Brent Hodgson, Copywriter

Have the “Gurus” lost touch with the joe-average internet marketer?

Not all of them, but MOST of them…

Do they realise how much work it takes to actually start an internet business anymore?

Sometimes I wonder about this when I read about the latest “Get Rich Quick” software they’ve developed, and wonder how it could possibly deliver any legitimate value to any start-up internet business owner.

I wonder whether most of the gurus remember what it took to start their business, or have an appreciation of how the market has changed since their business hit critical mass.

Let’s face it - they don’t need to know these things.

Once you have a big list, and a rapport with that list, it’s all-over-red-rover!

You can sell other people’s products on affiliate commissions, and still make a killing.

You can live off the “Launch Spikes”…

(In fact, at a certain point you don’t even need to do that. Like Mark Joyner, you can simply drift off and enjoy retirement… which makes you wonder why the big “gurus” are still in the market?)

But for the rest of us - we need to carve out an internet business that is designed for today’s internet market - by ourselves…

And as I’ve said over and over again, building a business is hard work.

The good news is there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Eventually you hit “critical mass”.

You literally end up with a money-making machine.

It’s just building that machine that’s the hard part.

When I was still a young pup (er, younger pup… starting 6 years ago…), I worked in a small team to build an online business from practically nothing into one of these “lean, mean money-making machines”.

It took 2 people 2 years part-time work to get it to the “critical mass” stage.

It was part-time work because half the time was spent building the business, half the time was spent generating the cash using another business so that we could afford to pay ourselves (peanuts) to work on the website. (At the time I was taking home around $8.50 per hour… I had to work for an hour to earn my bus ticket to work - I couldn’t afford to drive.)

It was damn hard work too.

Not all of it was rewarding either…

We promised to send subscribers a monthly newsletter…

When you have a 60,000 person database, a monthly newsletter becomes a licence to make money. (3 years later when we’d built the business to this size, we would joke that the “Send Newsletter” button was the “Make Money” button.)

But when you’re sending a newsletter to 150 people, and still have a 1% conversion rate, it hardly seems worth it.

I wonder - if most of the gurus had to start again, without their databases, finances or contacts - could they do it?

Could they break into a new market?

Do they really understand what it takes to become a success, today?

Or have they lost touch, and they’re peddling concepts that used to work yesterday?

Personally, I’m more inclined to trust a guru who is actively out there, building online businesses that have yet to reach maturity… Or if they’re truly on the cutting-edge of their marketspace.

There are a few I do trust that I can think of off the top of my head - James Brausch is one (a “guru” who is building his own business before your eyes), John Reese is another (the hardest working internet marketer in the business), Ed Dale (because his “Lab” researchers are constantly trialling new concepts in new markets).

That’s not to say I don’t believe other “gurus” have nothing to offer - just I often wonder if they’re genuinely wanting to help, or if they’re just out for the quick buck from product launches…

What are your thoughts?

Who do you trust to help YOU in the marketplace, not just make a quick buck on launch commissions?

Brent

Popularity: 11%

Do you know when to stick at it, and where to give up and let the opportunity pass you buy?

Most businesses are not successful from day one.

It takes a long time, and a lot of hard work, to become an overnight success.

Unfortunately, most people give up long before they get close to this point. Perhaps that’s why 98% of people fail (or 99.5% in my estimations from my time working in the get-rich-quick industry).

I was watching one of Marcus Hochstadt’s DVD interviews with James Brausch recently.

It’s genuinely great content - after buying it for $35 during a 24 hour special, it almost feels like I stole it or don’t deserve it for what I paid for it.

I wrote down a page of insights that I wanted to apply to my business…

But one insight that stuck out to me was never explicitly revealed by James Brausch in the interview.

It’s about “sticking at it”.

James Brausch told the story about how he got into internet marketing. It was through an amazing piece of technology that he and four business partners had developed.

Over time, each of James Brausch’s business partners left the business for various reasons - he was left with a product, but alone with no marketing expertise, and nobody to help him.

It would have been easy to give up when things started to get hard - at the same time that his business partners left.

It would have been easier to give up now - when things were toughest, and he was alone with an whale-sized problem: How to commercialise this device?

