Chapter One

The Awesome Power of Google Ad Words

By Ben Hart

Pay-per-click advertising is the primary way I drive targeted traffic to my websites.

The 800-pound gorilla in this space is Google AdWords.

But first, what are pay-per-click ads?

Well, if you type keywords describing what you are looking for into Google, Google gives you a list of sites that best match your keywords.

Google gives you two categories of listings.

One is the organic  search results of sites that run down the center of your screen. “Organic” means free to the websites listed in the search results.

The other category is the pay-per-click ads that run down the right side of your screen, plus also a few ads along the top of your screen.

It’s the pay-per-click (PPC) ads that we are focusing on here.

Why is pay-per-click advertising so interesting to me and potentially lucrative for you if you do it right?

Well, I’ll show you with one example.

If you type “guinea pig” into Google, a big list of sites on guinea pigs will comes up in the “organic” search results list.  If you look at the top of the page on the Google list, Google tells us it’s found 3,130,000 sites and pages on the Web on the subject of guinea pigs.

But if you look at the pay-per-click ad section on the right of the screen, there’s only one PPC ad on the subject of guinea pigs.  It’s an ad for things guinea pigs need -- such as food, a cage, toys and the like.

So there are more than 3.1 million sites about guinea pigs that come up in the free or organic search results, but on one pay-per-click ad.

The fact that there is only one PPC ad for “guinea pig” on Google means you can be at the top of the first page on Google for 5 cents a click.

We also know that guinea pig owners love their guinea pigs. 

Yahoo’s Keyword Selector Tool shows there are more than 46,000 searches for “guinea pig” every month on Yahoo and on search engines powered by Yahoo.  Triple that number for Google and engines powered by Google.

So if you are selling products related to guinea pigs, you could have a little gold mine here.

If you are guinea pig lover, this would be a wonderful little online business for you.

I’ll explain why and how in a moment.

The big point I want you to see now with this example is that you can either be competing to be noticed on the organic search results list with more than 3,000,000 sites about guinea pigs, or you could be at the top of the first page of a Google search for “guinea pig” and have just one other  competitor in the pay-per-click ad arena.

I don’t know about you. But I like my chances of success if  I have just one competitor instead of 3.1 million competitors.

So that’s one of the big benefits of pay-per-click advertising.

Even for a high-traffic keyword such as, for example, “marketing plan,” I count just 63 pay-per-click ads on Google.

That’s compared to 226,000,000 listings for “marketing plan” in the organic search results. 

226,000,000 pages or sites on organic search vs. 66 pay-per-click ads. 

Which arena do you want to compete in?

That’s why I’m such a big believer in PPC advertising – especially Google AdWords.

If you are looking for a lot of targeted traffic fast, Google Adwords is vastly superior to the #2 pay-per-click ad program, which is Yahoo Search Marketing, formerly Overture.

Overture actually pioneered pay-per-click advertising.  Overture was then bought by Yahoo.  Once Google saw the brilliance of  pay-per-click advertising as a money-making model, Google quickly moved into the pay-per-click arena and now dominates it.

Pay-per-click advertising is a big reason why Google now has a market cap of $143 BILLION as of this writing.

Google dominates the pay-per-click arena because it is by far the largest search engine.  About three times more searches are done on Google than on Yahoo.

About 90 percent of all searches are done on Google and Yahoo or on search engines that are powered by Google or Yahoo.

Because Google AdWords is the biggest and the best pay-per-click ad program, I am going to focus here almost entirely on Google.

But the principles and strategies I will explain here apply to all pay-per-click advertising programs.  All the search engines now have pay-per-click ad programs.

So do the online Yellow Page, Super Pages and many other online directories.

Let me explain why pay-per-click advertising is so powerful and so cost-effective if you know how to use it correctly.

Now, I built my reputation over the last 20 years in old-school direct mail marketing.

In fact, over the years, my sales and marketing letters (the old fashioned printed kind) have generated well over $500,000,000 in sales and donations for all kinds of businesses and non-profit organizations.

But a few years ago, I started my intense studying of online marketing.

I made this commitment because I saw the direction the world was heading.  And I knew I would quickly become a dinosaur if I did not understand how to market and sell on the Internet.

I read every book out there on the subject of Internet marketing.  I knew I just had to make that investment in my Internet marketing education if I was going to survive and prosper in the 21^st Century.

About two years ago, I started playing with Google’s pay-per-click ad program. I chose that advertising vehicle because it seemed the closest in concept to direct mail marketing.  That is, you spend a relatively little amount of money to test an idea and wait for the results to come back.  You then modify your idea based on the results.

If an idea fails completely, you try something else.  If it works okay, but not great, you make adjustments and try it again.

With old fashioned printed direct mail, this trial-and-error process of testing an idea and waiting for results can take months.  What’s great about pay-per-click advertising on the Internet is you can test an idea and get results back in minutes instead of weeks or months.  The feedback is instant.

