village, get the truth about the Clinton administration below retail price, conservativemall.org. Okay, this ad right here, I would experiment with capitalizing the T in truth, the A in about. Let’s see Clinton is already capitalized, A in administration. Retail, the R, the P in price. Every one of those letters could make a difference in what I typically find is if you capitalize most of those words like not necessarily the the or the of or whatever. But usually if you capitalize all those words, that’ll bump you up another tenth of a point or two tenths of a point. Conservative-C, Mall-M. If you do that, that could adjust the response one or two tenths of a point.

And in a previous session, you talked about how horse races are not won by hundreds of feet. They’re won by a nose.

JM: Yeah.

PM: Okay, these are the little things. I mean just in this one ad between the order of the lines, the adjectives, the verbs, the capitalization, there’s easy 10 or 15 or 20 things that you can play with. And somewhere in there is a formula that whether for rational reasons or irrational reasons will get your click-through rate higher, higher, higher. And so typically what I see is between what people start out with and what they end up with after they’ve played with a lot of this stuff is an improvement of two, three, four, or five times better than what they started with, which means the same amount of traffic for half a third, a fourth, or fifth of what they started with.

JM: Or for just as much money but three times more traffic.

PM: Exactly. Then you add in things like the brackets and the quotes and the variations. And you’re talking another improvement of probably 50 percent in the economies of what you’re saving. And then you get rid of keywords that don’t convert. And we’ve just defined a process for squeezing anywhere from five to 20 times as much out of your AdWords campaigns as if you just did what most people do.

JM: Okay, wow. Let’s wrap up now and just let people know about the questions. Now in the next session, what we’d like to do is get questions from all of you guys who are listening to this right now. And Perry and I decided that we really want questions, I mean we really want great questions.

PM: Yep.

JM: Hard questions.

PM: Yep.

JM: Questions that you might think, well I don’t want to ask them that, maybe they don’t know. Don’t worry if we don’t know, we’ve got a couple days to find out. [Laughs] A lot of clients who work with Google, Perry’s got tons of case studies and example. And the harder the better. So what we decided to do is have a little contest. And the person who asks the best question we’re going to give a gift to. Perry has an e-book for, I think it’s about $50.

PM: Yeah, it’s $49… …Guide to Google AdWords.

JM: And I’ve got my Anatomy of an Internet Marketing Rollout, which I did with Ken McCarthy, which actually starts with pay-per-click search engines.

PM: Right.

JM: …and at this point, Google. And so it’s really a phenomenal plan to put together a marketing promotion from beginning to end. And so the person who asks the best question is going to get both of those packages. Perry has a couple more techniques he’s going to give away and then a few more case studies that we’re going to go ahead and answer in the next session.

PM: Yeah, perfect.

JM: Well, guys, see you in the next session. And Perry thank you so much. You’ve already made me money. I can’t believe you got me with that one little trick from page two to page one.

PM: Yeah, it’s the fun of it.

JM: I’m, you know, the only question I have now is that 2.7 times return on investment’s going to stick. But it’s easy enough to know because we’re using an AdTracker, and I just thank you for that and for all the stuff that you’ve shared today.

PM: Right on.

JM: We appreciate it. We’ll talk to you guys soon. Thank you very much for joining us, and thank you, Perry.

PM: Thank you everybody.

JM: Welcome to How to Profit with Google AdWords session two. This is Jonathan Mizel, and I’m on with Perry Marshall. And what we’re going to do is review some of the techniques that we didn’t get to in the first session. And we’re also going to answer your questions from the first session. We got some phenomenal questions. Perry, I’m ready to go ahead and get started. How about you?

PM: I’m ready to go. Okay, well, let’s go ahead and just complete the techniques you had laid out in your 12-point plan. I’m going to ask everybody on the phone to go over to:

http://www.perrymarshall.com/923/

And on that page you will be able to download and view the notes and the presentation part two, which has got Perry’s plan. We’re going to go over some of the stuff from that PDF document. And Perry, go ahead, and I’m ready to take my notes. [Laughs]

PM: Yes.

JM: Give us some more techniques.

PM: Go to:

And there is a link that says handout for session two. And you can just click on it. And what I did was I outlined the steps that I went through on this piece of paper. And I got basically through 1 to 9. And I want to focus on http://www.perrymarshall.com/923/ part of 10 because this is a really interesting opportunity. What we were talking about was ways of selecting keywords and bidding on keywords very specifically to minimize your bid prices and then a whole bunch of response modifiers, little tweaks that would increase your click-through rate. And there’s a whole bunch of them here. And I’m not going to repeat them. But all of these things can adjust your click-through rate by one or two tenths of a point, sometimes more. So when you add them all up, from where you start to where you end up after you rotate ads and tests, you can very often be two or three times improvement on what you started with.

I want to talk about kind of an esoteric little trick that I have found to be pretty effective. If you go to number 10, I talked about…

JM: And this is number 10 on the PDF document.

PM: Yeah, on the PDF document, handout for session two.

PM: Exactly. So if you go to 10, I already talked about, there’s two URLs. There’s the URL that you send the people to, and there’s the URL that you display in the AdWords ad, which often is slightly different. And the first thing I talked about with respect to that on Tuesday was, instead of mycooltoys.com all lower case. My—-capital M, Cool—-capital C, Toys—-capital T. Sometimes just making that change will bump up your response one-tenth or two-tenths of a percent, which could amount to a five or 10 or 20 percent improvement in the traffic you get for the same amount of money.

Now here’s another one that can add another dimension of improvement, which is a sub-domain or a directory. If you are selling wagons, and people are searching on wagons, and your ad is about wagons, if your URL says: www.mycooltoys.com/wagons, just the fact that they see that word wagons there will bump up in your response usually.

Now the only caveat is if the directory mycooltoys.com/wagons, if they type that into a browser and it doesn’t take them anywhere, they get an error page or something like that, within a week or so, Google will catch up to you. And you’ll get whacked. And they’ll disable your ad because it doesn’t meet their requirements. And the same situation exists if you do a sub-domain. If you say wagons.mycooltoys.com, that’s called a sub-domain. It’s something that can be set up with your ISP.

And, again, you usually have a few days or maybe a week to test that premise before you have to commit to it or get in some kind of trouble. And I’m not trying to encourage you to go outside of Google’s rules. But I’m just telling you that you might find that, you know, an ad that gets a two percent click-through rate under mycooltoys.com gets a two and a half percent click-through rate if the URL is wagons.mycooltoys.com, and if you discover that then you should get to work and set up a sub-domain on your website so that it actually works like it’s supposed to. And that can help quite a bit.

Another thing you can do, especially if you’re in the market research mode and you’re getting started, and you don’t have anything that you’re tied to, you can set up a website. Let’s say that you’re just doing some market research or you’re trying to get some opt-ins before you commit to a complete product strategy. Maybe there’s seven different URLs, seven different domain names that you’re considering for your website. You’re not really sure which one would be the most appealing to people. You could register all seven of those domain names. And you could rotate ads with different domain names and have the world vote on them and have people pick a winner.

JM: So let me just back up. I want to make sure I got that right. Let’s say you were looking for a domain name or you were just wondering if a domain could actually affect the response.

PM: Which it will.

JM: Which it will and which we know, especially in search engine traffic, it can have an affect on it. We’re not talking about search engine optimization and, you know, dashes and what Google likes as a search engine. We’re talking about what they like as an advertising partner.

And in this case, you can take five or 10 domain names. You would want to take the exact same ads right?

PM: Yep.

JM: Then the only thing you change to that would be the domain name that it looks like you’re driving the traffic to.

PM: Right.

JM: And you could run that for awhile. And technically Google does want you to have those domain names. Google does want those pages to be active.

PM: Yeah. In a perfect world, you’d set them all up working.

JM: You’d set them all up. But if you just did it and then for a couple of days, maybe they disable them and they come back and they say, hey, you really do need to set up these domains, in the meantime, you’ve got clicks. And you can actually let people vote by various clicks on which domain looks best to them.

PM: Yep.

JM: Wow.

PM: That’s right. So there’s three little tricks to even pick a domain name that people would find more appealing than some other one.

JM: Also, it just struck me that if you do have, let’s say, mycooltoys/wagons, and you don’t have something there, just put something there.

PM: Right.

JM: That’s your domain. Just put something there even if all you’re doing is framing the main page or the same page that you’d be doing. I think Google only requires there be a page there, that it doesn’t resolve to a dead domain or something like that.

PM: …right.

JM: Okay. Very interesting.

PM: Right.

JM: What have you seen in terms of which of these is the most effective? Domain with subdirectory or domain with sub-domain?