But he “stuck”.

He kept going.

One thing lead to another, he turned that business into a success before selling it, started another, and then started the business he’s in today!

Ed Dale is another example - he failed to make a “winner” out of his first niche site 37 times before he created a model that worked.

Imagine how easy it would have been to give up?

What about Thomas Edisson - his story of persistence in the face of failure when inventing the light bulb is practically a cliche!

Personally, building an online business from $0 to $Millions in sales took 2 years before it reached critical mass.

The common trend that I’m noticing among the successful people I know is that you need to stick at something for 1.5 to 2 years in order to achieve success at it. (For relationships, I’m told it’s 6 months to 3 years.)

It’s a character building exercise.

It’s like success wants to test you to see if you can handle it - before it will give itself to you.

I don’t know why… It just works that way.

It’s interesting because if you can test someone’s character, you get a good indication of how likely it is that they will achieve success.

This is also something James Brausch spoke about in the interview.

I never realised how genuine his desire to see people become successful was.

He comes across as a jerk to so many people because he’s found “tough love” actually improves peoples chances of success.

It’s also interesting how he uses the Intern Program as a character building and testing exercise. (I won’t go into how, or what exclusive reward he offers though… It’s probably best that I don’t mention it.)

It makes me wonder… Do I have the character to stick with it, in my internet marketing ventures?

In the past, the answer (most of the time) was “no”… This time, I’m not so sure.

I guess time will tell.

What about you? Do you have the character to “stick it” for 1.5 to 2 years before you see the rewards of your work?

Brent

Popularity: 23%

At lunch during Ed Dale and Dan Raine’s Over the Edge conference in Beechworth - in the middle of … well, nowhere…

Just finished listening to Pete Williams‘ presentation on using offline media for promotion.

Check out the video Ed produced on-the-fly, just during a break before Pete Williams’ session:

http://seesmic.com/v/7lGar8juPy

Check it out!

Keep an eye out for my ugly mug in the video, and Ed’s comments about me.

If you want to see what people here are up to, have a look at the Beechworth 08 Twitter Aggregator…

Brent

Popularity: 16%

The hardest part of living the “Four Hour Work Week” is something that is only glossed over in the book…

It’s actually creating the income to fund your business, your outsourcers, and your lifestyle.

This is a pretty big black hole in the book.

Tim Ferriss’s release of the Four Hour Work Week has created a new gold-rush of “Get Rich Quick” junkies - this time, instead of the million dollars and a Porsche, they’re out to become part of the “New Rich” - to own lifestyle businesses.

The lifestyle is easy to build.

But building any sort of business (lifestyle business or otherwise) is hard work…

It’s not something that you can create overnight. It takes time and effort.

So how was Tim Ferriss able to build a lifestyle business?

Well, he never set out to build a lifestyle business to begin with… So there are gaps in some of the “How To”…

But if you read between the lines, there are 7 lessons that Tim Ferriss provides about building a business, and turning it into something that runs independently of you and funds your lifestyle.

But he does illude to a few concepts that show you what it takes.

1. Business Takes Hard Work

Once you’re past the excitement phase, starting a business is hard, unrewarding, time consuming, dull, boring, costly, arduous, stressful, crappy work.

Starting a business is hard, hard work, and it’s not for everyone.

But it’s one of the few ways to achieve the type of lifestyle that Tim Ferriss talks about.

Before Tim Ferriss achieves his “Four Hour Work Week”, we see how hard he works - both as an employee and as a business owner.

In the early stages of the book, he could easily be described as a “workaholic”.

He works more productive hours in a day than most people do in a month!

Tim Ferriss did not decide he was going to work 4 hours a week, then started a business.

He built a business, THEN decided to work 4 hours a week.

He didn’t have an internal conflict about working so hard when he “should have” be off on month-long lifestyle adventures. He was just working hard to build his business.

Sure, it’s good to begin with an end in mind… But your end is “build a lifestyle business”. It’s not “live the lifestyle”.

And building the business is going to take a lot of hard work.

2. In Business, You Don’t Have To Do It All Alone

OK - the bad news is that building a business is hard work, and someone has to do it.

BUT the good news is it doesn’t have to be you.

