Affiliate Web Marketing

Hi Guys,

Since a lot of you are wondering how to convert your traffic from Google Adwords and PPC into buying customers, I will devote this whole post towards conversion strategies. Note that this information is centered around the search network (when someone searches for your keyword on Google and sees your ad), and not on the content network (which is using Google Adwords to display your ad on other relevant websites in the Google Network). If time permits, I may talk about the Google Content Network, as it is a hugely powerful way to advertise and is underrated, and often underused or misused. I have shown in several occasions to my clients that you can get 3 times as much quality converting traffic with the Google Content Network and one third the cost vs the search network, despite most “gurus” on the internet saying that the content network is dead.

Anyway, in order to convert PPC traffic into buying customers, you need to understand one important thing, and that is this – not all traffic is created equal. PPC traffic is cold traffic, meaning people who come to your site from PPC, are likely not to have known who you are or have dealt with you before. While traffic to your website from other advertising channels may be warm traffic/warm leads (e.g. you meet or talk to someone on the phone or at a networking function, and you give them your card with your website address on it etc.), the traffic from PPC is cold, and you don’t have the advantage of being able to talk to this person in real life to create the rapport and trust with that person. For this reason, your direct marketing skills is required to convince them to either buy, or enter your sales funnel.

I like to see the sales cycle as a 3 step process.

Lead Generation > Relationship Building > Conversion

Think of selling almost like courting or dating. When you see a person of the opposite sex at a bar, and you are interested in this person, are you going to go straight up to them and ask them to go home with you? The average person would not, depending on how brave you are and how well you cope with rejection of course What a sensible person would do, is come up to the girl/guy, and introduce themselves, perhaps buy them a drink, talk to them and build a rapport with them. You might even ask them out to dinner, movies or a first date. When you do this, what you are doing is building a relationship and a rapport with the other person. This builds trust, and over time builds credibility. Once the trust and rapport is built, it becomes a lot easier to ask them to go home with you. In business, it’s exactly the same thing. You need to build a relationship with your prospects before trying to sell to them.

So, for PPC, this can be done by gathering a database of leads/prospects, and using follow ups to close the deal. You can also get them through your sales funnel by selling a low ticket item, and then doing an upsell, or sell ongoing continuity to them. The worst mistake you can make is to tell your PPC traffic, someone who have never dealt with you before, to give you thousands of dollars for your products. Unless your offer is extremely unique, and solves a real major pain/problem, you cannot sell a high ticket item to a cold lead ie to traffic coming from PPC. When I say “your product solves a major pain or problem”, I’m talking about products like curing cancer, diseases etc. something that the consumer just cannot live without. The pain of not having the product is more than the pain of giving away the money for the product, and so they are willing to try whatever it takes to get rid of that pain.

So let’s use Renata’s website as an example, and hopefully, this example can give others ideas on how to sell their own products.

I take it from Barbara’s post that Renata sells flags. Since I didn’t get an answer from him/her to my previous post, I’m just going to assume that his/her website is http://www.hoppingkangaroos.com.au – I just googled The Hopping Kangaroo, I hope this is the right site Renata lol For those who don’t know, http://www.hoppingkangaroos.com.au is a website that sells all sorts of flags – novelty flags, desk flags, international flags, you name it. Anybody in need of a flag? Contact Renata or go to the website

Ok, now, unless you are a major corporate with a huge marketing budget, branding is not so important for your PPC landing page. Unless you have a brand like Coca Cola, Nike, etc. then that’s the only time I would care about branding in PPC. However, this is not the case for the typical small business, so you should concentrate on converting the lead/traffic into your sales funnel first, and then you can focus more on building your brand with this prospect once they are already in your funnel. So what I would do is create a landing page for a type of flag… let’s say… the Albanian desk flag. What you want to do is make the landing page all about this type of flag, and then bid on your main keywords “Albanian flag”, “Albanian desk flag”, “desk flag Albania”, “flag Albania” etc. you get the point.

Make your ad as closely related to Albanian desk flags as possible. E.g.

Need Albanian Flags?
We have Albanian Desk Flags
High Quality Flag. Only $3.00 Each.
http://www.hoppingkangaroo.com.au/flags

I don’t have time to go over what makes a high performing ad, so I won’t. However, I’ll explain this one. Basically, it’s been tested and proven over and over again that having a question mark in your ad works. If you can turn your ad into a question with a question mark at the end, it will attract the eyeballs and influences a click through. Symbols and numbers also work extremely well. Have $3.00 in the ad somehow always tends to get a higher CTR because of the use of symbols and numbers. Also, if the user is searching for “Albanian Flags”, what happens is whenever those keywords are repeated in your ad, they become bold. So your ad will actually look like this:

Need Albanian Flags?
We have Albanian Desk Flags
High Quality Flags. Only $3.00 Each.
http://www.hoppingkangaroo.com.au/flags

This also attracts eyeballs and influences click throughs. This is an ad I’ve just quickly put together in 5 seconds but it is an ad worth testing.

Now, put yourself in the shoes of the searcher. If you are searching “Albanian flags”, you are looking for web pages spefically about albanian flags, not USA flags, or Australian flags or any other flags. So the landing page you want to take the user to is a page specifially with information and pictures about the Albanian flag, and not your home page. Internet users are lazy. We like to be able to find the right information quickly, and if it takes a few clicks to get to the right page, we end up pressing the back button and trying another site. So make it as easy for the user to find the information they are looking for as possible. You can do this by minimizing the amount of clicks they need to make to get there.

If you’re selling your flag for only $3, you might want to target ‘buying’ keywords to prequalify your visitors so that you get a higher conversion rate. Examples of buying keywords are “price of”, “discounted”, “on sale” etc. People searching for “discounted Albanian flags” will convert a lot higher than just “Albanian flags” because that searcher already has the buying mindset. They’ve already done their research and decided to buy; they are just looking for supplier and a good deal, so bidding for these terms will yield a higher conversion rate.

Now, it doesn’t have to stop here. Once they buy one flag, and check out, you can do an upsell to them. For example, get the bundled package including the Albanian desk flag, Albanian table flag, Albanian novelty flag, Albanian handwave flag, Albanian car flag, Albanian mini banner and get xx% off. You will find that once someone has pressed the ‘buy’ button, they’ve already made a commitment to purchase from you, and many will take up on any other offer that you give them in the backend provided they can see the value in your offer. A customer is always 10-15x more valuable than a prospect, because they don’t buy just once. Once they’ve taken out their credit cards on your site, they are giving you their trust, and so offering them other great valuable deals is often accepted.

Now, you can take it even further. Once they buy, add them to your database. Create a relationship with them, build that rapport further, and then you can go on to sell other things to them such as flags of other countries etc. Provided they had a good experience dealing with you, they will be happy to buy from you again. You’ve already spent your money acquiring this customer, so why not work on increasing each customer’s true value to your business.

This has become quite a lengthy post, and I realise I haven’t even talked about the specific factors that make up a good landing page to optimize it for conversion yet. Tomorrow, I will post a post on what elements you should and must have to optimise your landing page for conversions. Stay tuned.