PM: Well, as far as domain itself—-I’m just suggesting you use it to pick a better domain name. But once you have that domain name, if you can use a keyword, it appears to me that a sub-domain is the most powerful tool because it’s the first thing they see as they read from left to right.

JM: Got it. Okay.

PM: They see a URL that says wagons.mycooltoys.com, I don’t think the average web surfer knows the difference between the first part and the last part.

JM: It’s actually in the domain name. It’s their keyword that they just typed in.

PM: Exactly.

JM: Okay. Boy, that’s a huge difference.

PM: Yeah, I mean it could bump you up 10 or 20 percent from what you were before.

JM: We have three different hosts at Cyberwave. I mean we have many different domains, and every one of them allows us to set up sub-domains. And there’s no cost at all in any case that I’ve seen to set those up, maybe adding a new domain. But a sub-domain is very easy to add. And that’s just the word, the sub-domain, and then dot, the main domain dot com.

PM: Yep. I just discovered that about a week ago. I was kind of pleased with myself. So now the cat’s out of the bag. Now other people are going to do it too. Okay, I’m ready for questions. Are you ready for questions?

JM: I am. Now is that everything? Those were the three things that we wanted to cover?

PM: Oh, you know, I want to jump for just a minute to this handout page. I want to go to number three. This might not have been totally clear to everybody. Somebody sent me an e-mail asking the difference between campaigns and groups. And actually I use the word campaign pretty loosely because I say ad-campaign, and it could be News Week Magazine. But in the context of Google AdWords, Google has a general category of a campaign and a subcategory of the group. And so if mycooltoys.com, if you sold bikes and you sold wagons, then the way you would want to set that up (and this is pretty important) you want to kind of fake it through a little bit before you just to do it.

You see, campaign one is all about bicycles. And I only sell bicycles in campaign number one. And in the first group, I sell 10-speeds. In the

second group I sell dirt bikes. And maybe the third group I sell 12-speeds. In the fourth group I sell kids bikes or, you know, very narrow focuses. And your keywords in each group, sometimes you might have 10 groups that are all about dirt bikes. That they’re about different kinds of keywords relating to dirt bikes. Like you might have an entire group just BMX. You might have another group that’s aluminum frames or something like that. But the keywords would be in very tight clusters. It wouldn’t be scattered all over the place.

If anytime you have a group and it’s got keywords that are all synonyms of each other and it’s got BMX and it’s got dirt bike and it’s got motor cross and it’s got this and it’s got that, anytime you’ve got that much display of different keywords in a campaign, it’s wrong. You always want very tightly related keywords all clustered together connected to a very tightly related ad. And anytime you get outside of that you just start a new group. But if it’s about bicycles and you put it under the bicycles, if you’ve got wagons, maybe you’ve got Radio Flyer keywords in group one, maybe you’ve got Red Wagon keywords in group 2. That’s how you want to organize your campaigns.

JM: Well, and let me ask a question about that actually because I’m looking at our, here I am making changes to our Google campaigns as I’m listening to the teleclinic …

PM: One of the people who sent me an email they said, Jonathan sounds like a kid in a candy store.

JM: … I love this stuff. Okay, so I just want to make sure I got it because I’m looking at one of our campaigns. If we’re selling something, a campaign would be the main campaign. So like let’s say we have a book on gardening, right?

PM: Yep.

JM: Let’s say we have a line of products on gardening. We would have, gardening would be the campaign and the groups would be like maybe our gardening tools. The other one would be gardening books.

PM: Well, you may have shovels in one and …

JM: Oh, oh so we’d actually bring it down to like shovels and then, well, let me ask this question. What if we started out with gardening tools and then we were driving traffic in within a group and we started to notice that certain groups were performing better than others, then we’d use the trick that you told us about setting up a different group and using different ad trackers for those keywords.

PM: Right.

JM: So we start broad and we just keep narrowing it down based on where we see the actions and the clicks coming from.

PM: Yeah, yeah. That’s, you could definitely do that and you can see, what people are clicking on and what they aren’t. The only problem is if you have gardening tools and you have an ad that sells gardening tools, you know, buy them at a discount here or whatever, that’s fairly general traffic as opposed to, you know, six inch spade or something really, really specific that people are looking for. Those really specific ones tend to convert to sales the best.

JM: If I have, let’s say, 50 different things in my gardening catalog and I’ve got an equal number of say 60, 20 tools, 20 supplies, and 20 bucks.

PM: Okay.

JM: Would you recommend starting with three groups or would I be best to take all my shovels and put them into one group?

PM: I’d say, I’d do three campaigns and I’d do …

JM: Oh, oh, got it.

PM: If there were 20 groups …

JM: I got it.

PM: … or if I heard you right.

JM: Yeah, yeah.

PM: 20, 20, 20, I’d do 20 groups in each campaign; I might even have 40 groups in each campaign because one might be shovels and one might be spades. And even though they’re the same thing, it’s a different ad, it’s a different keyword.

JM: One will convert better.

PM: One will. You might find that people that type in spades buy and people who type in shovels don’t. Who knows, but you could find out. And you could find out reasonably fast.

JM: Yeah, well, you certainly have some examples of that, don’t you? [laughs] Well, that’s great in terms of organization because now you’ve helped every one of us figure that out. So we always start broad and then we move down and then within each one of those groups, we might have how ever many keywords we have – 10, 20, 50.

PM: Right, right.

JM: Right, okay.

PM: Exactly.

JM: Well, let’s go ahead and get started on the questions, let me pull these up.

What was the first question that we had, Perry?

PM: Okay, the first question was, does it make any difference if I bid on speak Portuguese or Portuguese speak. And the answer is, if you don’t have any quotes or brackets around it, it doesn’t make any difference, okay? And that’s one of the things you discover, is if you bid on speak Portuguese or Portuguese speak, it doesn’t matter what order you type those words in when you bid on them. With no punctuation, Portuguese speak and then you have speak Portuguese in quotes and then you have [speak Portuguese] in brackets, well, if you’re bidding on "Speak Portuguese" in quotes, you’re then, the Speak Portuguese without quotes is only going to get impressions on appearances where there’s a word in between them or if they’re not in that order.

JM: Okay.

PM: Okay? And so what’ll happen is if you take speak Portuguese and you bid on it the three different ways, you’ll usually get the highest click-through rate on the brackets and the second highest click-through rate on the quotes. And often you’ll get a very low click-through rate on the unspecified because they’re typing it a different way than you’re even thinking.

JM: Okay. And actually that might even get disabled, huh?

PM: It might get disabled. And the better you are at anticipating all the other things they type in specifically, the harder it will be for it to not get disabled. But that’s probably okay because it sounds like we’re looking for something else anyway.

JM: Right, I mean, when Google disables your word, provided it’s not for content, you know, because that happens occasionally.

PM: Right.

JM: It’s generally for everyone’s good.

PM: Yeah, it’s …

JM: You’re not hitting the mark with your ad.

PM: Right, and you shouldn’t take it all personal, you know. Like, oh, the world hates me. I mean, it’s kind of funny. You tend to feel that way. You go, oh man, I wrote this ad and I got 1,014 impressions and two clicks and I got disabled. Ooh, you know. Have a keyword funeral.

JM: [laughs]

PM: No, it’s no big deal, okay?

JM: It’s good, actually, because it’s Google protecting you from irrelevant searchers who weren’t going to buy, generally, anyway.

PM: Generally, yeah. Yeah, and so if, and you can reactivate keywords just by changing your ads and then they’ll activate again.

JM: And then they’ll go back and it all starts over from scratch and …

PM: Yeah, you used to have to delete the keyword, start a new campaign. They used to make it really difficult, but they figured out that they were losing a lot of ad money that way.

JM: Uh huh, okay.

PM: So they made it easier. You just change the ad and the keyword will usually come back.

JM: Now what about two other parts to that question; one relating to capitalization …

PM: Oh yes.

JM: … the other one versus singular versus plural.

PM: Yeah, does it matter, does it matter if I capitalize the P on Portuguese when I bid? No.

JM: It does in normal search engines, I think people ask that question because I believe Google, in their normal search engine, does differentiate capitals.

PM: Right.

JM: But I don’t think, they don’t at all in the ad words, is that right?

PM: Right. Right, and so you don’t have to worry about that, but singular or plural, here’s the thing: Overture does not distinguish between singular and plural and motorcycle and motorcycles is the same thing to Overture. If you do a search on Overture, you’re doing keyword research, you type in motorcycle, it’ll give you a gazillion variations on motorcycle and it won’t give you any plurals at all. And they don’t care, they don’t notice the difference.