One of the key points in the book is that you can outsource practically any business activity.

Just on this point - I had a Virtual Assistant comment on my blog recently scoffed that she thought Tim Ferriss’s book conditioned business owners to expect Virtual Assistants to do “flunkie” work.

Running a business means doing a lot of “flunkie” work. Most small and start-up business owners do a lot of the flunkie work themselves.

If you think it’s boring, degrading, meaningless - whatever - it’s a necessary part of business.

(That’s why people outsource as much of the easy “flunkie” tasks to Virtual Assistants!)

There’s an issue that you’ll need to deal with though - to avoid the work, or pay for it.

If you’re outsourcing “little” tasks in your business, it immediately becomes obvious how much value a business owner invests into a business in the form of “free” labour and how it’s easy to undervalue our own time.

If a task’s outcome doesn’t make you money - how does it deliver value to your business?

Is it simply a case of the task being unprofitable in the short term? Will the task be profitable in the long term?

Is there a way to get rid of this task, or perhaps streamline it so that it is profitable - or at least costs less?

As a business owner, you don’t have to do it all… but for some tasks, that doesn’t mean you should get someone else to do it either.

3. Business Takes Someone With Strong Character Traits

Tim Ferriss has successful character traits.

He works hard. But more importantly, he sticks at things, long after most people have quit.

If you look at any successful person, you find that consistent action over a long period of time reaps rewards. A lot of action over a short period of time does not.

When business gets hard, you need to stick at it.

Success is like wine - it takes time to create.

Practically every successful person I know took 1.5 to 2 years of hard work to achieve success.

That’s 1.5 to 2 years of delayed gratification.

1.5 to 2 years of practically nothing… until they received something big.

1.5 to 2 years of trepidation and frustration before jubilation and celebration.

Do you have the character necessary to stick it through?

4. Choose a Business You’re Passionate About

Passion gets you a long way in any niche.

I’d prefer to hire a passionate marketer rather than a qualified marketer any day of the week. You can train someone to build their aptitude, but you can’t build attitude.

Someone with an insatiable passion will soak up skills and market insights faster than a dry sponge.

That’s why passion gets you a long way.

In Tim Ferriss’s example, he was passionate about nutrtition and combat arts.

This passion meant he’d already gathered a lot of knowledge about the needs and desires of his marketplace, plus a lot of technical information about nutrition and sports, long before he even developed a product.

But as we saw, after working so hard in his business for so long, he burned out and lost his passion.

It would have been easy to flake out and throw it all away (in some respects, he did) - this is where his strength of character showed through.

You still need the strong character to keep going when things get tough. But starting with a passion will get you a long way, fast.

5. Do Your Market Research Before You Begin A Business

This is something that Tim Ferriss DOES go into in his book - in fact, he dedicates a chapter to this area - but it’s such an important point that I thought I’d mention it here.

Market Research is CRITICAL for moving into a new business area.

I recently watched one of Marcus Hochstadt’s DVD interviews with James Brausch, who revealed that even though he has owned thousands of websites, there are only a few hundred profitable marketplaces online.

If you’re planning to build a freedom business, internet business, lifestyle business, or any other sort of business… How will you know that you’re going to reap a reward from your business?

It takes time to build a business and take it to profit.

Will you be investing time, money and effort into a business that is never going to compensate you? (A mistake I’ve made several times already)

How will you know unless you do your market research?

6. Make Sure Your Business Has Great Marketing

Just reading the book, it’s clear that Tim Ferriss is an exceptional marketer.

Featured on (how many?) TV programs and other forms of media. Building a brand. Carving out a marketplace. Speaking at Ivy League Universities.

And all of this was long before he even released his book.

He has an incredible marketing mind.

If you’re wanting to build a freedom business, or lifestyle business, do you?

How will you break into markets? How will you get the word out about your products? How will you communicate with potential customers? How will you build a brand?

It’s not easy…

There are plenty of people who are failing where they should be succeeding, simply because their marketing is sub-par.

Will you be doing your own marketing? Or will you be hiring or outsourcing to achieve a better result?

If you’ll be outsourcing, how will you fund this? (Marketing is rarely profitable from day one.)