With pay-per-click, I can test different headlines, different offers and different products, and within hours (instead of weeks or months) know if I have a winning product or winning idea.

And I can collect this market research for about $50 instead of the thousands of dollars I would need to spend on a test using printed postal direct mail.

Why is this trial-and-error process of testing so critically important?

Because your test results are your market research.

I would never go to the expense and effort of creating a product before I knew for certain the product will sell.  The way you find out if a product will sell is to conduct tests – a direct mail test . . . or a test on Google AdWords.

The absolute cheapest, fastest way to test an idea is to invest $50 in a pay-per-click ad campaign on Google AdWords and see if people will buy the product before you invest a lot of time and expense developing your product.

But if the product is not ready yet, how can you sell it?  How can you sell something you cannot yet deliver?

Good question . . . because it’s against the law to advertise and accept payment for something that you have no intention of delivering.  The law considers this fraud.

There are two ethical ways you can get around this.

You can design your order page so that when someone hits the order button, a page comes into view telling your buyer that this is a market research test and the product is not yet ready. You then explain when the product will be ready and give your prospective buyer two options:

1) They can give you their email address so you can alert them when the product is ready.

2) Or they can buy the product now for half price.

The way you track orders that would have been made is that you have tracking code on this page that pops up after your buyer hits the order button that tells you how many made it to this page.  Anyone who makes it to this page is counted as an order.

I’ll explain a little more how to do add tracking code to your key “conversion” pages later.

But this procedure I’ve just outlined for you basically takes care of your market research.

Most businesses start by “putting the cart before the horse.”

They develop a product and then try to sell it.

What they should do first is market research, just like what I describe here.

Find out first if people want the product or service you are thinking of offering.

If the answer you get back from your test is yes, then move forward with the rapid development of your product or service.

That’s how you guarantee your success in business.  Do your testing and market research first, before you develop your product.  Then develop your product or service based on what your market research tells you people want.

If you do it in that order, there really is no way to fail.

Businesses fail because they invest a lot of money developing a product that it turns out people don’t want.  There’s just no excuse to make that catastrophic mistake.

Launching a pay-per-click ad campaign on Google is the cheapest, quickest form of true market research you can do.

And by the way, this is extremely critical.

Market research does not mean polling people and asking them what they would buy or if they would buy the product you are describing.

That’s what many market research firms do.

Sure, a survey can give you some valuable information and some nice insights.  Surveys are fine to do.  I conduct surveys of my prospects and customers all the time.

But there is no better market research than trying actually to sell the product -- even though you have not developed it by following the procedure that I just outlined for you.

If you describe the product in a survey and then ask someone if they would be interested in buying a product like that, many will say “yes” just to be nice or to get you off  the phone.

But there’s a huge difference between saying “Yes, I would be interested” and actually hitting the order button and pulling out your credit card.

That’s where the rubber hits the road – when people hit that order button and pull out there credit card.

But in this market research test I just described, once they hit the order button and before they actually can give you any credit card information, they are greeted with the explanation page saying this is a market test.

Don’t let them actually give you their credit card information.

The point is, you can conduct not just one market research test, but several market research tests for about $50 using Google AdWords.

A simple market test like this can save you tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollar by stopping you from developing products no one wants.

After all, the foundation of building a successful business is making sure you are offering products that people will buy.  The easier your products and services are to sell, the more successful your business will be.

It’s really no more complicated than that.

So, at a bare minimum, you should be using Google AdWords to conduct super-cheap, super-accurate market research that will stop you from making big, costly product launch and marketing mistakes.

So start using Google AdWords this way – as the world’s best, most accurate and cheapest market research tool.

This is also the easiest, fastest and cheapest way to get an education in direct marketing. 

As you launch your little pay-per-click ad campaigns and track the results, you will begin to develop a sixth sense about what people want to buy, what offers work best, and how to write headlines and copy that sells.

You will learn through trial and error how to write killer direct marketing copy – a skill that will carry you through the rest of your business life.

There is no more valuable skill in business than knowing how to write winning sales letter copy and ads – because your sales letter and your ads are your proxy sales force that can go out there across the Internet and can talk to thousands or even millions of people without you every having to leave your office, your sofa or your beach chair.

Gaining this skill and then combining this skill with pay-per-click advertising is really the crown jewel of the “Automatic Marketing” system that I teach in the Inner Circle program.

So a big part of what’s great about pay-per-click advertising is that you can get started with very little money and almost zero risk.  That’s what I did.

Then once I figured out how to use Google AdWords effectively through trial-and-error and once I found a product and theme that worked (again through trial-and-error), I then just gradually ramped up every month. 

Like a rolling snowball my Google AdWords bill grew as my online business grew – and as I staked out new keywords and keyword phrases to dominate.