Google, they do. It does make a difference and if you get your keywords from Overture, you better make a double set of them and add plurals and a lot of times, sometimes you even want to take the singulars and the plurals, put them in different groups, write one ad that’s singular, one ad that’s plural. I mean, sometimes you want to do that. It depends on the word and whatever, but that can make a difference. And so they don’t, Google does not approximate anything for you in that regard and that’s good if you really want to have control.

JM: Yeah, it’s the back to the old do I just want to trust it like the Overture, just go in and do the thing and maybe I make money and maybe I don’t? Or do I want to have control over every aspect of the campaign. This is just one more way to control it.

PM: Yep.

JM: Takes a few extra minutes to set it up, but guys, everyone listening to this, knows a couple of extra minutes is nothing compared to that return on investment you’re going to get from the time, you know, from the time you invest to do it correctly the first time. You know, if it pays off today, it’ll just keep paying off every single day.

PM: Yep. And once these things are going, they don’t usually require a lot of maintenance.

JM: Right.

PM: I mean sometimes things will change, but for the most part, they tend to be pretty steady. And what happens, you know, you’re always split testing ads and so, you know, you’ve got two ads running and they’re pretty good and maybe you go back a month later and you go, you know what, this one really hasn’t been doing as well so I’m going to replace it with another one. But yeah, definitely.

JM: Well, let’s look at keyword permutations as well because I know there were some questions about how do we get 200 keywords.

PM: Oh yeah.

JM: If you only have 20 and let me make a comment here. Keywords are just different keywords that you’re bidding on, even if it has brackets around it. That’s a different keyword because it comes up on a different search. If you have 20 keywords and then you add your plurals and you might end up with say 30, right, or 35?

PM: Yeah.

JM: Then you add your brackets and quotes, you’ve now got 115, is that right? No, 105 keywords.

PM: Yep.

JM: So, in some cases, going from 20 keywords to 200 keywords, you can get halfway there simply by adding the plurals and then adding the brackets and the quotes.

PM: Yeah.

JM: And that takes you so much further and that’s without even doing any keyword research, which we’ll get into in a minute.

PM: Right, exactly.

JM: [laughs]

PM: And, you know, maybe it’s email and e-mail and e mail.

JM: Um hmm.

PM: Right? There’s all these different ways that people type in things and you just have to think about it a little bit. And maybe use some sites that I like to use for research that we’ll talk about pretty quickly here.

JM: Okay, good. So on the keyword permutations, do they compete with one another? that was a question.

PM: Yeah, well they do. Again, like the speak Portuguese without any punctuation and then adding the quotes, they definitely compete with each other. And sometimes you’ll end up like the one with no punctuation it gets disabled because …

JM: Oh, because it’s getting the fewest clicks.

PM: Right, right.

JM: That’s right.

PM: Now, you could decide well I don’t like that so you just go back to the way you were doing it. But you have to make that decision and you might want to

make that decision after you’ve actually used tracking to see if it converts to opt-ins or converts to sales.

JM: Hmm, okay good, and we’ll talk about that in a few minutes as well.

PM: Yeah.

JM: Great, great conversation. What’s the next question?

PM: The next question was, should I use, they used the example from before, arthritis versus arthritis pain relief. And should I go for high volume, low quality traffic or low volume, high quality traffic. And this is a really good question. You can only truly answer by tracking, but let me give you a slightly different example because I think it would be really helpful.

It goes from the general to the specific. Let’s talk about headaches. The word headache is a very general thing – it’s something a person’s probably looking for a solution for, though, right? A migraine is a much more specific thing. If you do a search on Google, you’ll find there’s two or three people bidding on headache. The reason there’s not more is it’s hard to write an ad that gets the hot, over the .5 percent, with the word headache because headache is so general. There are some terms like that where you really, really, really have to try a lot of things before you come up with an ad that’ll get over a half a percent.

JM: Wow.

PM: But, yeah. You can get it for a nickel. I guarantee you, you can get the word headache for a nickel.

JM: Well, let me ask you a question on negative qualifiers.

PM: Oh, okay.

JM: I don’t know if, no one asked that question, but a little background. On

Overture, if you have a keyword that’s general, because they don’t have a minimum click-through so you don’t have this issue there. But if you have a keyword that’s very general like headache, you might get a lot of clicks. But, of course, it’s hard to make money with those clicks.

PM: Yep.

JM: And so, what we found you can do on Overture is you write kind of a negative ad.

PM: Right.

JM: And you add negative qualifiers and so you’d say something like, cure your headache for five bucks instantly.

PM: Right.

JM: Or the number 1 best-selling headache plan, you know, buy it here.

PM: Right.

JM: You make it very clear that this is not an informational site, but rather you’re going to be asking them for money eventually.

PM: And you disqualify them and you get less clicks and more quality click thrus.

JM: Right, and so you get a lower number of higher quality clicks. Because the people know going in that you’re going to ask them for money. The easiest way to do it is to either put some sort of qualification in there. Like, for example, credit card companies. You might say, the best credit card for people with great credit.

PM: [laughs] Yes.

JM: Right? And if people don’t have great credit, they’re simply not going to click on it because they know what kind of credit they have.

PM: That’s right.

JM: Or the best credit card or solve your headache problems for five bucks. They know it’s going to cost money going in. Have you used negative qualifiers in Google?

PM: Yes. Well, okay, in the ads …

JM: Yeah.

PM: … yes. Sometimes you want to do that because if you’re not really having a problem getting the .5 percent and it’s, let’s say there’s a lot of free stuff and you don’t freebies, cherry-picker people …

JM: Right.

PM: … then you might say, you know, headache medicine, 10 bucks. And you’ll get less clicks, but that would be on a more specific kind of term. That wouldn’t work on something like headache, but it would work on something like migraine.

JM: Hmm.

PM: I was going to talk about migraine because migraine, last I looked, there was about 8 bidders. Migraine is a much more specific term and it’s just a more focused thing. It’s easier to get clicks on it and now here’s the interesting thing. There is a migraine prescription medicine called Imitrex and Imitrex is like one of these wonder drugs. It costs about $15 a pill. And if you do a search on Imitrex, there are 60 companies bidding on Imitrex.

JM: Wow.

PM: Imitrex is a highly, highly specific solution to a headache problem. People know about it, people search for it. People comparison shop for it and so think of the difference between headache, migraine, and Imitrex.

JM: Oh my God, you’ve got two bidders, six or eight bidders, and 60 bidders.

PM: Right, okay? Now that tells you a lot about the market. It really does. Now, just as a general strategy. If I was trying to buy the nickel traffic with the word headache, I would not try to sell an Imitrex. What I would do is I would take them to a name-squeeze page, which is just an opt-in page, we will talk about that in a few minutes. I would take them to a name-squeeze page. I would tell them that we’ve got a report or a five day course or a series of tutorials on solving headaches, I’d get an opt-in and then I’d send them auto-responders for the next week. And I would try to convert them or educate them; a little missionary work on the cheap to teach them about, I’ve got this really specific solution for a headache. Maybe it’s a chiropractor, he’s got acupuncture, I don’t know, whatever.

You could do something with nickel traffic. I don’t think you could sell them Imitrex, though. You know, at the other extreme, 60 companies bidding on Imitrex, that’s not really a battle I’d care to fight. A migraine might be the right thing in the middle and when I did my research on migraine, the sites that had, the ads that had the most click-through rates and the fullest in popularity bars were the ones that talked about information oriented things rather than product oriented things.

JM: Okay. Interesting. Interesting.

PM: I got another question, somebody said, are there any negative keywords that are universal. Where do you get them and how do they impact your click-through rate?

JM: Ahh.

PM: I don’t know that there’s any universal ones. I think free is a common one. But here’s how you get them – if you go, if you use WordTracker, use

Overture’s inventory tool, you type in headache, well here, let’s talk about something different.

I liked that Hillary Clinton ad that how to destroy a village, I thought that was kind of funny. So I typed in Hillary Clinton, I got a whole bunch of stuff. There’s 21,000 searches a month, then there’s Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hillary Clinton picture, Hillary Clinton nude, Senator Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton photo. Well, if you are a Hillary Clinton fan, let’s say you had a pro Hillary Clinton site. Now I don’t know why you would have that, but let’s say you did. You probably want to put the term negative nude in your keyword so that people looking for nude pictures of Hillary don’t click on your ad.

JM: Right, they also …

PM: They don’t see your ad.

JM: … you wouldn’t want anybody who said, I hate Hillary to get to that page. You would only want to bid on the phrases that are likely to come up that would really match the audience that you’re looking for.