How will you measure and track results, so that you know that you’re moving towards your goal?

7. Make Sure Your Business Is Constantly Moving Forward

A client and friend of mine, Brian Cavill, has a saying - “If you stop moving forward, you’re a backslider.”

Now, I don’t know if the saying is his or not, but it rings true in practically everything. If you’re not growing, you’re decaying. If you’re not competing, your competitors are. If you’re not improving, you’re getting worse.

In Steven Covey’s book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, it’s one of the 7 habits - “Sharpening the Saw”.

There were a several examples of this principle in Tim Ferriss’ book, but to pick two examples:

Tim Ferriss applied the 80/20 rule, and only supplied his products to a small number of large distributors, and fired a large number of small distributors. Although it meant a smaller market, it improved the efficiency with which he distributed his products.

In another, we see his systems and procedures for outsourcing. These had been refined and improved over time as a result of problems he had with providers - and no doubt he was still improving them.

It takes hard work to build any sort of business…

I wonder how many people who dream about owning “lifestyle businesses” will be able to stick through, and create their business in the end… Or if they are just that - dreamers.

Brent

Popularity: 21%

Humans HAVE TO develop a resistance to commercial advertising and sales pitches.

Put it another way - if you said “Yes” every time someone offered you something to buy, pretty soon you will have spent all your money, and you’ll end up broke, bankrupt and starving!

That’s why it’s been a copywriter’s job to find ways to “get under the radar”.

It’s been our job to look for tactics where we can slip past people’s natural defences, their natural aversion to being “pitched to”, and sneaks into the soft fleshy part of their brain where we might be able to get them to make a buying decision…

RULE #1 OF SALES COPY: Don’t Make Your Ad Look Like An Ad

But SO MANY people are screwing this up online.

For a long time, I defended long form sales letters…

“They look horrible… They sound horrible… They’re blatantly obvious sales pitches…

…Yeah, but they sell well!”

And let’s face it - they HAVE sold well…

But do they sell the best?

Is there something that could sell better?

Step back for a minute - where did long-form salesletters come from?

They came from the direct marketing industry. The OFFLINE direct marketing industry.

They used to be delivered via post into people’s hands - and were read like genuine person-to-person letters.

It was a way of getting through the brochure-mail and junk-mail, and actually GETTING READ - because letters get read, whereas advertising mail lines the bottom of people’s budgie cages or is delivered straight to the bin.

This is why they were sales-LETTERS.

Long Form comes into the picture because you NEED 16 pages to establish a rapport with someone who you’ve never met with before.

Advertorials were born in a similar way.

Direct marketers’ ads weren’t being read in newspapers - so they came up with another strategy. They hid their sales pitch inside what looked like editorial - what looked (on the surface) to be a genuine article.

Long form sales letters worked really well in the infancy of the internet…

So did the split testing strategies behind sales letter creation…

But nobody really thought about the “why?”. People just blindly followed the advice of “Pro Copywriters” who assured everyone that long form was the way to go online - based on their 30 years experience offline. (This is the same reason EVERYONE has Red headlines… one copywriter said red headlines work the best, and within a month, every sales letter online suddenly had red headlines).

The problem is, people are becoming “immune” to online sales letters.

Via email, people are “spamming” sales letters that arrive… Via web pages, people are having a quick look, then hitting the back button.

And the reason is simple…

THE FUNDAMENTALS BEHIND GOOD DIRECT MARKETING ARE BEING FORGOTTEN

Copywriters are just blindly following what everyone else is doing - without thinking about WHY.

Copywriters are using slang and informal language in ALL sales letters… When it was originally used as an early NLP-style tactic to mirror and build rapport with targeted markets - weight-lifters, body-builders, people with a self-defence interest, cage fighters - people who use slang and informal speech normally.

Copywriters are using long-form styles that “turn off” their targeted customers instead of engaging them… Instead of fighting for attention with long form sales letters, copywriters should be engaging prospects by using writing styles that their prospects engage with - blogs, article sites, news sites, Wikipedia, video sites…

Copywriters should still squeeze before a sale - but they don’t need to use churn-and-burn strategies to hassle prospects into buying, or go away… Old-school copywriters used to have a high cost of attaining and then contacting leads - it was buy or die. Profit or lose money. Each lead cost so much more to gain, and so much more to contact.

