“Publicity vs. Direct Response?”

You shouldn’t look at publicity as a replacement for direct response advertising and marketing.

You CAN use publicity for lead generation in a direct response fashion, and I do so all the time. However, sometimes you need to think of it as a low-cost, more-believable alternative to image advertising. As such it’s not necessarily your #1 priority.

But what others say about you is more believable than what you say about yourself. This makes up for the lack of control that you have over it. So don’t look at the next section as an alternative to doing the basics. Rather, think of it as a lowcost, high leverage component of your multi-faceted marketing system.

How Pay Per Click Works

Your first question might be, “why should I use pay per click if I can get FREE listings on the search engine anyway?”

There are several reasons. First, if you have a new website or one with lousy rankings for your important keywords, it takes a lot of engineering and at least a month or two to improve that. Pay per click just gives you a shortcut.

You step up, pay the money and you’ve got INSTANT traffic.

Second, even if you’ve got free traffic from a GOOD listing, you can still buy a little more. And in general, even if you’re getting a killer ratio with one form of media, if you can get acceptable ROI with another media, you should use that too. Never become 100% dependent on one media. Use as many as you can.

Third, Pay Per Click allows you to do instantaneous experimentation by changing advertising copy, the landing pages on your website, and your bidding prices. You’re in control, and you can use this to research and understand markets very quickly. You have much more control over pay-per-click than free listings.

Let’s talk specifics, especially Overture and Google. Between those two you will reach 90% of the available market. Overture is a “manual submission” process through which your keywords are approved by Overture staff. It takes a few days to get set up.

An Overture listing on Yahoo, searching on “post cards” looks like this:

Sponsor Matches (What are Sponsor Matches?)

• USA’s Fastest, Cheapest Postcard Printer - 1,000 4″x6″ full-color, two-sided postcards …

www.4over4.com

• Full-Color Postcards 250 for $49.99 - Low-price guarantee yet high quality on business …

www.vistaprint.com

• Full Color Printed Post Cards All Files - 1,000 4″ x 6″ full-color high-quality printed …

www.copyprint.com

Web Site Matches 1 – 20 of 1074 | Next 20 >

1. My Postcards - software for multimedia virtual postcards with music, poetry, add-ons.

http://mypostcards.com

More sites about: Shopping > Greeting Cards > Electronic

2. Motel Postcards from the Era of the Open Road - nostalgic and humorous look at classic ’50s and ’60s motels throughout the USA.

http://www.lileks.com/postcards/motels/splash.html

More sites about: Automotive Travel > Roadside Attractions

The “Web Site Matches” are Yahoo search engine listings. The “Sponsor Matches” are the top three bidders from Overture on the term “post cards.”

See the top listing? That postcard vendor is paying $3.31 per click – that ‘s a relatively high price. If that listing stays there a long time, it most likely tells you that their website is converting traffic to customers. Or at least should be.

Here’s another listing from Google – this time, “post card marketing.”

Advanced Search Preferences Language Tools Search Tips

post card marketing Google Search

Marketing – Free Access to Tips, Ideas, Resources

www.MarketItRight.com Step-by-Step Guides – Launch Your Campaign! – Free – Click Here

Sponsored Link

POSTCARDS – LOWEST PRICE Guaranteed – 250 Full-Color for $49.99

www.vistaprint.com Up to 10,000 only $439.99 (or $0.043 cents per piece).

Sponsored Link

Postcard Promotions * Post Card Direct Marketing

Welcome to Postcard Promotions ®. … Welcome to Postcard Promotions®, a service of Track Marketing Group. … 2001 Track Marketing Group, Inc. …

www.postcardpromotions.com/ – 8k – Cached - Similar pages

Track Marketing Group * Postcard Promotions Specifications

… As direct marketing experts (we write regular articles for publication and speak at events … We specialize in copy and layout that will work on a post card. …

www.postcardpromotions.com/pcspecsheet.htm – 9k – Cached - Similar pages

Postcards, preprinted cards and postcard printing from Onsite …

… and preprinted color cards: postcards, greeting & announcement cards, and card … Direct Mail Marketing, Ideas, Design Tips and US Postal Information. …

Description: Source for “farming” and “keep in touch” postcards.

Category: Business > Real Estate > Marketing and Supplies

www.postcardprinting.com/ – 27k – Cached - Similar pages

Sponsored Links

Full-Color Postcards

Low price guaranteed.

