Contents Copyright... 3 Title Page... 4 Is This ebook For Me?... 5 The Problem: You Are Marketing To The Same People Over And Over Again... 6 Your Contacts Are Made Up Of People Who Like You Rather Than Your Business... 6 The Solution: Find, Cultivate And Market to People Who Are Interested In Your Business... 7 Use Pay Per Click to Find Your Audience and Build Your Email Contact List Of Leads... 7 The 5 Steps... 9 1. Create An Offer To Exchange For Their Email Address... 9 2. Create a Landing Page That Exchanges Your Offer For An Email Address... 10 3. Setup Your AdWords Account... 11 4. Run The Campaign... 13 5. Collect And Utilize The Email Addresses... 13 What s Next... 15 About The Author... 16 Testimonials About Nerds Do It Better... 17 2
Copyright Make Internet Advertising Work For Your Small Business 5 Steps to Find, Cultivate And Market to New Customers. By Adam Lundquist Copyright Adam Lundquist Make Internet Advertising Work For Your Small Business 5 Steps to Find, Cultivate And Market to New Customers. Reproduction in whole or part of this publication without express written consent is strictly prohibited. Thank you for taking the time to read my ebook. I hope that it helps your small business succeed with your Internet advertising efforts. Please consider leaving a review where you bought the book, and feel free to post about it on social media using the hashtag #ndib. If you have any questions about the contents, or about Internet advertising in general you can always email me adam@nerdsdoitbetter.com. 3
Title Page Make Internet Advertising Work For Your Small Business 5 Steps to Find, Cultivate And Market to New Customers 4
Is This ebook For Me? You have started your small business, but are just not going to send out another email to your friends and family talking about it. You know they are sick of hearing about it. For the past couple months you have taken what was once a dream and created a website for your business. You feel proud about your creation and the site certainly looks good. Professional images, compelling copy, and you even found ways to give deals, discounts, and coupons. It was a lot of hard work, and you had to really stretch your potential to learn tools like WordPress or PhotoShop and/or an ecommerce platform such as Magento or Shopify. However, your site is now live and no one is coming to it. You look at the analytics and it says about 5 users come to the site a day. You are pretty sure those are mostly just you looking at your site in different coffee shops. Even the users that do come, you are not sure how they got there or why they came. They are certainly not buying anything. You begin to wonder why did I not plan ahead to get traffic to the site? You have heard of facebook marketing, pay per click marketing, SEO, email marketing and more. However, you have neither the time nor the energy to engage in all of those forms of Internet marketing. You could create a facebook post to the same 6 followers you have, or send an email to your current email list. But you won t you know it is a waste of time. As you sit and look at your screen you get frustrated at all the time and money you invested to create an online presence for your small business. You told everyone that you know that you were starting this business, and if it fails everyone will know you are the failure. This is the state of your online presence for your business, and if you are having these types of problems, than this ebook is for you. This ebook will share with you the root cause of your problem as well as provide 5 actionable steps to fix the situation and market to people who are actually interested in your business. It's time to stop marketing to friends and family and start reaching your new customers. 5
The Problem: You Are Marketing To The Same People Over And Over Again You are marketing to the same people over and over again with the same results no sales and few clicks. I see this problem often with businesses that have just started a website. If marketing to the same people over and over again is your problem then you are playing right into the law of diminishing returns. Though persistence is a virtue and necessary for any entrepreneur or small business owner, if the people you emailed the first couple of times did not want to buy they probably will still not want to buy when you email them the next couple of times. In fact as you continue to email these same people, your messages begin to get ignored. You may have great offers, but because your emails and facebook posts are not being read it won t matter. Your email list will shrink as friends and family unsubscribe and soon you will be essentially marketing to yourself. This is a cycle which you want to get out of immediately if you want your small business to thrive. You need to find new people to market to. Your Contacts Are Made Up Of People Who Like You Rather Than Your Business When many small businesses begin to market online they often have an email list and facebook contact list that only includes friends and family. This is normal for businesses just starting out online, but the situation needs to change for your business to be a success. It is safe to assume that these contacts do in fact like you. However, it is more than likely that they are uninterested in your business. This can be uninterested in your business for a variety of reasons, but it is usually because they are not your target demographic. They are on your email list because they like you rather than your business. You could email them with the best offer in the world, and they will tell you how good your site looks but they will not buy. You are simply marketing to a small audience, which is made up of the wrong people. 6