PM: Right.

JM: So you disqualify the words hate and just …

PM: Yeah, anti.

JM: Anti.

PM: Right.

JM: Just like what we did with pop-ups and we came up with that funny example. When we advertise our pop-up course on Google, we have, you know, our negatives are killer, stopper, blocker, software, anti. And if the guy selling pop-up blockers is advertising on Google, then his negatives are going to words like advertising, generator.

PM: Right.

JM: He does not want to have his ad displayed for people who are trying to make a pop-up.

PM: Right.

JM: He wants his ad for people who want to stop a pop-up.

PM: Right. The same problem exists in telemarketing. There’s people looking for telemarketing companies and there’s people looking to stop telemarketers. Well, you don’t want the other guys clicking on your ad. They’ll just waste your money.

JM: Right.

PM: And they’ll find the opposite of what they wanted.

JM: Well, when we added all those negatives to our pop-up thing, guess what happened to our click-through rate?

PM: It went up.

JM: Way up [laughs].

PM: Because there’s the same number of people looking for it, but now less people seeing it.

JM: Yeah.

PM: Yeah.

JM: Yeah.

PM: So that’s a very good one.

JM: Let’s keep going.

PM: Okay, keyword research tools. How do you get your 20 and turn it into 200? Well, I like inventory.Overture.com as a starter. Again, it only gives you singulars. You’re going to have to add the plurals. I’ll just paste them into a Word document, do find and replace and then I got a new list.

There’s a software that I have sold to some customers, but have not officially released yet called Keyword Blizzard. And you’ll eventually be hearing about that, sooner as opposed to later. I’ve got a developer that’s ironing out some bugs. WordTracker.com, you can type something in and they will give you an extensive list. I want to say something about WordTracker and Overture. Both of those tools tell you how many searches were done on each phrase they produce for you. And they give you numbers. Now Overture gives you Overture’s numbers. WordTracker gives you numbers from a bunch of other search engines that I don’t even know exactly where they get their data. I don’t know if it’s from TEOMA or, I don’t even know where they get it.

The numbers on WordTracker are only relative. They’re not absolutely meaningful to you. It’ll say something like, you know, this got 2,000 searches, but it doesn’t equate to Google. All I can tell you about Google is Google will give you more in almost all cases. Or like Google versus Overture technical audiences and academic stuff and university stuff and research stuff. There’s like 10 times the traffic on Google compared to Overture.

JM: And also, Perry, can’t you check the Google ad word inventory just by having it, adding an ad and then adding some keywords and having it do keyword estimates?

PM: Yes, yes. That’s another good point is Google does not give you a way to say how many people searched on Hillary Clinton. What they do is they have a keyword estimator; you set up your campaigns and there’s a thing that says estimate traffic and you click on it. And based on your bid price, it will estimate how many clicks you’re going to get, not how many searches there were.

And one of the people at Google told them that the reason they do it that - I’m sure they’ve got some business reasons as well. But one of the benefits to you is that some keywords get higher click-through rates all the way across the board than others. And those estimates they give you are actually based on the click-through rates other advertisers are getting on the same keywords.

JM: Okay, so even though it looks like it’s not the same kind of intelligence and we need to know how many searches are done, it’s far more relevant to us advertisers than what Overture delivers.

PM: Right. The only disadvantage is Google doesn’t give you as big of a list of keyword variations as Overture does. So that’s why I like the Overture tool, but …

JM: There were a couple of others that you didn’t mention. Was it the pay-per-click toolkit?

PM: Yeah, there’s one called , which I have not used. It was recommended to me by somebody who’s on the call. I think that was Romel. John Keel’s got one called Keyword Bid Optimizer at http://www.paidsearchenginetools.com, which is for Overture and it draws off of Overture’s results. http://www.PPCToolkit.com

JM: And there was a brand new one that was just released, I think, for Google. Is that correct?

PM: Yes.

JM: Called adwordsanaylzer?

PM: Yeah, http://www.adwordsanalyzer.com, that’s another one I have not used.

They have an interesting thing where you type things in and it goes and it’s called scraping. They scrape Google’s pages with a software program. They count how many ads there are and how many bidders are on all these different keywords and they report the results to you.

It looks, on the surface, to be a very useful thing. The only fly in the ointment is scraping is against Google’s Terms of Service. I don’t think they’re going to arrest like Hillary Rosen and the RIAA MP3 lawyers might. But there are some potential issues. I really don’t know how those guys are doing, you know, I don’t know if they could be getting served papers by Google for all I know.

JM: So it may or may not be a good tool, but probably the best thing to do is to wait until they and Google get together and figure out a way to do it without violating Google’s Term of Service.

PM: Yeah, yeah. Again, I don’t, I think it’s just a software you download. It doesn’t run from their server, so jury’s out, I can’t speak with much expertise on that, but there’s some issues.

JM: Okay. Now there were some other tools that you came up with and they’re not necessarily keyword makers or keyword specific tools. But they’re just online tools which people can use from a research standpoint.

PM: Yeah.

JM: Expand the keywords even more, what are those tools?

PM: Well, let me just preface by saying every time I’ve done campaigns, there was always some keywords that I thought of two weeks later that should have been obvious and I didn’t think of them. Along the lines of like synonyms or, you know, like a guy that sells golf clubs might potentially bid on Arnold Palmer, but he might not think of it for three months. And go, geez, I could bid on Arnold Palmer and I’d get a bunch more clicks.

So I’ll tell you some tools that I’ve used. If you go to AltaVista.com, they have this link called Prisma, where you can type in a word and it will give you a bunch of suggestions of things that are related to that word. And that can be pretty useful. Now there’s another one that I really like, it’s a cool fun little site. I found it totally by accident somehow one day. It’s called , and it’s got all these different things you can check, but if you just do the default thing, if you type in golf, it will give you a whole bunch of words related to golf. Stuff in literature, stuff in the news, names of people, name brands; it’ll typically give you anywhere from 10 to maybe 50 or 100 related words. http://www.lexfn.com

And sometimes it’s more useful than other times, but I’ve usually found that it is helpful. Another thing is just a thesaurus. Another thing is to go to competitor’s web pages and see what words you find on them.

JM: Okay.

PM: Right?

JM: Yeah, I mean, we used to do that when we just looked at other people’s meta-tags. Of course, now meta-tags don’t mean much, but you enter in your keyword at Google …

PM: Yeah.

JM: … and in every search engine. Every search engine that continues to be a real search engine, which would be Google, AltaVista, Teoma, and there’s probably one or two more that are real search engines left. And that actually spider pages.

PM: Yep.

JM: And you would enter in your keyword and you would look at the pages that are coming up and then you would basically go to those pages and study and see whether or not you can find other keywords within those pages.

PM: Yep.

JM: But, you know, I went to lexfn.com I mean, I entered in one of my keywords and it gives you synonyms, triggers, generalizations, specializes. It gives you part of, it gives you the antonym. It gives you rhyming, it gives you what it sounds like, it gives you occupation of. I mean, this is amazing.

PM: And there’s even a link for Shakespeare.

JM: [laughs]

PM: I mean, who could not like that? We’re all sophisticated people, aren’t we?

JM: [laughs] Oh, this is great.

PM: Yeah, it’s a really cool tool. Or a thesaurus.

JM: You could just go to dictionary.com, couldn’t you?

PM: Yeah, you could. Now here’s another thing I did one time. This was a technical company and they’re offering white papers about different things. What we did, we made a buzzword guide. It was like this three page thing, actually I think this is very useful in just about any industry. We had this three page thing, it had like 75 different words and phrases that are technical jargon, lingo things that people don’t, acronyms and stuff, people don’t always know what they mean. And we hired somebody to make this list, come up with a short one-sentence definition of every single thing. And we offered it as a buzzword guide. Then we took all those buzzwords and some more that we got out of a glossary of a book. And we bid on all those as keywords; all these technical acronyms and everything and we just wrote an ad that said buzzword guide.

JM: Hmm.

PM: And we got a nice click-through rate on it, a lot opt-ins. It was people that wanted to know more about that subject and we figured if they want to know more about this, they’re probably going to have to buy something. And it was a catalog company with a lot of products and so it made sense. And that campaign’s been running for nine months now.

JM: Well, Perry, I have a question for you, which kind of relates to this. When did a campaign for us and you went in and you optimized everything, you spent the majority of the devising the keywords, is that correct?

I guess what I’m trying to say is, if there’s one thing that people should consider most important, it’s how to come up with more keywords. I think if there’s one thing that’s going to pay off probably better than anything else, it’s getting new, interesting, different, related, semi-connected, semi-related keywords, to finding out which ones convert.