250 for $49.99. 10,000 for $439.99.

www.vistaprint.com

Interest:

Premium Postcards

Design, Print or Mail, Full Service

Affordable Quality 5,000/$379

www.premiumpostcards.com

Interest:

See your message here…

In Google, the top horizontal bars are large, expensive corporate sponsorships. The little “classified ads” on the right are pay per clicks from the “Adwords Select” campaign. Adwords Select is very cool because it’s instantaneous.

You can open account, create an ad, and be driving traffic to your site within 5 minutes.

I’m going to go into further detail about this in future newsletters, and there’s an upcoming seminar in Cincinnati that everyone who’s serious about Internet marketing should be at. But for now here are some important bullets about pay per click:

• Keywords are sold by bid price.

•Your rank within multiple listings is determined by how much you are willing to pay. The price you are willing to pay is based on your understanding of what a visitor is worth, based on sound direct marketing practice.

•Keywords are very, very specific. You need to brainstorm every word or phrase and wording of phrases that might be relevant to you and bid on each one individually. If you’re doing this properly you’ll come up with many, many dozens of words and combinations of words.

• You can minimize your expense by not focusing on the most obvious, highest-priced words, but focusing instead on a larger number of less popular but less expensive keywords.

• Different keywords call for different headlines, messages, and even landing pages on your site. You will probably want to run several campaigns at once.

• If you have even a moderate amount of traffic related to a particular keyword, you can change your headlines several times a day and observe changing click-through rates each time. Some headlines will pull TEN TIMES as much as others.

• This instantaneous testing – changing your headlines and watching the click-through rates change – teaches you about your market in REAL TIME. You can use this to INEXPENSIVELY test and perfect ad campaigns for other media – and it costs you pennies or dollars instead of thousands of dollars!

• After you have developed a campaign that is profitable, you can put the pedal to the metal – ramp up your marketing expenditures and make huge profits because you know it’s profitable. That’s how big dollars are made in direct marketing.

The next step for you…

…Is to just try it. Overture in general is less expensive than Google, but Google is faster to set up. In any case, this is a fascinating new advertising medium, and most people on the Internet don’t understand it yet. As more and more people understand this, it will become more competitive and the prices will continue to go up. But for the next year or so, I believe its wide-open territory!

A few minutes ago I mentioned Ken McCarthy. Ken’s a friend of mine who did the world’s first-ever Internet Marketing seminar with Marc Andreeson, founder of Netscape, on November 5, 1994. That’s right, Internet Marketing in 1994! Ken is not only one of the true pioneers in Internet marketing, Ken’s background was in true direct-response mail order marketing before he got involved in the Internet.

Back in the good ol’ days of Bulletin Board Services, Ken started studying up and applying direct response marketing principles to online marketing. He’s literally one of the first human beings alive who understood the Internet to be what it really is: The ultimate direct-response, results-accountable marketing machine.

Eight years later Ken is one of the most respected authorities on Internet marketing, and in April I attended his now-famous seminar in Cincinatti: “The System.” Ken brought together a seminal team of successful Internet marketers and went from traffic generation to conversion and product development. It was sold out: Only 98 people were allowed to attend; others were turned away, and because I got in early, I got a front-row seat. It was fantastic, and two months later (June now) I can tell you that it has driven numbers to my bottom line and easily paid for itself.

Well Ken is doing an update of his original “System” seminar September 28, 29, and 30th. Registration has not yet been opened but if you email me (newsletter@perrymarshall.com) I can hold a seat for you. And of course I’ll make sure to provide information as soon as it becomes available.

Why is Pay Per Click so Profoundly Important?

We all witnessed the arrogant dot-com stupidity from 1998-2000. Banner ads went from being the hottest new idea to being almost completely ineffective, and waste of money. (They did work well for awhile. As a matter of fact my friend Ken McCarthy, who did the world’s first Internet Marketing seminar with Marc Andreeson, founder of Netscape, was at the meeting where the banner ad was invented.) Everyone thought that banner ads would fund everything in the world, but they’ve performed very poorly. The direct marketers figured this out a lot quicker than everyone else, by the way.

Well first let’s talk about what DIDN’T work. What didn’t work was when you go to Yahoo and AT&T has a banner ad about long distance that you don’t click on, and AT&T pays something to Yahoo every time it’s seen. What didn’t work was the fact that they were showing you a banner ad about phone service even though you were looking for stuff on the Rolling Stones. If you’re searching for “Rolling Stones” then what are you likely to buy? Phone service? Of course not. But you might buy CD’s or T-shirts or concert tickets.

