This is the Old Banner Ad Game, Re-Tooled for 2005

Big-time banner ad players (I know a few people who serve up millions and even billions of impressions a month) have always known that the name of the game is split-testing your ads. Now you can run text or banner ads on Google, and play this game more easily than ever before. Banner ads get MUCH higher Click Thru Rates than text ads, and that’s better for both you and the advertiser. Better CTR = more profitability, lower cost per click. And obviously there’s more room for your message and a great deal of creativity possible with banners. Start with text ads, and once you’ve determined what text gets results, use that text on your banners.

You can upload all kinds of banners, in addition to the text ads – in a variety of sizes. Here are several examples right from Google’s help page:

Leaderboard (728 x 90)

Banner (468 x 60)

Skyscraper (120 x 600) Wide Skyscraper (160 x 600) Inline Rectangle (300 x 250)

The Peel And Stick Technique Applies to This, Too!

My Peel-and-Stick technique, which is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal, is definitely useful here. Some sites may not be doing well because your ad doesn’t match. So… peel it out of that campaign, stick it in a new one, and write an ad that targets that site’s audience even better.

The Latest Stuff at Google

For several months Google has offered “Site Targeting” which is different from standard pay per click in two ways:

1) You bid on specific websites, not keywords. This is a completely different way of slicing the world than keywords.

2) You pay cost per impression (CPM) not cost per click. This is not as different from CPC as it appears, because Google factors in your CTR to make you rise in the rankings, so that Google effectively serves up ads that get the highest CPM anyway.

This has become especially attractive now that Google’s minimum bid is 25 cents per thousand, down from the original $2.00 per thousand that they started with.

Google has a site tool where you can type in keywords and it will return a list of sites it thinks are related. Now you have to take a good look at those sites and decide if they’re a fit, but if you do your homework, the advantage is that you can sell things that people wouldn’t necessarily search for.

Something you need to be keenly aware of is that some sites will give you many more clicks per impression (click thru rate) than others, sometimes just because of where they place your ads. If your ads are showing at the bottom of their page, you don’t want to pay as much as if your ads are prominent.

Why pay per impression if the person never actually sees the ad?

Well here’s how to figure that out. Below is a list of sites from an actual niche campaign, and I’ve sorted these results by CTR which shows you directly which sites are giving you a lot of clicks for your money, and which ones aren’t. The ones at the top are getting the most clicks; as you can see below,

Plexxa got by far the most impressions but not a whole lot of clicks. It needs to be deleted:

Site Clicks Impressions CTR Cost per Thousand Impressions Total Cost

uncommondescent.com 39 1,903 2.0% $0.64 $1.21

absoluteastronomy.com 82 7,698 1.0% $0.57 $4.34

livescience.com 211 27,620 0.7% $0.51 $13.84

iscid.org 17 2,473 0.6% $0.47 $1.16

charles-darwin.classic-literature.co.uk 9 1,607 0.5% $0.46 $0.73

ecotao.com 5 937 0.5% $0.66 $0.62

gelfmagazine.com 15 2,812 0.5% $0.35 $0.98

nucleusinc.com 41 12,280 0.3% $0.57 $7.00

biologydaily.com 4 1,568 0.2% $0.64 $1.00

plexxa.com 1,034 480,540 0.2% $0.59 $282.46

ld4all.com 21 33,139 0.0% $0.31 $9.97

biology4kids.com 4 6,370 0.0% $0.70 $4.44

biology-online.org 0 32 0.0% $1.00 $0.04

At first it might make sense to sort by cost per thousand impressions, but that’s almost totally irrelevant. If you’re used to Cost Per Click (which most of my customers are) then you need to calculate that. The best site on this list, is giving us 39 clicks for $1.21. That’s 3.1 cents per click. The cost per click for plexxa.com is 27 cents per click. The one below that comes in at 47 cents per click.

As you can see, that’s a 16:1 ratio between the best site and the worst ones. (Actually, some are zeros, which is even worse.) As the traffic develops, you will definitely end up deleting some sites from your list. Generally the ones with the worst CTR’s are going to be the first to be deleted. What you don’t see here is cost per conversion data, which is the real criteria. CTR is useful as a relative measure, but it’s cost per action or cost per sales lead or cost per sale that you want to watch out for. If you’re using Conversion Tracking, you can sort by that column too.

Writing the Copy: Low Pay, High Pay, and Procrastination

I just had John Carlton as my guest instructor in personal AdWords coaching and as John’s always fond of saying, nothing ever happens until the copy gets written. If you’re selling at a distance, this is where the rubber meets the road.