The Solution: Find, Cultivate And Market to People Who Are Interested In Your Business You need to step outside the friends and family zone, and market to an audience that is actually interested in your business. Once you find this audience they will become your greatest asset. You know they are interested in the types of products and services you offer so any marketing messages you send to them will resonate on some level. These are what we refer to in the Internet marketing as warm leads, and they are much easier to convert into sales. Marketing to these warm leads is efficient and cuts wasted spend in time and money. You need to immediately start to find new contacts that are actually interested in your business and the most efficient way that I have found to accomplish this is Use Pay Per Click to Find Your Audience and Build Your Email Contact List Of Leads Pay Per Click (PPC) is when a marketer buys clicks from a search engine such as Google or Bing, from a website, of from a social network. For the purpose of this ebook we are going to use the example of Google s PPC network (called AdWords) to teach you how to build this list of contacts. At the most basic level PPC involves an advertiser choosing what words they want their ads to appear for when a user performs a search, creating an ad for those specific words, and then creating a designated page (called a landing page) that a user is taken to when their ad is clicked. Pay per click can be used to try to immediately drive sales but the surprising secret that many Internet marketing companies don t tell you is that you should use pay per click to build your email list. The majority of companies use pay per click in an attempt to drive sales right there and then on their landing page, but that can be a mistake. These companies lose the sale all together with high pressure on page tactics rather than make the sale at a later time when the prospect is ready to buy. Here is why it is better to use pay per click to build your email list and than try and sell the prospect immediately: 7
When people are on your email list they have a relationship with your company. They are on the list because they volunteered to be and as such will be more receptive as you send them appropriate and non- spammy email marketing messages. When you have an email list, you can market to these people as often as you like. You have many chances to succeed with them, and these chances do not cost you additional money. While you paid for the initial click in pay per click, you do not have to pay every time you email your list. If you tried to sell them on the initial visit to the site and they didn t buy, than you are not getting another chance. However, if you have their email address you can try multiple times with different marketing messages. You can create multiple offers and test them against each other. You are able to see what people interested in your business actually respond to and target the offers to their hot buttons. You get to build a relationship with them. Rather than always asking for a click or a sale, your emails can (and should) provide real value to the subscriber. 8
The 5 Steps 1. Create An Offer To Exchange For Their Email Address Here is something that I learned the hard way no one just gives you their email address. Why would they? With all the SPAM and abuse of peoples email addresses, when a user comes to your site they will not simply sign up until you prove that you provide something valuable for them and that you are not some spammy scam artist. It boils down to a simple value proposition the cost to the user is they provide their email address and the value they receive in exchange from your company is the offer. For this reason, the first step is simply to create an offer. Your offer can essentially be anything that you believe provides value to the user. As a rule it is best if it can be delivered electronically like an.mp3 or an ebook, but there are many different options. Here are some examples of offers that I have seen work on pay per click campaigns: ebooks Video courses Email learning series Informative PowerPoint Access to a tool Template Free consultations The bottom line is that you need to provide something of value, so it is important to either buy or create something to offer to the website user. 9
2. Create a Landing Page That Exchanges Your Offer For An Email Address A landing page is the web page you send your user to after they click on the pay per click ad. You want your landing page to literally have one purpose: to get the email address of the user who comes to this page by enticing and providing the user the offer. Take away anything on the page that distracts from this purpose do not try to sell the person, do not try to get them to become a twitter follower, do not try to even get them to read your blog. Just get their email address and provide them the offer. This can be hard to envision so here is an examples of a landing pages below it is from UnBounce (which is actually a landing page software company): Notice that they are providing an ebook in exchange for the email address. A good tactic is to provide an image of your ebook even if your actual ebook is just a.pdf that you are emailing. A great way to create this image is to use http://www.psdcovers.com/ - it is free and easy. 10
You need to make sure that your landing page is able to collect the email addresses. There are a variety of different tools out there for creating landing pages which allow you to receive email addresses. At Nerds Do It Better we prefer UnBounce, but there are plenty of other great tools for creating landing pages that receive email addresses in exchange for your offer such as: www.leadpages.net/ www.instapage.com/ www.pagewiz.com/ 3. Setup Your AdWords Account AdWords is Google s advertising system. The ads you see at the top and side of a search engine results page are AdWords ads (see image below). The reason to use AdWords is that your business will be able to reach customers that you do not know personally, that are interested in your business. The way adwords works is you bid on keywords, and when users type these keywords in a search engine it triggers your ad to show. In the example below the companies bid on the keyword blender to appear on this search page. 11
