200-Proof Marketing

Recently Google put their Landing Page Quality Score system for Adwords on overdrive. The effect was that thousands (millions maybe?) of advertisers were instantly shut down. In some cases advertisers that spend 6 and 7 figures a year with Google had their Ads inactivated.

To reactivate the Ad’s Google is demanding anywhere for one dollar to ten dollars a click and possibly more for some. Unfortunately most advertisers can’t pay those extraordinary amounts unless they’re selling Jets or Mega Yachts.

Do they think advertisers will pony up the outrageous new minimum CPC? Or do they think advertisers will somehow change their websites to conform to their new rules?

If it’s the latter as many people are assuming, then why are they refusing to tell their advertisers what they expect of them?

Google’s saying they want searchers to find the information their looking for on the landing page. That’s great for organic traffic and would be a good move for them to apply to their search traffic. However, they can’t expect advertisers to give their products away for free.

If someone is searching for “how to fix a slice” and clicks an Adwords ad for a ebook addressing that problem, should they be immediately sent to the product and then asked nicely to pay when they’re done?

I haven’t done any testing yet since I wasn’t hurt too badly, but my suggestion to you would be to add webpages to your website. Possibly a FAQ, contact page, etc. A little SEO couldn’t hurt either.

Some tests have shown that FAQ pages improve conversion rates. Also as I mentioned here before, a well placed link in your salesletter to a helpful article (on your website) that you wrote can improve your conversion rate. Make sure it opens in a new window so they don’t have to leave your salesletter.

The article should be helpful and solve one of your customers problems, but it should leave them wanting more. The idea is to build trust and establish credibility by proving you can solve their problems.

If you want to read more, one of the best discussions I’ve found is HERE

If you already have a profitable infoproduct site (or sites), an easy way to boost sales is to find new ways to drive traffic. Many people who make infoproducts, setup AdWords and then move on to another infoproduct.

Almost all of their income relies on their AdWords ads and if something were to happen, their income could dry up very quickly.

If you’re the typical Infoproduct Marketer and only use AdWords, you can give your self an immediate pay raise by going and setting up an Overture Campaign with your best keywords.

While Overture is annoying (I don’t like the user interface at all) and sends less traffic than AdWords, it does seem to deliver higher quality traffic than AdWords.

Another way to boost your traffic is with articles. In competitive areas like marketing, articles aren’t very effective, but in other markets they work great. Just write and submit as many articles as you want to article directories and you will quickly start getting some decent quality traffic for free.

Throw in a little basic SEO and you’ve got your self a much more profitable infoproduct. You can write and submit 3-5 articles, setup Overture, and SEO optimize your web pages for one product in a day easily and it will potentially more than double your sales for that product.