Make More Money From Your Ideas

"I've just re-read your newsletter on the power of testing Google ads. I'm wondering about doing this to see what titles would work for the book. What do you think?"

Yes, go for it! This is a very creative idea, and one that would work quite well. I do know of other people who use Google ads for testing book titles, seminar titles, etc.

To do this, sign up at Google, create two or three ads that are the same except for the headline (i.e. the book title) and run them simultaneously for a while. That will quickly tell you which one works best. Drop off the worst-performing ad, replace with another, and repeat this process for as long as you like.

Remember that you're only counting clicks, so it doesn't matter where you send them when they click on the ad. You might as well just send them to your home page. This is usually a Very Bad Idea for real ads (you should always send them to a specific page about the product you're promoting), but it doesn't matter in your case because you don't really care where they end up.

If you would like more guidance, you can get my product Get Traffic Fast, which is all about Google advertising.

Labels: Google advertising, market research

"How do I get a number one ranking on search engines, such as Google, MSN, and Yahoo?"

Easy - pay for it.

Seriously. The easiest way to get a #1 ranking is to pay for advertising on these search engines. And the good news is that this is no longer only something for big companies with deep pockets. Pay-per-click advertising is well within the reach of any business. For example, with Google AdWords, you can have streams of visitors to your site for as little as $0.05 per click.

Labels: Google advertising, search engine listings

"When I direct them to a landing page from a Google ad ...what should I have on it? .... Should I redo my coaching page with more general info and have that as the landing page with links to my resources page?"

You should have information that is directly related to the
information that they read about in the ad. So make the ad as specific as possible, and make the landing page directly related to that information.

If your Google is advertising a specific product or service, then you should have a very specific page about that product/service and nothing else. So, if anything, make your landing page less general, not more general.

For instance, if I was promoting my Get Traffic Fast product, I would have a very specific ad in Google that leads them directly to the Get Traffic Fast page at gihanperera.com/get-traffic-fast.html. This page promotes the ONE product only, and doesn't even have any other buttons on the side to distract them. This is the best way to do a Google advertising campaign.

Labels: Google advertising

"I'm busy reading through all the info I received from you with Get Traffic Fast and have a question. Somewhere I thought i read that you couldn't have a pop up on a landing page. Is that only on the immediate landing page, or is it that you can't have one on the website at all?"

It's only the landing page that is affected. You can't have a Google ad leading directly to a page that has a pop-up on it, but it's perfectly OK to have OTHER pages on your Web sites that do have pop-ups.

Labels: Google advertising

If you're asking this question, congratulations! It's one of the most common questions I get asked about search engine marketing, and one of the most important.

The answer is that you should do both - pay for Google ads and continue to market your Web pages for the free listings.

Ed and I talk about this in the interview for Get Traffic Fast, and you can listen to that part of it here:

Labels: Google advertising, search engine listings

"How do I properly list my business in search engines to get the optimum traffic visiting?"

The first thing is to do some research to find whether there's a market for your products.

Then I recommend that you buy some Google advertising to experiment with various keywords combinations. Yes, I know that you're talking about free listings, but I do recommend that you buy some traffic first. Even if you only invest $100 in this form of advertising, it will give you a clear idea of what keywords are the most popular.

Then start optimizing your Web pages to get a higher listing for free search engine traffic. There are specific things that you can do, and they don't require much effort. However, if you're doing them on the wrong keywords, it won't help at all! That's why I recommend buying the advertising first.

Labels: Google advertising, search engine listings

"How do I promote my site in search engines, without a great time-lag between new pages uploaded and returns from the engines?"

Use Google AdWords.

This is by far the quickest way to get listed in Google. It does mean that you're paying them, but it also means that you get an extremely high level of control over your listing. Typically, I find that my ad gets listed within 5-10 minutes of me creating it! It also means that if the ad is not working, I can take it down within 5 minutes as well.

I think that perhaps you were asking about getting listed fast with the free listings. The trouble is that you have less control over the search engine "spiders" that crawl the Web regularly. That doesn't mean you're completely helpless, though. For example, if Google already knows about a page that's changing regularly (your blog, for example), it will visit that page more often. So you can add a link from that page to your new page, making it more likely to be listed quickly.