PM: That’s absolutely right. And I have found just experimentally, if I use the tools that I’ve already talked about, just about any product or service or whatever it is, by the time you’ve done all your homework, you’re going to be able to come up with at 500 keywords.

JM: Well, let’s say someone’s listening to this right now and they’re thinking, gosh, I want to spend my time in the most effective possible way, you know. And they’ve decided to put some time aside to do the keyword research.

PM: Yep.

JM: When you say 500 keywords, does that take an hour or three hours or five

days. Or is that a unique process?

PM: Well here’s a procedure that I use and you could do it in a couple of hours.

JM: Okay.

PM: You have a subscription to WordTracker.com, that’s probably just the best, simplest thing to do.

JM: Okay.

PM: Okay, and let’s say that I sell chainsaws. Just to pick something out of the air. I go to Prisma, I’ll go to Lexfn, I’ll type in chainsaw, maybe I’ll go look at some meta-tags. I’ll do chainsaw search on Google and I’ll look at 10 different web pages. And on a piece of paper, I’ll make a list of all of the chainsaw related topics and I don’t know a thing about chainsaw, but I guarantee you, there’s probably about 10 different groups of words that have a lot to do with chainsaws. Like cutting down trees, you know.

Some people would be selling chainsaw and it would never occur to them to bid on the word cutting trees, okay? And I’m going to come up with a list of like 10 or 15 or 20 different basic keywords that have to do with chainsaw. Then I go to WordTracker.com and I enter every one of those words and it’s going to give me 100 variations on the word chainsaw, 100 variations on the word cutting tree, 100 different variations on the word, I don’t know, prevent forest fires or something.

And you haven’t even gotten into the brand names of chainsaws, which could be, you know …Toro, and then we had a client and he bids on all the model numbers.

JM: Yes!

PM: All the popular model numbers. He goes to Toro and he finds out what the

most popular model number is and then he bids on those keywords.

PM: That’s right.

JM: And he doesn’t just bid on Toro, he bids on Toro 1520 chainsaw and he bids on 1520 chainsaw and he bids on 1520, or model 1520. Even though there are a lot of products that have model 1520, there are probably not a lot of people who have bid on the term model 1520.

PM: Nickel clicks.

JM: Right, these are nickel clicks and if it says very clearly on the top, chainsaw in your description, even if the person enters in something esoteric about 1520, if they’re looking for the chainsaw, bang! That ad comes up, it costs a nickel to get them, you get them in the door and hopefully convert them.

PM: That’s right and somebody brought up this question about, you know, using brand names of its competitor and trademarks of the competitor.

JM: Yeah, yeah. What’s the story with that?

PM: Well, I just get a call at a gray area.

JM: But does Google have any objection to you using like Toro or

McCulloch or a brand name of something?

PM: Well, I have never gone against any major companies like that. If the

company sells through distributors and they’ve got all these stores that are

selling their products and stuff, they’re probably never going to be able to please the people that are using their name as a competitor.

If it’s something like Microsoft probably you could have a problem real quick, kind of like eBay.

JM: Okay, yeah, I’m looking and it does not look like they have a problem with it, but I would bet that they require when you click-through, they want to see something related to Toro.

PM: Ah, yeah. And again, that’s the kind of thing, it’s going to catch up to you later. It’s not going to happen today. You could get a cease and desist letter, you know. I think everybody who has significant size business is eventually going to have to decide, well, what do I think of people bidding on my name?

I typed in Armand Morin one time, there were like, you know, 10 people bidding on Armand Morin [laughs]. And I don’t think they were selling his stuff [laughs]. So I don’t know, you know, he’s got to decide whether he approves of that or not. It’s a double-edged sword whoever you are, especially if you have any kind of an established business.

JM: Okay. Yeah, I know there are people bidding on my name.

PM: People bidding on mine. Yeah, the scary thing is, I don’t know if they’re any

good, you know.

JM: There’s one guy, I’ll make sure to click on it. I got three people who are bidding on my name, that’s kind of funny. Interesting, and you’ve got one other guy. So that’s kind of a gray area; not a big issue, but can you do it? How should you do it? It should relate to the site, the keyword, somewhere on the site. And so far we haven’t seen any problem with it, but you could have a problem and that’s something to just keep in mind.

PM: Yeah, and the other thing you could bid on is URLs.

JM: Ohh …

PM: For example, there’s a gazillion people that will type in cars.com in the Google search bar or the Yahoo bar. As a matter of fact, last time I checked, 134,000 typed cars.com in the Yahoo search bar and nobody was bidding on it in Google. You could bid on somebody else’s URL.

JM: Wow. Boy, I had not thought of that. That was funny, when I used to work with a search engine and we looked at the stats one day and the number three searched for phrase was Yahoo.com.

PM: Isn’t that funny?

JM: And never quite figured it out except that people, I guess, didn’t know how to use the Internet. It’s more of an indication of a lot of newbies, but that’s a great idea. So you can bid on people on just their name and brand name, but also on websites.

PM: Yeah. And, you know, cars.com, www.cars.com, http://www.cars.com, you know, anyway you want to do it.

JM: Yes, all three of them.

PM: Right.

JM: And then brackets and quotes.

PM: [laughs] Yeah, sure.

JM: Boy, there’s nine keywords right there. Talk about to pay-per-click or not pay-per-click. When does it work and when do other things work better?

PM: Well, my favorite example is toilet paper.

JM: Uh huh.

PM: Toilet paper got used, as far as I can tell, four or five or maybe six billion people last month. But there was only 4,000 searches for it on Overture. Toilet paper is not something people look for on the Internet, it’s just not.

JM: Right.

PM: Now, and there are things like that where …

JM: Well, there are also, let me just kick in for a sec. There are also things like we talked about with coral calcium.

PM: Yep.

JM: Where things have become commodities.

PM: Yep.

JM: Where they’re very, very price sensitive and one of the aspects of using the search engine is someone is now presented with 500 different vendors, who sell apparently the same exact product. So it allows people to do tremendous shopping and comparison between one vendor and the other. Now there’s some other aspects, too, which is what we found and let me kick in a bit here because we also advertise with pop-ups. We advertise with banners and we advertise with a lot of email. And what we found is, take the coral calcium, for example, the email works better than anything else. And our reasoning, because we had to come up with a reason, it’s like why did this happen, was it that there were no other competitors around? The only thing in their email box was us, when the email got mailed. It was kind of a stand-alone offer.

And so, in certain cases, like with search engines, where you’ve got, like I said, a very competitive product or you’re looking for a specific model number, like a Canon Digital Elf 400. You know, there’s not much difference between the one from Amazon and the one from eBay.

PM: Exactly.

JM: There’s no difference whatsoever. Or the one from, you know, Jim’s Camera in New York or 42^{nd Street Camera. At that point, people start looking for, are they the same, are they refurbished versus new because they’re going to compare apples to apples. Then it really comes down to price and do you have the best price, do you have the best shipping, do you have the best terms, do you take all the payment options? Do you have a money-back} guarantee, can you FedEx it, all those things that come into play in a traditional retail business, which include all the little give aways people want just for doing business with you.

And if you don’t have those, then you’ll probably find that search engines are going to be a harder place to sell than using things like banners, pop-ups, and emails where you’re not surrounded with your competitors.

PM: Yep, that’s right.

JM: Okay.

PM: There’s kind of a rock, paper, scissors relationship between, you know, email, banners, pop-ups, affiliates, search engines, all those different things.

JM: Right, but not, I mean, the traffic’s different, but we’ve seen email traffic convert a lot better than pay-per-click traffic. And even standard search engine traffic, simply because of the context that we were presenting the advertising message to the person.

PM: Yep, yep.

JM: Okay. Now I think we covered this URL trick.

PM: Yep.

JM: And the visible URLs. Let’s talk about market research and using this, I thought your example was so great with your friend Jenny [laughs]. That was a very, this was my favorite question actually and the question was, how can you use this to research different stuff. Headlines, book titles, hot buttons, new products, new trends.

PM: Yeah, well, let me take the question in two parts. Somebody sent in a winning question related to this, I’m going to that in just a second. One guy said, how do you research book titles on the Internet and it’s the same answer as headlines and domain names and here’s an example. I’ve got a friend named Jenny who is a consultant and she was talking to me about positioning herself as an authoritative person with her clients and there’s some people, I think you can imagine that, you know, sometimes maybe women, in general, might get less respect from certain kinds of men or whatever. Or clients that don’t think that they should pay her bill on time or whatever. And I said to her, I said, you know, I have a little theory that Jenny is a girl next-door name. Maybe Jennifer or Jen would give people a different impression of you as a consultant. So, I don’t want to suggest that the name Jenny is bad, because she’s very, she’s a wonderful person. But maybe Jenny is the wrong impression for consulting.