The pink arrows point to all of the AdWords ads. Though all these ads appear, a company only has to pay if the ad is actually clicked. Hence the name pay per click. Here are the substeps to get started on AdWords: 1. First you will need to setup an AdWords account, this is free to do and relatively simple. Go to http://www.google.com/adwords/ and click Get Started. 2. Within AdWords click New Campaign to begin setting up your campaign. Setup a single campaign with a single keyword that matches the offer you have. For example if you are a sunglasses store and your ebook is about 10 Things Your Need To Know About Sunglasses Maintenance Then your keyword is Sunglasses Maintenance. It is important to be a specific as possible. As a small business you do not have money to waste, and making the keyword/campaign/landing page as specific as possible will keep your ROI high. 3. You will be asked to set the budget and the keyword bid. The budget is the maximum that you are willing to spend in total for the campaign that day. You will not necessarily spend that amount it is just the most you could possible spend that day. I like to start with $30.00 per day for 5 days just to get my feet wet, however spend what you feel your business should spend. The keyword bid is how much you are willing to spend every time your ad is clicked. It is not how much you will spend, it is just how much you could spend. For example, if you set your bid at $10.00 and have a campaign budget of $50.00 than the most you would spend is $50 in a day and receive 5 clicks. Start with something small like $5.00 a bid. 4. Set the destination URL to your landing page. Bonus Tip To further qualify the prospect put the offer in your ad. For example your ad could read. 10 Things You Need To Know About Sunglasses Maintenance. Download Our Free ebook 12
4. Run The Campaign Once your campaign is setup it is time to launch it and watch the data. Run your adwords campaign while keeping an eye on the cost per acquisition, and making sure that it is in line with your business goals and objectives. For example if you have a high margin product or service then you can afford to spend more on the email addresses. If you have very tight margins you may only be able to pay less. However, you need to remember that you are building for the long term. These are valuable customers and you will be able to market to them often. This means even if you have a relatively low margin product or service you need to be thinking about the lifetime value of that customer. 5. Collect And Utilize The Email Addresses The way your landing page is setup you should have been collecting the email addresses the whole time. Now that you have these addresses it is time to use these to appropriately market to these prospects. You can do this in a variety of ways, but here some ideas: Send these new potential customers offers that provide real value. For example, if you are a shoe company, send your new potential customers an offer for a half off pair of sneakers. Begin building a relationship with this email list with emails that are not too product or service focused. These emails will typically be content focused emails where you tell stories and provide tips to improve the lives of your new email contacts. Match the email to social profiles and begin to market to them on the social networks. Doing this will allow your brand to be top of mind wherever your potential customer is. Get feedback. Ask the users if they liked your offer. If they did, then offer more of the same. If they did not like your offer ask why and work on improving it. Send them offers for more lead generation material. For example, if they have downloaded the book, why not offer them the webinar as well? Anything that you can do to build value is a good thing. 13
14
What s Next Congratulations you have taken the first step to improving your small businesses online presence. What s next? 1. Continue to build that email list with Pay Per Click 2. Send this book to another small business that is having trouble with their online presence. Do you have a friend or family member who is also struggling to get their small business up and moving? Send them this ebook and work together to implement these tactics. Working together will allow you to bounce ideas off of one another and see aspects of your pay per click and emails from another angle. If someone sent this ebook to you, that means your online presence needs help. It is time to get to work! If you like what you have read and want to learn more about Internet advertising, go to www.nerdsdoitbetter.com to read the blog and sign up for our insightful newsletter. Cheers to your future online success! 15
About The Author Adam Lundquist (@adamlundquist) is the CEO of Nerds Do It Better a Philadelphia based Internet advertising company. He began his career as a radio morning show host in Santa Barbara, CA. While on the radio he began to get interested in Internet marketing, eventually creating a viral Internet video which was featured on Vh1, Sports Illustrated, Best Damn Sports Show, and received over 400,000 views. He recognized that radio was a dying medium and decided to change careers to Internet advertising. Since that career change he has managed Internet advertising campaigns that have generated revenue of over one million dollars per month. He is a recognized thought leader and has been featured in The Harvard Gazette, PPC Hero, KISSmetrics, Search Engine Journal, Certified Knowledge, Digital Operative, e- Junkie, and the Daily SEOtip. He blogs regularly at www.nerdsdoitbetter.com where he provides Internet advertising tips for small and medium size businesses. He is received his undergraduate degree from UCSB and master s degree from Harvard. You can email him: adam@nerdsdoitbetter.com. 16
Testimonials About Nerds Do It Better Nerds Do It Better marketing is effective and efficient. Adam is great about listening to clients needs and strategically working with them to accomplish all their SEO and marketing goals! Kristen Pocock COO Coastal Shows Adam and the gang at Nerds Do It Better are amazing. From the initial contact through project completion, Adam was so organized, attentive and competent that the process was much easier than it would have been with anyone else. Adam also has a great personality that makes working with him really easy and fun. I'm really happy we hired Nerds Do It Better to propel our company forward in 2014. Jason Marino CEO Imagine Photography Nerds Do It Better has done wonders for our PPC campaign! They brought in more leads in his first month on the job than the past 6 months combined. Bravo! Carmel Legacy Digital Marketing Manager Kukui'ula Nerds Do It Better works efficiently to define the tasks, outline creative strategies, and keep everyone on track. Best of all, they respond immediately to issues that arise! Steve Boodakian CEO MERA Consulting "Working with Nerds Do It Better has been a high- speed result oriented work experience that left us both more knowledgeable and more motivated to take our project to the next level!" Sari Wisenthal- Shore Co- Founder, The Human Development Project 17
18