Today, we have the luxury of communicating with our prospects online for free - so we can afford to invest into building life-long buying relationships with clients.

We don’t need to be take-take-take, pitch-pitch-pitch, sell-sell-sell as copywriters. We CAN give away value too to engage prospects.

This is the next generation of sales copy writing - particularly for the online marketplace.

We’re fighting for attention in the most distraction-riddled medium that has ever existed - the internet.

The copy writing war-cry for online marketing is not “BUY OR DIE!”

The new war-cry is now “ENGAGE!”

Are you engaging your prospects? Are you giving your market what it wants?

Are you slipping under the radar, using the same common technology, common writing styles, and common language used by your market? Or are you trying to jam your prospects faces into the much-hated long form sales letter?

Watch this space…

Copywriting is changing.

Popularity: 20%

Just a quick post…

I’m heading to Ed Dale and Dan Raine’s “Over The Edge” 2008 Seminar in Beechworth.

It’s going to be an interesting few days. The guys have become masters of “quick-hit SEO”.

Invariably, the strategies that they talk about at these events are the strategies that will be released as the “cutting-edge” strategies in 3 months time… So I’m not sure what I’ll discover… but I’m sure going to be bringing my notepad and system cards.

Brent

Popularity: 14%

When you think about it, it’s SUCH an obvious concept…

But at the time, it’s also SO valuable.

When you’re testing, you want to test EVERYTHING at the largest part of your sales funnel. That means you shouldn’t necessary test sales copy on your sales page.

This one concept will make a zillion percent difference to your efficiency as an internet marketer.

If you just said “ah”, scroll down to the bottom now and show your appreciation

But if you said “huh?”

Then let me explain what I mean… Because if you’re split testing, or if you want to improve your conversions, this is going to make a WORLD of difference to your effectiveness.

When you’re split testing the conversion rates of a sales letter, the faster you can collect a large number of “responses” (clicks, sign-ups, buys, sales leads, whatever), the faster you can optimise the sales letter.

You need “responses”.

And you need as many of them as possible.

It’s the reason a page that gets a lot of traffic (or, has a high conversion rate), can split test faster than a low-traffic page (or, a page with a low conversion rate).

So the more traffic you’re getting, and the “easier” it is for people to say “YES!”, the more results you’ll get, and the faster you can optimise.

Simple!

Consider this model…

You have a fairly standard internet marketing website - you have a simple squeeze-for-email that signs people up to an autoresponder on the homepage. This then leads to a longform sales letter. If people choose to buy, they’re asked if they want to upgrade to a premium version of your product (an upsell). And you’re driving traffic through Google Adwords to your site.

Have you been paying attention?

Good!

Let’s test your lateral thinking skills… Grab a piece of paper and write down the answers to these 4 questions:

Question 1: What’s the most effective and efficient way to test the headline of your Upsell page?

Question 2: What’s the most effective and efficient way to test the appeal of your sales page?

Question 3: What’s the most effective and efficient way to test what you should be offering people in exchange for their email addresses on your squeeze page?

Question 4: Where should you be testing different Adwords ad variations to work out what your market will respond to?

Have you completed the quiz?

What were your answers?

Upsell pages get the fewest hits of any page. They usually have phenomenal conversion rates, but with the fewest visitors of any of these pages, they’re the hardest to test. Although you might want to test the sales copy for this page ON this page, it’s going to take FOREVER to optimise.

Sales pages require a big buy-in. If the conversion rate of your sales page is 10% (like one of my clients), you’re killing them - do whatever… But if you’re like most people and in the 0.5-2.0% range… then you’re going to be waiting forever for a result here too.

Squeeze pages, you have a much higher result - a lot of my clients run squeeze pages that convert between 10%-50%. This is a good place to test.

HOWEVER…

In the example above, the answers to Questions 1, 2, 3 AND 4 is “With different Adwords Ad Variations”.

This is at the very “opening” of your sales funnel - it’s where you’re going to get the biggest data set, fastest.