Labels: Google advertising, search engine listings

"How do I make my website hit the top ten or 20, when searching say in
Google (1ST WOULD BE BETTER). Is it to do with maths, in the construction of the site?"

The #1 factor that will get you to the top of search engines is to write valuable information that people would like to read. The search engine's job is to serve the searcher, not the Web site owner. The more relevant and topical your information, the better its chances of getting a high ranking.

After that, you can consider various techniques for adjusting your page to increase your ranking. There are a number of simple things you can do to enhance your Web page, and thus boost your ranking.

Labels: Google advertising, search engine listings

"I would like to learn more about meta tags and other ways to optimize for search engines. What they are, where to find them, where to put them. I read articles all the time that tell you to use meta tags but no one says where to go to and put the keyword or whatever there for the meta tag. I see meta tags on the html for my website but is the information there not supposed to be there? Do I replace it or do I create my own?"

You've been slightly misinformed about meta tags, or perhaps you're reading material that is out of date. Search engines used to place a high emphasis on meta tags, but they don't do so any more because they are so easy for the Web site owner to manipulate.

Nowadays, search engines primarily look for high-quality content on your Web site. There are ways of adjusting your Web pages to attract the search engines, and it is important to know how to do it.

Labels: Google advertising, search engine listings

"How do I drive the punters to the product/site?"

First, stop referring to them as "punters" :-) No, just kidding - I know that you don't mean this literally. However, there is something important here - make sure that you do think of them as valued customers when they visit your site.

Anyway, your question was about getting them there in the first place ... First make sure that you target the right market.

Then direct people to specific pages of your site, relevant to what they are interested in. I looked at your site, and I would recommend that you do not send them directly to the front page, which is just a useless splash page. Rather, get some Google advertising that takes them to specific pages.

Labels: Google advertising, market research, search engine listings

"How do I create a website that mimics the big companies offering the same types of services at affordable prices since I am doing my business out of pocket without traditional sources of financing?"

First, I recommend that you do not try to match the big companies. They have big advertising budgets, deep pockets, and frankly sometimes they really don't care whether their Web site is profitable. So do the things that the big companies are not doing.

For starters, whatever your market, can you find a niche market within it? It's easy to go broke trying to reach everybody on the Net! It's far better to find a smaller market and create products for that niche.

Next, don't spend big bucks on a Web site. Instead, start small and then do small things to improve it.

Also invest $100 or so in highly targeted Google ads. Do a simple survey, asking people what they would like to learn, and collect their e-mail addresses.

Only then should you start creating a product for that market.

Finally, start small and build on your success. In other words, if you can make $100, invest $50 of that in more Google ads. When you make $1,000, invest $500 in an affiliate program. And so on.

Labels: Google advertising, niche marketing

"how do I promote my site in search engines, without a great time-lag between new pages uploaded and returns from the engines?"

The simple solution is to pay for it! Sign up with Google AdWords and start driving traffic to your site.

One of the best things about Google AdWords is that you get almost instant exposure. Within a few minutes of submitting your ad, it will start appearing. You can also suspend the ad just as quickly, so if you find that getting traffic to your site is not creating the response you require, you can quickly stop it and re-work the site.

Labels: Google advertising

"I already have a web site which is specific to my name - which is also the name i trade under. When i type in my name to google, the response is always other peoples web sites first. If my web site is specific to my name, why do other sites come before mine and how do i raise mine to number one?"

The simple answer: Pay for it. Buy some Google advertising that is based on your name. Chances are you won't have to pay a lot for these ads (unless you're famous or share the name with a famous person)! So this is a very cost-effective way of getting a high place in Google for your own name.

Labels: Google advertising

"How do I discover how many people are searching for our products via search engines?"

Start at inventory.overture.com, a free tool for finding out what people are searching for, and how many times they search for something in the last 30 days. This tool is just one of the ways to do Internet market research.

By investing a few dollars in Google advertising, you can also find out exactly what search phrases people use in Google.

Labels: Google advertising, market research