And so, what she’s doing is she’s running Google ads for her consulting business where she’s using text in the ad to test Jenny, Jennifer, and Jen, to see which people click on more. Do they want a Jenny, do they want a Jennifer, or do they want a Jen? And she’s probably going to change what she calls herself, based on rotating three different ads; Jen, Jenny, and Jennifer.

JM: So could you do the same thing with book titles?

PM: Absolutely. And, as a matter of fact, Bill Harrison, he owns a radio, TV interview report and he wrote up my Google stuff in his newsletter because, as a matter of fact, it’s the perfect place to find out a book title that would be most appealing to people. Now, I actually did a version of this, it wasn’t a book, it was a seminar. It’s one of my favorite stories to tell about Google ad words. I was doing this church event; it was about the movie The Two Towers with J.R. Tolkien and all of the spiritual and religious symbolism that’s in it.

JM: Okay.

PM: And we had this little committee meeting and we came up with four different suggested titles for our event. And I liked mine the best.

JM: [laughs] A big fight, huh?

PM: Jeff liked Jeff’s the best. Mark liked Mark’s the best, so who’s right? So what I did was I bid on the word Tolkien on Google, I ran it for a day and I had these four titles. The Two Towers, Tolkien The Two Towers, and Spiritual Symbolism, that got 11 clicks. Lord of the Rings and the Spiritual Powers of Hobbits, that got 8 clicks. Spirituality of Tolkien, Hidden Messages in The Two Towers, that got 20 clicks. Tolkien’s Spirituality, Is There Hidden Christianity in the Two Towers, 16 clicks. So I got 11, 8, 20, and 16, which one’s the winner?

JM: Hmm [laughs].

PM: So now, and that’s how we decided to call it Hidden Messages in the Two Towers. Now who would know, without just letting people vote on it. Now, another thing that we did here was I just sent them to the Tolkien Society website. I didn’t have one, so I just sent them to somebody else’s site. And no problem, it cost $2.78 and I got my answer. And you can do the same thing with a book title or product name or a name of a report or a name of a white paper or anything you want. Or whether you decide if you want to be Mark, Marcus, or John or James or Jonathan or whatever. You know, Jonathan Mizel, you could see if John works better, if you wanted to.

JM: Well, now the other question related to hot buttons and that was the winner actually.

PM: Yes.

JM: So Perry? Let’s announce who the winner is.

PM: Okay, the winner is Eric Prinze.

JM: And what was his question specifically?

PM: Eric’s question was, you mentioned marketers find the groove and resonate with the consumer, exactly what I was thinking during that section of the Google ad words. So how do you peer into the searches that are occurring, without going through guessing keywords or phrases.

JM: Hmm, boy, that’s a good question.

PM: I thought so. Congratulations, Eric, and I know Eric, he’s one of my customers. So …

JM: Now, if he wins, do we have to answer it? [laughs]

PM: Hmm, well, we probably should.

JM: Okay. Well, here’s what I think. And, Perry, you can kick in, you know, your opinions as well. Generally, if you’re going through the process of Google ad words and you’ve developed a lot of keywords, and this is really a function back to how many keywords you have. If you have 20 keywords, you’re not going to particularly notice a lot of trends in 20 keywords. You might get one that wins or one that doesn’t win, but a trend, a hot button is when you have, in my opinion, 500, 700, 1,000 keywords. And that’s when you’ll start to notice what’s happening in terms of clicks, we’ll just call it in terms of action.

And an action is either a click or an opt-in or a sale. And what you’re looking for is things, hot buttons, phrases, words [laughs] that create a lot of actions. And specifically actions that lead to sales. I mean, you would never, say an ad that gets a lot of clicks is good, if it doesn’t get opt-ins as well.

And you’d never say it’s good unless it gets sales eventually. So what the secret is, is to get a whole bunch of keywords and really to just—-you don’t find the hot buttons so much as they find you. That’s what I think.

PM: Yep.

JM: And when I look at new products that we’re going to create and release. Quite often, and you know I’ve never told anybody this, so we sell a lot of products and we sell a lot of different products. And most people have no idea what we sell, which is exactly how we like it. We never develop a product right off the bat. We basically will take a bunch of products from Clickbank or CJ or Affiliate Offers or one of those CPA networks, those affiliate advertising network link shares, one of those guys. And we’ll put traffic in front of it, pay-per-click traffic and e-mail traffic and banner traffic and pop-up traffic. And we’ll test it beforehand to see whether or not we can sell it before we write a sales letter, before we develop a product, before we get a domain name, before we start collecting opt-ins.

Before we do anything, we’ll use Google. We’ll use e-mail and other advertising methods to find those hot buttons and see what sells beforehand. And so typically what we do is we look at our e-mail box. We look at our spam. [Laughs] We go to space.com, excite.com, and other sites thet have a lot of pop-ups and look at what’s selling and then we do our keyword research based on that. And we look at the number of advertisers and then we find the best advertiser with an affiliate program and then we start developing keyword strategies around it, throwing traffic at it, and seeing which ones convert and which ones don’t.

And that’s how we find the hot buttons in the market. When we find

something that we perceive as a winner, then we just develop our own version of it and create our own product. But we never create a product without knowing pretty well that we’re going to at least get our money back and usually that it’s going to be a big blockbuster. Do you have anything to add to that?

PM: Yeah, I do. What you’re describing is exactly what to do once you’re ready to start spending some money. Let me give you some tips for before you spend money.

JM: Great.

PM: Here’s just kind of a rule of thumb: I think a market is a decent market to go into if there’s 3 to 16 bidders on Google.

JM: Three to sixteen bidders, huh?

PM: Yes, now that’s kind of a, just a shoot from the hip number.

JM: But if there were no bidders, what would you think?

PM: If there’s no bidders, it very strongly suggests, or only one or only two, that there’s a pretty strong suggestion that there’s not much money to be made in that market. I mean, to pick a ridiculous example, you know, I could bid on the word existentialism and I can get it all day long for five cents and it might even get a lot of searches or the word philosophy or something like that. But, you know, how much money is there in something that ethereal, okay.

Or, like I remember a story that Yanik Silver told one time where somebody found out there was all kinds of traffic. Like hundreds of thousands of searches that had to do with learn to type. Well, the guy developed his product and he’s buying this traffic and he slowly figured out, after it wasn’t working, that almost everything, it was so easy to find a free

learn to type tutorial, that nobody would even pay 30 bucks for one.

JM: Wow.

JM: That might be one of the products that you’d want to sell if you were bound and determined to sell a learn to type product through a method other than search engines.

PM: Maybe, yeah. Yeah, that would be very good.

JM: Okay.

PM: But, you know, three or four or five bidders, that tells you that there’s more than one person that thinks this is a good idea. And that’s a good sign. On the other extreme, you know, when there’s 20, 30, 40 bidders, then that strongly suggests that you’re in some kind of brutal commodity market. Like I wouldn’t try to do Imitrex or the coral calcium thing, you know. We kind of gave up on that because you didn’t have enough backend to support, you know, paying so much money to get a customer.

And so, but I think three, you know, if there’s 16 bidders, you’ve got a fighting chance. It tells you that there is, if you’ve listened to this call and everything, you can probably figure out how to get into the first page for a lot less money than most of the other people you’re bidding against.

JM: Yeah.

PM: Then if you design a good sales process, an opt-in process, you write good copy, etc., etc. then yeah, you’ve got a fighting chance in a market like that. So that would be an indicator and then, yeah, go to the websites and go, well, what are they selling.

Here’s another example of something I found, I was doing this project

for a company that sells equipment to retail store chains. And the key, and I thought man, this is going to be great and there was all this traffic; people looking for this kind of equipment. Well, like kind of like cash registers and stuff. Well, we found it very difficult to make it work just to get opt-ins and quote requests for them because all of the people searching were very small businesses. There are lots and lots of small businesses and only a small number of large retail chains.

JM: Okay.

PM: Okay? And everything that was being sold in that market was like $99 software packages for your flower shop.

JM: Ohh.

PM: Not thousands and thousands of dollars of equipment for all of your retail stores. And so, we bid on the right keywords, but 90 or 95 percent of the people were the wrong kind of people for that company. So that’s something where direct mail and, I mean, they could buy mailing lists of the right kind of companies and all of this, that was just a better strategy.

JM: Right.