By testing your appeals, headlines and everything else at the highest point in your sales funnel, you’re able to optimise everything faster and more effectively.

“But, Brent! Adwords is different to a sales letter, or a squeeze page, or an upsell… You’re testing on two different mediums.”

You’re correct - however there’s an important distinction you’re probably missing…

The same person who responded to your upsell - they were the same person who responded to your salesletter, the same person who responded to your squeeze page, the same person who responded to your salesletter.

Any “appeal” you’re testing, it doesn’t matter where you test it in your sales funnel, you’re essentially testing it on the same person each time.

That’s why you should test it at the “widest” point of your conversion funnel, on a call-to-action that’s incredibly easy to respond to (like a click), in order to test to the biggest data set and get the best response rate so that you can get results as fast as possible.

…In essence, you’re optimising your optimisation!

It’s so freakin’ obvious… but so powerful!

Brent

P.S. - There’s huge value in surrounding yourself with other smart marketers.

I wouldn’t be a fraction of who I am today as a marketer if I didn’t have people around me like Eugene Ware, Pete Williams and other smart dudes.

All the credit for this idea goes to Eugene Ware.

If you want to show your appreciation to Eugene, leave a comment below.

P.P.S. - If you want to network with other smart marketers, also leave a comment. You’ll receive an email from me that includes my email address. Use it!

Popularity: 17%

Have you ever been into an ice-cream store, and seen only “Chocolate Ice Cream” available?

Never!

In fact, one multi-national ice creamery’s slogan is all about the choice of selection that they offer - “31 Flavors”.

But when you go to an ice-cream store, how long does it take you to choose the right ice cream?

“Do I want chocolate fudge plus mint in a waffle cone? Or do I want wildberry swirl and vanilla in a sugar cone?”

For marketers, this example tells us a lot about the value, and cost, of choice.

The Cost of Choice

Just like in the example of choosing the right ice-cream… The more choices you have, the harder it is to make a decision.

Let me give you an example of this.

Last night I went to dinner with a close friend, Eugene Ware.

In my pocket, I had three rolls of Lifesavers - Fruit Pastelles (sugar-coated jubes), Peppermint, and “5 Flavours”. I offered one of the packets to him after dinner.

Euge and I have practically been siamese twins since we began working together - I know all his bad habits, and he knows mine.

Fruit Pastelles are one of his favourite types of lollies… And when I offered them to him, I expected he’d reach straight for that packet.

But something unexpected happened…

He stopped.

He paused.

He thought about the decision.

The fact that he had to make a decision between three options made making a decision harder.

I handed him the packet of Fruit Pastelles, which he immediately accepted, and asked why he paused.

“I guess it was because I had to make a choice.”

“But the Fruit Pastelles are your favourite of the three, right?”

“Yeah… I would have chosen them. But psychologically, I must have had to weigh up the options.”

It’s the same at the ice cream counter - you have favourite ice creams that you’ll go back to every time… But it still takes a few minutes to come to that decision.

Generally, when you’re in a sales situation, you want people to make a decision to buy as quickly as possible.

Especially in internet marketing: It’s buy-or-die.

Either you get the reader’s attention, and get them to buy immediately - or you’ve lost that person forever.

Something that complicates the buying decision means you might lose the customer. Which is why copywriters tell you that you want to create a “slippery slope”.

So I wonder, does choice adversely affect conversions?

I’ve seen evidence for-and-against.

Let me show you the flip-side of the coin:

The Value of Choice

The positive side of choice is that it gives the customer more CONTROL.

They can choose HOW they want the product (payment terms, shipping terms, etc), or WHAT they want (vanilla or chocolate, standard or premium package, etc).

And as a result, they can have more OWNERSHIP over their decision, and generally more SATISFACTION.

Two jobs ago, before Alliance asked me to become a full-time Internet Marketing Consultant, I was working for a highly profitable online business where I co-managed (with Eugene) internet marketing.

(P.S. - It was SO much fun having complete control over creating kick-butt marketing, rather than being a consultant and only being able to “suggest” things… That’s where we did our “570,000 in Sales in 37 Minutes” launch. Doing crazy things like that is what I miss most now… but I digress)

Some of the products this online business would sell were reasonably high value.