There’s an old saying in sales – I think I heard it first from Tom Hopkins – that selling is the “lowest paying easy work” and “highest paying hard work” you can do. If that’s true in person to person sales, then the same is true writing copy.

Personal confession: Whenever I’m about to write some really important copy – or execute any project that’s “really important” – I find myself fighting procrastination. It’s kind of odd. The other day I sat down to write some really really important copy, and I kept having all these impulses: Perry, you need to check your email. You need to finish some critiques. You need to get a haircut.

Huh? A haircut? I know I’m about to do something really important if, as I’m getting started, I have an urge to get a haircut of all things. I happen to need a haircut rather badly right now, but that never stopped me from putting off my haircuts before. Let it get long. Haircuts are on the top of my procrastination list, actually. They’re just so unimportant. So when executing a haircut attempts to preempt writing copy, it means there’s a demon in my head that knows how important the copy is!

I don’t know about you, but I think a lot of people avoid doing important things exactly because of this strange quirk. So I mightily suppressed the haircut urge and kept writing my copy.

When you’re new at copywriting, it can feel very unnatural. Think of it as bottled energy: If you can compress your thoughts, expressions, energy, feeling and excitement into one really good piece of hot copy, that copy can work for you for years.

But it is like sales. You don’t just walk into a prospect’s office or home and blithely say whatever you feel like saying. You listen intently. You choose your words carefully. Key parts of your presentation are carefully scripted. You have your evidence and demonstrations ready to go. You don’t just leave stuff to chance.

At some point you have to stare down that copywriting procrastination / fear demon and conquer him. It’s really pretty simple – you just lock the door, unplug the Internet connection if email or the web is a distraction – and do it.

Everybody’s got a set of conditions that are optimum, and over time you develop a ritual. For me it takes creative input like music, DVD’s or movies to get my creative juices going. Things need to be quiet and free of distractions, which means the best time is at night after everyone else has gone to bed.

I’ve got notes on points I want to get across, some headline ideas and hooks, and away I go.

Over time it starts to feel natural. A long time ago someone said, “In martial arts, a punch is just a punch. But you practice and practice, and that unnatural punch becomes natural – and it becomes an awesome punch. It only takes a split second to send the guy sailing backwards and hitting the wall with a sharp smack. Why? Because the moves are embedded in your system.

Yes, writing copy is hard work, but it’s probably the least unpleasant hard work I can think of.

I’ve got guys remodeling my kitchen right now, and that’s hard work. Hammering, drilling, sawing, cutting out drywall, carrying appliances in and out, installing cabinets and shelves – that’s real physical labor. Even harder if it’s outdoors in the heat of summer or cold of winter. Even harder if you get a nail through your foot or hurt yourself with a power tool!

Compared to all that, slugging down some espresso at 9pm and writing copy from 10pm to 3am is the easiest, highest paying hard work I know of. And it does pay a lot. I would say that the time I spend writing serious copy is worth several thousand dollars an hour.

The problem isn’t that it’s hard at all – the problem is it requires focus, and because it’s important, it wakes up the procrastinator demon. Put that demon out of his misery and just get it done.

The Missing Link in Getting Consulting Clients

Here’s where I think the missing piece is – it’s one or more of the following:

1) He’s talking to someone who can say no, but can’t say yes. That happens a LOT; it sure happened to me. He’s gotta talk to the guy who writes the checks. The form they fill in should answer that question.

2) He’s not getting to a vivid, ugly, bottom line reality of how expensive their problem is. A conversation about a potential consulting opportunity will meander aimlessly until you can clutch this problem solidly in your fingers. Imagine getting your hands around the heart of the problem so you can feel it beating in your fingers. The very first consulting gig I landed, the one that came 19 days out of the Dilbert Cube, came because I found this. I flew to Arkansas and met with the president of the company. We talked about all kinds of stuff – his products, his new product plans, how his company was structured, all the people that worked for him, but we were going nowhere until we started talking about how much it cost him, and how much effort he had to expend, to get a new customer. Turns out he would fly all over the country, talk to all kinds of people, make enthusiastic presentations, and all told a new customer cost about $50,000. Until we got to that number, and I heard it from the horse’s mouth, nothing was going to happen. After we got to that number, the problem was defined. We had agreement that this problem needed to be solved.

