If your new to SEM it stands for Search Engine Marketing and you use search engines like Google, Yahoo, & MSN to get your traffic by paying for it. That is called PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising. If your super new go research these terms and learn about landing sites, split testing, and the other factors which influence your results.
For those of us who are already signed up and are already running campaigns, you might be asking yourself how can you improve your overall performance. First off there are several performance factors that you should always be considering throughout your campaigns, the most obvious is testing different variations of your landing page in order to improve how well it converts.
If your using Google Adwords you can use their Website Optimizer which enables you to cross test anything at all on your landing pages, test one thing at a time, test different images, different ad copies, different background colors, different fonts, each time one beats out the other stick with the winner. This will enable you to increase your sales.
If your wondering what good testing your fonts, and colors is compared to your ad copy, well its actually quite important, for instance Page A has a visitor length of 5 seconds but Page B which has different colors that flow nicely and are more targeted to your overall page might have a longer visitor length, the reason why I test my colors and font is to increase your visitor length, not even increase your sales but defiantly increase your visitor length to longer then 30 seconds, that will give you enough time to keep their attention on the page, from there you can split test your ad copy and the other factors that influence conversions more then the others.
But this post isn’t really about split testing or tracking your visitor length its more about what can you do once you know all of that stuff, what else can you do for ideas when your already doing everything above and more, maybe there are things that others are doing to increase sales that you don’t know about so how can you figure those things out or increase your creativity when dealing with your own campaigns.
The simple answer is you watch what the next guy is doing and you can ether test their technique out or you can just ignore it because not everyone is going to have the proper solution, what I like to do is continually watch new (FREE) Adwords videos, I used to watch a bunch by Pery Marhall and even though there was nothing new in what he was saying, it gave me more ideas to test for my own campaigns.
Earlier today I was checking out some sites recommended by SEOMoz and I came across one called Marketing Pilgrim, by the way if your looking for some advertising they charge $2,000 per month for a 125×125 banner on their site. Anyway SEOMoz is pretty good and I figured they probably recommend some alright sites so I decided to check it out and I came across an article about Adwords Tycoons.
What they are doing is having a so called limited entry online class to teach you how they make over $500,000 a month, now I encourage you to click on their link right now and look at their landing page and laugh because it sucks hardcore, its got crappy scam written all over it. But the course was free so I signed up and watched their first introductory video, the class doesn’t start until the 16th of June or something, not exactly sure.
The first video showed a bit of so called proof (Can easily be faked) of how they made just over $7,000 in a single day and what there daily average usually is which stands just over $3,000 per day. Pretty good results if they are real.
Now there video was showing their Click Bank stats and that alone has eBook loosers written all over it, I suggest that you don’t promote scam Internet marketing eBooks but what I’m getting at doesn’t involve selling eBooks or promoting products through Click Bank its to watch what others are doing or have done to give you more ideas for your own campaigns.
So this is what I do, if its free I’ll sign up for the course and see what they say, do, or better yet don’t do. Most of the time you should have common sense to say this guy or chick is an idiot and doesn’t know anything, but when your watching the useless videos ask yourself how you can better avoid any mistakes you see or how can you improve upon your campaigns by what you’ve seen, the trick is not to watch these videos and think before how much its going to increase your sales because that rarely happens.
The real trick is to watch and say ok I should avoid this, that, and that, however he might be onto something with point D, maybe I’ll test it and see where it takes me. By doing this it will increase your creativity and give you more ideas to test in your own campaigns, most might fail but the ones that work make you one step closer to increasing your overall cash flow.
Just remember bad information is just as good as good information the only difference is most people don’t know how to learn from bad information and end up making those mistakes for themselves, which in a way isn’t always bad because you’ll know what not to do next time around.