PM: It didn’t work for big retail stores. It worked if you were selling the flower shops or something.

JM: Okay, well now, look, we’re running out of time and so I’m going to kick it up a notch here. We’re going to talk about the Name-Squeeze page right now. Okay?

PM: Go.

JM: Somebody had asked a question, can you do this without a website. And it was another question about ClickBank is going to be requiring a website soon.

And then we wanted to talk about Name-Squeeze and then basically combine this stuff together.

PM: Yeah.

JM: The answer is, in almost every case, you can use Google ad words without having a website. All you do is you drive the traffic straight into your affiliate page. And yes, you do have to do the little AFF on there. However, it’s better if you do have your own website. And if you do have your own website, you can also use ClickBank.

ClickBank’s current system will allow you to drive traffic straight into the ClickBank merchant – that is going to change. We had a client, and a friend of mine who contacted me the other day and he said, so big deal. I went and I got a website [laughs], it’s not so hard. Some people have said, can I use a free website? Well, of course, you can use a free website. You can use a free website a Geocities or you can set one up at any number of hundred places that will give you free web space. It does not have to be a big domain name. It does not have to be really anything. In some cases, like with ClickBank, all it has to be is a website that has the redirect script that just sends them to the right affiliate link.

But what we found is there’s a much more effective strategy whether you have your own domain or not. And that is to use what we call a Name-Squeeze page. And what Name-Squeeze is, is a website or a web page that is a one full-page opt-in form. And what it does is, is it captures the client information. So you, the advertiser, gets that name. You can fit in your own follow-up system and then after the person opts in, then they go to the web page. And let me give you the example.

In the old days, we used to say that you send them to a web page and if the person doesn’t buy, use an exit pop-up and the exit pop-up sends them a little window that says, hey, you’re not going to buy, at least subscribe to our newsletter. And we found that was very good, much more effective than putting a little form on the page. That basically gave us an opt-in rate that went up from two or three percent up to about 10 percent. Then we recently discovered, let’s just turn that around. Instead of sending them to a page, and if they don’t buy, have them opt-in, send them to a page that asks them to opt-in.

PM: Yep.

JM: And if they don’t opt-in, then send them to the sales letter. So what we use is we use a page, the traditional Name-Squeeze page, it’s just a big opt-in form. And if they don’t fill out the form, they get a pop-up with the page we’re trying to send them to anyway. If they do fill out the form, then there’s a little, it’s called a redirect or a confirmation page, as soon as someone fills out the form, and all forms have this, all sites support this. As soon as someone fills out the form, the page that would normally be the thank you page is the sales letter you’re trying to get them to go to anyway.

PM: Yep, that’s right.

JM: Now Google says you can’t use pop-ups. So what we did is we came up with a version of this where right below the opt-in form, it just says very simply, click here to go straight to Google. It’s not a big deal. Now, Perry, you use a Name-Squeeze page and I think we can go to the page if we can.

PM: Yeah.

JM: Go to:

And which one of these is your name squeeze?

PM: Okay, if you go towards the bottom, it says Perry’s free Google ad word email course.

JM: Yeah.

PM: Yes.

JM: If you click on that, that will take you to a name-squeeze page.

JM: And this is the page that you send people to from Google, correct?

PM: Yeah.

JM: So when people click, type Perry Marshall and then click on your ad, this is where they go.

PM: Right.

JM: And you’re not trying to sell them anything here, are you?

PM: No, I’m not.

JM: All you’re trying to do …

PM: I’m giving them a five … excuse me?

JM: You’re just trying to get them to opt-in.

PM: Right, and I’m offering them a 5-day email course that will explain how to solve some problems when you’re doing Google ad word campaigns.

JM: Okay. Now, when they click on that and they opt-in, then where do they go?

PM: Then it takes them, there’s a page that says thank you for opting in, check your email in about 10 minutes, the first installment will arrive. Just a moment and then after about five seconds, it goes to a sales letter for my toolkit.

JM: Got it.

PM: Okay, good definitive guide to Google Ad Words, which Eric Prinze won a copy

of for asking a great question.

JM: Oh, that’s great. Okay, so Gosh, you’ve got a real quick process here. I hadn’t even checked that out yet. Fantastic.

PM: Well, let me just tell you from the standpoint of somebody who wrote in, I’ve got this international sales force and the deals are closed in person and we can’t track these, the sales, and how do I make my ad words and stuff accountable and everything. Here’s what you: this works for all kinds of situations. This works for a guy selling a Google Ad Words course, it’s great for business to business, too. But let’s take the guy who sold this instrumentation equipment.

You buy the keywords and your ad says that you’ve got a guide to X, Y, Z kind of instrumentation. They land on a landing page and it says, are you considering this kind of instrumentation? Well, you’ve got this problem, you’ve got this problem, you’ve got this problem. If these are problems that you’re concerned with, we’ve got a white paper or a guide or report or a trouble-shooting guide or something and it tells you how to work through all these problems. Fill in your name and you get a copy. And so now what you’re tracking, you’re not tracking sales, you’re tracking sales leads. And that’s what you’re measuring.

JM: So in that lead, you would somehow mark that lead in the form to say when that lead goes into the system that it came from Google.

PM: Yeah, and that’s easily done with HyperTracker or 1shoppingcart.com or AdMinder.

JM: Got it.

PM: Easily.

JM: Very good. So …

PM: This is like a killer formula. And what I usually see on these pages, depending how targeted the traffic is and how good the message is, anywhere from a 10 to 40 percent success rate in getting the person to tell you who they are. Now, they’ve given you permission to communicate and follow-up.

JM: We’ve got the same thing. I think now when we use email and other methods and pop-ups and stuff, we get a pretty high name-squeeze conversion. We get, in some cases, 40 even 50 percent. With Google, we get about, it’s lower, it’s about 20 percent, but it’s still fine. [laughs]

PM: Oh, yeah.

JM: It’s great, I’ll take 20 percent any day of the week, you know. Because it’s already built up our mailing list to hundreds of people for this particular thing. And those people are fairly responsive people.

PM: Right.

JM: Okay, let’s talking a little bit more. Let me say one more thing about Name-Squeeze, I’m just looking at my notes. If you’re selling something, a lot of people have said, hey, I can’t use an opt-in form, I’m just an affiliate for this guy. And how can I take this traffic and follow-up for him, that’s his job.

Well, that’s the difference between making, you know, 20 cents a click or 30 cents a click and making 50 or 60 cents a click. There are a couple of big benefits to using Name-Squeeze or using a process of sending them into an opt-in form on a website that you own or control. First of all, you do not have to use the AFF on the page.

PM: Yep.

JM: Because you’re driving it to your page, not an affiliate page. Second of all, if

that page is using pop-ups, I don’t care, you can’t use it any other way. If the affiliate program that you’re sending the traffic into has pop-ups and they’re not going to disable them just for you, you’re out of luck, man. You’ve got to use your own page. And that page is like a pre-sell page and it can have an opt-in form. But the bottom line is, you control the process. You don’t have to put the AFF.

And then the other last thing is, even if it’s an affiliate program that you’re promoting, set up an AWeber account or an auto-responder and start following up with those people. And you can increase the conversion rate on your affiliate sales like three times; two, three times and it’s unbelievable because many advertisers don’t do a follow-up job and you’re doing the follow-up job.

PM: That’s right.

JM: And you’re getting the credit for it. So that’s the big one. The next question we had was how to attract affiliate sales because a lot of people say, well I can check the clicks and I know the clicks are going in and there’s two ways to do it.

One, you can convince the advertiser to put your little AdMinder or HyperTracker code on their thank you page, after someone buys. And then the only other way we found outside of that is, and if you’re a super affiliate, they might do that for you. But if you’re not, then the bottom line is, you know, you’re going to have to come up with an alternative.

We just sign up for different affiliate accounts. So we have about 15 different ClickBank nicknames and we’ll set up different ad groups to go into different ClickBank nicknames. And that way we can say, well, this one

generated this many clicks and then we just go to the log-in screen for that nickname and find out how many sales it generated. That’s the only way we found that you’re able to do that. Now, do you find anything else, Perry?

PM: Well, I just say that you really do, especially if you’re doing these affiliate deals, you really need to use very narrowly, narrow ranges of keywords on every one of your affiliates’ links. Because some of those keywords aren’t going to convert and the money is going to be found in figuring out which ones don’t and not buying them.

JM: Right. Because it’s not just about clicks, it’s really about sales. Now there’s another benefit to using Name-Squeeze or an opt-in form. And that is, if you’re bringing traffic in, and this also relates to if you’re getting bogus clicks, and someone says, how do I tell if I’m getting fake clicks? Well, it’s real easy.