Now IF you can buy advertising that’s entirely based on people searching for very, very specific things, then you ONLY have to pay for eyeballs that you care about. And… if you only pay when they click through (pay per click, not pay per impression) then you’re ONLY talking to people who are likely to care and you are ONLY paying if they do care. There’s really never been an advertising medium in history that was targeted that way, until now. There never was a way to ONLY advertise to people who are looking for your exact kind of thing.

Pay Per Click Means that people who type in a very specific phrase or word on a search engine see your ad… and you only pay when they click through to your website. If you sell “Orange Ethernet Cables” then you can create an ad that ONLY appears when those three words – or even that exact phrase – is typed in at a search engine. How much do you pay? It’s based on what other advertisers are bidding for those words.

So let’s stick with the “Orange Ethernet Cable” example.

I’m going to use Overture (www.overture.com) who is the #1 pay per click vendor – they sell their listings to most of the other search engines, including Yahoo and MSN. The #2 vendor is Google, whose listings are sold to AOL and Earthlink as well. On Overture right now, “Ethernet” is selling for $0.39 per click. “Ethernet Cable” is selling for $0.25 per click. “Cable” (one word) is selling for $0.79 per click. “Orange Cable” and “Orange Ethernet Cable” have NO other advertisers who are bidding, so you can buy the top position for just pennies.

Ultimately what determines the price is how much a visitor to a website is worth. Getting a visitor does not mean the same thing as making a sale. So if it takes 100 visitors to make one sale, you must factor that in. That means that the guy who’s able to afford the most advertising is going to be the guy whose website converts traffic to paying customers. You can’t buy advertising sensibly if you have no measurements or at least educated guesses as to what a customer is worth.

And pay per click will increasingly be a tough proposition if your website is not designed to ask people to take definite action – whether it’s giving you an order, calling you on the phone, sending you an email or filling out a form to take the next step.

Welcome to the Premier Issue of the Perry Marshall Marketing Letter!

Don’t lose this newsletter!

If you just got this in the mail, then ya better hang on to it. The envelope, the newsletter, the hand-written address, the stamp on the front, my signature on the back page… Everything.

Why?

Because you’re among the elite group of people who purchased my marketing system in early 2002, right after I introduced it. The original group. Kind of like people who got Michael Jordan’s autograph way back in ‘85 when he played college basketball at North Carolina.

This newsletter you’re holding is destined to become a collector’s item. So don’t lose it.

Does that sound brash? Well, yes, I suppose it does. But there are people out there who have old Jay Abraham,

Dan Kennedy and Gary Halbert tapes and newsletters from 20 years ago, and they’re worth a lot of money today. Why?

Because Jay and Dan and Gary persisted, did brilliant work, and created a jet stream that has inspired thousands of entrepreneurs over the last couple of decades. It’s made them living legends.

Well I’m in my element. I love what I do. And if the creek don’t rise and a bus don’t hit me tomorrow, I plan to do the same. Because there’s a whole lot of very bad marketing these days, especially B2B, and I intend to change that.

You and I can change it together – and prosper greatly along the way.

So strap on your helmets, because it’s going to be a wild ride!

Never, ever forget this: Even if somebody’s willing to pay you five hundred bucks someday for this piece of paper, it ain’t nothing compared to what you made in the meanwhile by reading it and acting on it.

Onward. Let’s get to work.

In this issue…

• •Internet Marketing Update: The incredible power of Pay Per Click

• Publicity vs. Direct Marketing and Low-Cost Publicity via Charity

• •Writing Ad Copy with a Gun to Your Head – a Success Story

• •Finding the Fantasy – and Pandering to it

Internet Marketing Update

The Internet is always going to get a lot of attention in this newsletter because it’s constantly changing. The web material in the Perry Marshall Marketing System itself is very basic and this newsletter is the place where you’re going to the true, state-of-the-art stuff. This month we’re going to talk about…

Pay Per Click Search Engine Strategies.

I can’t begin to tell you how important Pay Per Click is in the entire picture of marketing in the world. It’s truly revolutionary; it’s the business model of the future for the Internet; it’s going to affect all other advertising media; and there is, by my predictions, a two year window of opportunity that you should take advantage of while it’s still fresh.