Almost anything over a few hundred dollars would have a “choice” attached.

“Do you want to pay $X up-front, or would you like to pay $Y per month (a 10-30% premium, depending on the product).

We never split-tested this tactic.

However, the anecdotal evidence suggested we sold more products as a result of offering a choice of payment options.

That evidence was simply that we sold more of them after we began offering this installment-payment option.

I say it’s anecdotal, because it was likely affected by any number of other factors - such as changes in the general marketplace outside our control, growth in the size of the database we were promoting to, and more - so we didn’t actually have any hard “split testing” on whether choice of payment options improved conversion or not.

It’s something interesting that I’d like to test in-depth one day.

Have you tested “choice” as a conversion factor?

What choices did you give your customers? How successful was it for you?

Brent

Popularity: 18%

Interesting stuff keeps pouring out of the Google Adwords data that I’m collecting through Tracked.to

As I’ve mentioned already, Google’s broad matching is “VERY broad” - more broad than most people give it credit.

Most of the time Broad Match completely misinterprets your keyword, and gives you a bunch of crappy keyword clicks…

But every now and again, it grabs a few clicks on a really great keyword.

Going through my Tracked.to data yesterday, I found I’d received a click for a new search term…

I’d set up a new campaign around the keywords “copywriter” and “copywriting” - in broad, phrase and exact match. The purpose of this campaign was to drive a little traffic to this blog, but mainly to gather more Tracked.to data.

Here’s what I found:

Although I was bidding on the keyword “copywriting”, I’d received a click for the keyword “Harlan Kilstein” - the name of another copywriter, and a specific “buy-term”.

Awesome!

You can bet I’m specifically testing the effectiveness of this keyword now!

I had a look in Wordtracker and the Google Adwords keyword suggestion tool - if you look for keywords around “copywriter”, neither of these tools will pick up Harlan Kilstein’s name as a keyword - but based on early data, it highly likely that this keyword will result in signups and sales for me.

This is gold-level keyword research - I’m gathering real-life data on the precise keywords that result in clicks, in any market I want.

I’m a huge believer in Tracked.to’s ability to uncover negative keywords, and positive keywords (like in the example above) - “gold-nugget”, high-converting keywords that other keyword research tools won’t give you. And I genuinely want to see it help you too.
There’s still time to jump in on the Tracked.to Closed Beta, and trial Tracked.to for yourself for free.

To find out more about Tracked.to or the Closed Beta, visit http://www.tracked.to

Popularity: 20%

The traditional internet marketing model is simple:

Have a squeeze page on the homepage, that sits infront of a salesletter… And tacked in behind the scenes, you have a bunch of traffic-generation articles.

Fundamentally, this model is flawed.

Sure, it works to convert traffic into sales - but no better or worse than taking these same pages off your site’s homepage, and putting them into a subdirectory.

You might get more people visiting your sales letter (or squeeze page) if you put it on the homepage - but you’ll get fewer people visiting your site overall.

So what do you do with your homepage?

Give something away!

Give away some value somewhere. Offer articles, advice, free software, calculators, tools - whatever.

Ranking well in search engines is important - sure, you shouldn’t rely on it for ALL your traffic - but a sales letter is rarely going to rank well in search engines. It’s not optimised to rank, and (with the exception of affiliate links) it’s not going to attract links.

Links are a critical factor for improving your search engine rankings.

A sales letter on your homepage makes it harder to get links to your site.

That’s because there is no incentive for people to link to a sales letter.

Here’s an example of why it pays to build sites around content rather than a “pitch”:

Scott Bywater is a highly respected Australian direct response copywriter.

I know Scott’s invested a lot of time, effort and money into SEO for his web-site. His site’s older than mine, he has a better name in the industry, and is a far more prolific copywriter than I am.

I’ve invested practically no time into SEO - just setting up my Wordpress site initially.

All things being equal, Scott should outrank me for search terms like “copywriter“.

But I outrank Scott.

I have more links, for less effort and less cost.

The difference is that I’m running a content-based site (and at the bottom of each post, still offering a squeeze and a pitch on each post), and Scott’s running a Squeeze page focussed site.

Brent

Popularity: 18%