3) I suspect my friend isn’t proving that he can solve it for less than it costs – that the solution is less painful than the problem. In the case of my client in Arkansas, he had a $50,000 cost per customer acquisition and I told him I could get that down to $15,000. He agreed to a 2-month, $15,000 assignment because all I had to do was help him get one customer, for less than $50,000, and I’d pay for myself. He knew from my previous track record that I had the marketing skills, there was little doubt about that. Had I been an “unknown” then my job at that point would be to prove that I could do this. Prove beyond reasonable doubt that you cost a lot less than the problem – that is your challenge, that is your job.

All three of these steps are mandatory. None can be left out. You won’t do business unless you talk to the man, assign hard dollar value to the problem and make them vividly visualize those dollars slipping away, and prove you can solve it for less.

If you do all three of these things, getting new business is a slam dunk. Your Openline consultations consistently book you new business.

For my client who’s been using Openline for some time now, many prospects are not qualified.

But when they are, he proves to them, beyond reasonable doubt, that they can pay him $75,000 initially and $500,000 over a period of two years and he’ll bring them several million dollars of equity. Thepurpose of Openline, and any plan of action he gives them later, is to establish this.

If You Sell Business Consulting:One ingredient that might help, And one you MUST have

During the last month or so I’ve been coaching a business consultant who’s on the slippery edge.

He does a rather sophisticated analysis that can identify problem areas and unplug huge bottlenecks, but it’s been a roller coaster of feast and famine for him. More famine than feast.

He sells some books on his website, has an autoresponder sequence, some articles and white papers, and he’s been getting LOTS of nibbles. Plus he’s been steadily improving the results of his website. But no big hits.

One of the Catch-22’s of being a consultant is you kill yourself if you give out free advice. You kill yourself just by being easily accessible, really. So how does he bump people up from the general interest level (i.e. on his email list) to seriously discussing possible consulting sessions?

The first step of the solution: “Openline.”

I came up with this a couple years ago for another consultant. He sells a very high-end service to corporate managers, and it’s the kind of thing that requires a lot of discussion and massaging. The problem is, if he makes himself available to whoever wants to chat, he devalues himself and his $340 per hour expertise.

So he has a time slot every week – every Tuesday from 10am to 12pm – called Openline.

Openline is eight 15 minute slots that are booked by appointment only. He’s actually got this as part of his Autoresponder sequence, where 1-2 weeks after they download one of his white papers, they get an email sort of like this:

Dear [firstname],

Does your company qualify to do a share split?

Everyone wonders about that, and many people expend months of tedious effort just to come up with an answer.

So I have developed a fast-track phone consultation which will help you find out. It’s called “Share Split Open Line” and the next one is going to be on Tuesday from 10am to 12pm.

There are only 8 time slots available and they will be assigned on a first-come, first served basis. This consultation normally costs $85.00 but on Open Line days *only* it is free.

Here’s what to do: Go to www.ACME.com/openline and complete the form.

Many companies are receiving this message and there is only time for 8 appointments, so don’t wait.

I look forward to talking you on [Date]!

www.ACME.com/openline

Sincerely,

Jack Rogers

Principal

ACME Corporation

The /openline page is active, with the very next Tuesday programmed in with the proper date. In order to sign up they have to fill out a form (very important, it’s the same “clipboard intimidation strategy” your doctor uses on you). They use the form to tell you about their business. People get to talk to Jack for 15 minutes, and when 15 minutes has gone by, the call is over.

Jack’s job is pretty simple: 1) Disqualify the prospect if they’re not a fit, 2) Identify an urgent itch the prospect wants to scratch – and attach financial value to it – and 3) define a next step if the prospect agrees this problem needs to be solved.

The client I originally developed this for has used it to secure several million dollars of business; it’s a staple of their sales process now.

My struggling feast/famine business consultant implemented this and emailed his whole list with an Openline offer. He booked some consultations and had good conversations.

But then nothing. No business.

He’s very frustrated, and actually kind of scared. He has to make this work.

Earlier had I told him: Marketing campaigns succeed because what you assume to be true about your audience is true (i.e. what they want, what they fear, how they need to be talked to) and marketing campaigns fail because what you assume to be true about your audience isn’t true. In this case it has little to do with your formula for analyzing sales and all that stuff once you start working with a client, it has everything to do with hitting their felt needs, their emotions about what they’re doing, and making a promise they believe and are willing to act on.

So what is he assuming to be true that isn’t?

We’re scheduled to talk tomorrow. Here’s where I plan to go with this.

He’s getting the phone calls and the interest because he’s close to the sweet spot. But he’s not getting the orders because he’s not making a promise they believe and are willing to act on.