If you’re using AdMinder, you’ll just notice that many of those fake clicks are going to come in from the same IP address. And you’re going to be able to compare, you’ll just see the same number again and again and again. And you’ll be able to compare that with your Google numbers. If they’re way out of whack, you’re getting a lot of bogus clicks. And the other thing is, is to track every step of the way.

If you’ve got an opt-in form on there and someone’s legitimately interested, probably a good percentage are going to opt-in. Every day we look at our numbers. If one day, you know, if we’re getting like 100 clicks a day and we’re getting 20 opt-ins a day and then some day occurs when we get 200 clicks and we still get only 20 opt-ins, well, that’s pretty good indication that we’ve got some bad traffic and there’s some fraud.

PM: Yep.

JM: Google does have a protection mechanism in place for that, I believe. Is that right?

PM: Yeah, they don’t really explain how it works, but they seem to have addressed it.

JM: Let’s talk about the bidding strategy. Is there a difference between one, two, three, eight, nine? And what have you found, Perry?

PM: Yeah, and again, we’re like, get bugs in our teeth because we’ve got to move so fast here. But just really quickly …

JM: That’s okay.

PM: … but just really quickly. You don’t generally want to be number one because you’ll get lower quality clicks that, you know, people search and they go, ah, click on that. If you’re down around number 6 or 7 or 8, you won’t get seen very much. As long as you’re above 3 and 4, you’ll get listed on partner sites like AOL and Netscape and Earthlink, too. So the optimum place to be if you can get it, is like position 2 or 3 or 4.

JM: Wow.

PM: But you probably don’t want number 1. It’s definitely a point of diminishing returns. You may get lower quality of traffic for a lot more money and that’s bad. But you want to try, if at all possible, to get on the front page because the first page is going to get way more clicks than page 2 or page 3. So you don’t want position number 10, 11, 12 because that’s on the second page.

JM: Right.

PM: So that would be my suggestion, but the real answer ends up being, when you figure out your conversion rates, what am I willing to pay first. There might be some times you’ll take all the people you can get and you’re willing

to bet on number one because your ROI is really good…

JM: Right. Let me answer the questions on search engine optimization versus pay-per-click.

PM: Yes.

JM: There’s a lot of questions about that; the first one, do you get an advantage advertising on Google from the search engine standpoint? And there’s only one advantage you get and that is, if you start to drive a lot of traffic into your site, your page rank will go up. Now, you have to drive a considerable amount of traffic in order to get your page rank up.

PM: Right.

JM: But there is a benefit. There is a bigger benefit to it than getting any sort of special deal and that is, if, one of the problems people have is just getting Google to spider their page. You know, forget the ranking, just going to the page and spidering it. If you’re an Ad Words advertiser, you will immediately get that page spidered.

Google says, and I believe them, they don’t give you any advantage for being an advertiser. But the advantaged that they do give you is that they will, at least, go to the page and visit it and add it to their index. You might get added and get position 500 [laughs], or position 1000, but that’s better than being in no position at all, because in order to move up, you need to start from somewhere. And, like I said, guaranteed that they’re going to spider you if you submit it.

We’ve had people who said within 30 seconds, they can see Google’s spiderbot go to their page, of submitting an ad word, and make sure that it’s a real page. Search engine versus pay-per-click really depends on the

product and service. Generally, generally you’re going to get a higher conversion rate from search engine optimization than pay-per-click. Not always and not huge, but what we’ve seen because we have Smart Pages and other things out there, generally we find the Smart Pages do a little bit better in terms of conversion. The pay-per-click stuff is more consistent so that’s why we do both.

Search engine and pay-per-click side by side, is it bad to have everything? Hey it’s like, is it bad to have every keyword be yours or every listing on the page be yours? No. Gosh, if I could make it happen for all my keywords, I’d be the top 50 listings for everything [laughs] I don’t think there’s a problem with it at all. The only problem is people might keep searching. If it’s the same ad or the same page they’re seeing listed again and again, they might keep scrolling down, but you honestly want to be in both the normal directory, I’m sorry, the directory, which is Dmoz. The search engine, which is Google and the pay-per-click side of it, which is AdWords.

Overture versus Google and other pay-per-clicks, should I use one or all? Boy, Perry, I used to say start with Overture, but we don’t say that anymore, do we?

PM: No. Start with Google because it’s instant. And after you figure out what works on Google, then stick that on Overture.

JM: And then after you find what works there, then you start working with FindWhat or the other ones.

PM: Right.

JM: And then, you can start looking at things like banners and pop-ups and email

and other alternative forms of media. I want to talk a little about the idea of using Google for market research. We’re going to do a two-minute presentation on this.

We have a friend, a guy by the name of Frank Kern, and what Frank does is something amazing. He will pick a niche market and what he’ll do is he will use Google Ad Words to survey that market. He will buy Google Ad Words and I think his latest product is on Japanese gardening or something or how to teach your parrot how to talk. I mean, he’s got some weird esoteric stuff. And what he does is he uses Google to basically ask the questions of what the market really wants. And what their most important problems, passions, issues are. And, at that point, he gets a bunch of clicks, maybe 100 people, 200 people responding. He gets maybe 50 to 75 people answering the survey, filling out what they’re interested in. And that is how he writes his sales letter and then creates his product, based on researching what the people told him they want.

So for anybody thinking about using this for market research, and you haven’t created your product yet, I mean, this is the biggest boom I think I’ve ever heard. Any weird esoteric fields at all that you’re interested in, preferably something without a lot of competition, you just run a survey form and you use something like Zoomerang or Alex’s Ask campaign. And you bring people in and you ask them what they’re interested in and you take those questions and you answer those questions and that’s your product. And you re-phrase those questions and that’s your sales letter. And you don’t have to turn off your ad words campaign, do you? [laughs]

PM: No. Change the destination.

PM: You know, a lot of times you might not even know what itch they’re trying to scratch. You know what keyword they’re typing, but you may be off. You know, maybe you think they want cheap and what they want is fast and maybe your sales letter is all about cheap and they want to hear fast. Well, if you do an ask campaign, you’ll find it.

JM: Any sort of survey would just be phenomenal. I mean, I love the idea, you also know where your traffic’s coming from. I think that’s it. The only question left was what about content targeted ads. The traffic quality on that stuff on the content and the partner sites usually you don’t have to make your half a percent click-through rate.

PM: No, you don’t.

JM: Does that mean that it’s generally a lower quality traffic?

PM: Yeah, content, you’ve got these two choices – do you want partner sites, do you want content-targeted sites.

JM: Yeah.

PM: Partner sites are like AOL and Earthlink and other basically search engines. And you usually do want those. Then, it says, do you want content-targeted ads and you can select that. Those are like, you know, stuff that ends up on business.com or the New York Times website or maybe thousands of other sites. Google sells their results to websites and usually that traffic is lower quality because the person that sees the ad didn’t just get done searching for that thing. They saw it while they were on their way somewhere else.

And so, if you’re very price sensitive on your traffic and your profit margins are the thing you’re concerned with, you probably don’t want content-targeted ads. If what you’re trying to do is, if the price of the traffic

is really good, and you’re just trying to get all you can get, that tends to be the quandary. It’s either too expensive or you can’t get enough of it. That’s usually it, people are torn between one or the other. If you’re trying to get all you can get, then select those content-targeted ads and you’ll get some more clicks.

JM: Okay, good. Well, that’s it, guys [laughs]. But we do have a couple of last little announcements. Perry, you wanted to talk a little bit about your toolkit?

PM: Yeah, I got quite a few questions about this and the question was, okay, Perry, I see in your website you’ve got those Google Ad Words definitive guide and what’s the difference between that and what we just went through for the last two sessions. And there’s certainly a lot of overlap, but there’s also a lot of things that we didn’t cover in very much detail today. And they are complementary and so if you’re really trying to dig as deep as you can, it would be worthwhile to check out. You can go to:

http://www.perrymarshall.com/923/

…and you can click on the link at the bottom of the page. And it’ll take you to information about that.

And I also have several different packages and a couple of those are coaching programs. One of them is a telecoaching thing where we have meetings on a teleconference, kind of like this every month, except the lines are open. And anybody that wants to can jump in and we can discuss your campaigns and that could be really useful to some people. I also have another one that adds some one-on-one time and some email access. So you get my individual attention.

JM: Great, and the last thing I have to say is, if you are interested in working with

us, you can check out our two coaching packages, one a group coaching program, and the other for individualized help.

I want to thank everybody for joining us. We really appreciate it.