A New, Liberated Life

Doesn’t really sound like such a big deal, does it? It wasn’t. Yet… it was. It was a HUGE deal, because for the first time in my life, I was working on my own terms, not somebody else’s. It was a sweet new season of life for Laura and me, finally having control of our destiny.

Not being in a squirrel cage, having flexibility to do family stuff as opportunities arose; all of us being home every day; de-compressing from the corporate mold and becoming more and more our natural selves. Having long periods of productive work time instead of constant interruptions. Liberated to be creative. I’d love for everyone to be able to experience that freedom. It could only make the world a better place.

Getting Consulting Gigs with a Rock-Solid ROI Argument

To any prospective client, articles have real, tangible financial value. The argument is simple:

“Advertising in Sensors Magazine costs $5995 a page, but I can get you a two page article – 12 grand worth of space – and the article will have more credibility than an ad. Plus it stays on their website for the next few years. I’ll write and place that article for you for three grand instead of twelve, all you need to do is cooperate and give me some material to write about. And it has to be the article Sensors Magazine wants, not a thinly disguised promo for your products. And I’ll put a response mechanism in there so you collect some good sales leads. Is that a deal?”

Darn right it is! Commit to placing one article every other month for a client, along with some other things – press releases, managing Google campaigns, helping with Search Engine Optimization, writing a white paper, putting together postcard mailers, writing their e-zine – and you’ve got a recipe for replacing most of your income with a monthly retainer. You’re a real, bona fide marketing consultant.

You don’t have to show up at an office every day, and they don’t have to pay full salary with medical insurance for a guy who’s walking in their office chewing up their time every day.

With two clients like this, I was making more money than I made at my job, and it didn’t take 40 hours a week either. I could spend the rest of my time developing products, promoting myself, working my contacts.

The Power of Celebrity – Even a Little Tiny Bit of It

The fact that I had a tiny but legitimate amount of celebrity attached to my name (credibility would be a better word, actually) made me a safe bet by default instead of an unknown quantity, which is what most consultants and job applicants are. The ‘obvious expert’ as they say.

But here’s the more important thing: I had relationships with all these trade magazine editors. I could write and place articles of completely different topics too, and I figured out a formula for doing that.

(My Marketing System In A Box, www.perrymarshall.com/inabox.htm describes how this game is played, in exhaustive detail.) When I left the company, those relationships came with me. They didn’t care about my company, what mattered to them is I knew what they want from a contributor. Two of those magazines, IPPT and Sensors Magazine, put me on their editorial advisory board.

“So How Do You Write Dozens Of Magazine Articles if They’re All About The Same Thing?”

It doesn’t take genius to recognize that industrial networking is a pretty narrow, and possibly dull, topic. How do you write dozens and dozens of magazine articles about that?

Like this:

Peas porridge hot,

Peas porridge cold,

Peas porridge in the pot

Nine days old.

Some like it hot,

Some like it cold,

Some like it in the pot

Nine days old.

If all you’ve got is Peas Porridge, then you serve it up in every imaginable way possible. You serve it with bread. You serve it with pudding. You serve it with spinach salad and raspberry vinaigrette salad dressing. You serve it in great big giant bowls. You serve it in little teacups. You serve it with pasta. You serve an Atkins Diet version with buttered steak and bacon with cashews on top.

So I go to this trade show, National Manufacturing Week. My mission is to book articles with every editor of every trade magazine that I possibly can. A trade show is a great place to do that. You show them some you’ve written for other editors, you ask them about your editorial calendar, and you come up with a hook that resonates with their particular audience.

Between walking the show and holding a small press conference, I booked something like 20 or 30 magazine articles with over a dozen different editors. It averaged out to two or three a month. For the remainder of the year, you could not pick up an industrial trade magazine and not find us somewhere.

Our tiny company was starting to be the mouse that roared. We were all over the place. In a few instances, we got on the front cover.

Oh, and here’s the kicker: My name was on most of those articles. I was the author. Which made me the expert, as far as all these magazines and editors were concerned.

I’d get phone calls from my friends: “Is this the world-famous Perry?” That was always good for a chuckle, but the fact was, in my teeny tiny corner of the world, I was becoming well known. ISA, the largest publisher in that industry, approached me about writing a book on Industrial Ethernet, which was one of the hottest topics in the business. I knew I’d never make much money from the book (I think I’ve made maybe five grand from the whole thing and it was a TON of work) but it was the very first book out on the subject. It pays to be first.