3 Ways To Beat Google’s Latest Cash Grab

In the last few weeks, I’ve had a bunch of people tell me there’s something "screwy" going on with their Google Adwords campaigns. My students and members of my team are telling me their keyword prices have suddenly skyrocketed, while their Quality Scores of plummeted — rendering their Adwords ads inactive for search!


Looks like the online world has been hit with another "Google Slap." And this time, it’s Adwords advertisers who are feeling the sting of the lash.  (Yaargh. It makes me think Google should change its motto from "we do no evil" to "we DO know evil!")

 If your Adwords campaigns have recently been "scroogled" (aka screwed by Google ;-), here are a few things you can do:

1. Check out Google’s new Keyword Analysis page, which is supposed to give you more information as to why you’re being penalized. You can access it via your Adwords account.

Once you’re on an ad group, click on the ‘Keywords’ tab over the "Ad Group Details" table. When you click the magnifying glass icon beside a keyword, you’ll launch the Keyword Analysis tool. It should give you some recommendations on what to do to improve the quality of your ads.

2. Try changing your content and then raising your bid to the maximum quoted – but ONLY for 24 hours or less. This will reactivate your keyword, and once that happens you can reduce it down to the lower price you were originally paying.

(I can’t guarantee this will help you at all, but one of my team members used this strategy with his campaigns and it worked for him.)

3. Do nothing — and see what happens. Okay, so this is definitely the "laissez-faire" approach — and if you rely heavily on your Adwords traffic then you might not want to risk it. But one of my team members let his campaigns sit for a week and found that his traffic restarted on its own without any intervention on his part.

Again, I can’t make any promises that this will work for you — with Google it’s always impossible to give any guarantees as to what works and what doesn’t — but if you’re not desperate for Adwords traffic, it might be worth a shot.

In the meantime, I’m hoping you can help me gauge how big this problem really is… Has Google been slapping YOUR Adwords ads around? If so, what actions have you taken to deal with the problem — and how effective have they been?

Maybe together we can decipher Google’s mysterious motives for slapping the ads that feed it!

Are your visitors being eaten by a giant black hole?

Whenever I surf on the Web, I always come across dozens of sites that are missing a VITAL ingredient to online success.

I wish I had to time to contact the owners of all these websites personally and tell them what a fatal mistake they’re making! Because the absence of this vital ingredient is like a giant, sucking black hole that is virtually guaranteeing the vast majority of their visitors are vanishing, never to be heard from again.

… What is this key element they’re missing?

An opt-in form!

An opt-in form is simply a small script-based form on your site that allows you to collect people’s names and email addresses and add them to a database, so you can send them relationship-building emails in the future.

If you don’t have an opt-in form to collect your visitors’ contact information on your site, I can guarantee you that you’re only making a small fraction of the sales you could be making!

Whenever I surf on the Web, I always come across dozens of sites that are missing a VITAL ingredient to online success.

I wish I had to time to contact the owners of all these websites personally and tell them what a fatal mistake they’re making!

Because the absence of this vital ingredient is like a giant, sucking black hole into which the vast majority of their visitors are vanishing, never to be heard from again.

An opt-in form is simply a small script-based form on your site that allows you to collect people’s names and email addresses and add them to a database, so you can send them relationship-building emails in the future.

If you don’t have an opt-in form to collect your visitors’ contact information on your site, I can guarantee that you’re only making a small fraction of the sales you could be making!

That’s because the vast majority of online shoppers DON’T make a purchase on their first visit to a web site. Most people need a minimum of 7-8 points of contact with a business before they feel comfortable enough to buy from them.

So if you don’t reach out to them and give them a compelling reason why they should give you their contact information– so you can stay in touch with them and overcome their buyer resistance — you’ll never realize your full income potential.

Here are some more reasons why it’s essential that you start building an opt-in list as soon as you possibly can…

• Your "opt-in" email list is made up of people who want to hear from you.

  They’ve visited your site, or they’ve come into your shop, and they’ve decided that they like what they see enough to give you their email address. They are actually inviting you to sell to them!

• You are giving your customers and subscribers something they’ve ASKED you for.

  When someone gives you their email address, they understand that you’ll be using it to send them information they actually want to receive - meaning your opt-in list will be highly responsive to any email promotions you run in the future.

• You are developing valuable lifetime relationships with your customers and subscribers.

  Email allows you to contact the people on your list over and over again, so you can build genuine relationships with them. There’s simply NO WAY you could do this offline without spending a fortune on printing and postage!

• Every time you send a mailing, the response is 100% measurable.

  Unlike other forms of marketing and advertising, email allows you to evaluate the success of your campaigns within just a few hours. This will save you thousands in wasted advertising dollars!

• Opt-in email marketing is effective… instantaneous… and FREE!

  This is my favorite thing about email marketing: You can contact your customers and subscribers whenever you want, with whatever offer you want, and it never costs you a single dime!

So those are the "whys"… now here are the "hows":

The key to growing your opt-in list is to convince your visitors to give you their contact information by offering an enticing free gift that’s so valuable they can’t say "no" to it.

What kind of free gift am I talking about?

Here are some ideas that have proven to be incredibly successful for us and our clients:

• An eBook on a topic that’s of interest to your visitors
• A free report full of valuable information
• A free subscription to an online newsletter that covers topics your visitors want to know more about
• A free "how-to" course, delivered as a series of emails
• Entry into a contest for a fabulous prize!

  (Just make sure that prize isn’t the product you sell… after all, who’s going to BUY a product when they have a chance to win it for free?)

It doesn’t matter if you’re currently set up to deliver email promotions or not… You should get an opt-in form on your site and start building your opt-in list NOW.

Then, once your email marketing efforts are set up and ready to go, you’ll have a large list of people you can start mailing to!

If you want to learn more about the ins and outs of email marketing, and how it can boost the profits of ANY business (online OR off) — I suggest you check out my best-selling course, Insider Secrets To Marketing Your Business on the Internet.

It will tell you exactly what you need to do start running highly lucrative email campaigns that will boost your profits by at least 50% — or more!

To learn more, visit: www.marketingtips.com/top-secrets

To your opt-in success,

Derek Gehl

Keyword hotspots

“How can you put in keywords and place them strategically when you already have your sales page developed and your website up and running? Does this mean we will have to change the wording of the sales pitch again to get the right keyword density etc?”

If your site isn’t optimized for your top-performing keywords, then it’s attracting only a fraction of the qualified visitors it should be getting. That’s why you need to put in the time necessary to rewrite your salescopy and optimize your site for your keywords.

It’ll take you some time to accomplish this… but I promise you, the payoff will be HUGE.

By placing your top-performing keywords in strategic places on your website, you tell the search engine “spiders” that those keywords describe exactly what your site is all about. And that’s what convinces the search engines to include your site in the search results for those keywords.

So… where should you put your keywords on your site?

Here are the strategic “hot spots” that are considered most important by the search engine “spiders”:

Keyword hotspot #1: Your domain name

The search engines REALLY like URLs that are saturated with keywords! Sites whose domain names include keywords will likely rank higher in the search engine results for those keywords than sites that don’t.

Brainstorm a list of URLs containing some of your hottest keywords.

Next, check if the domain name is available by entering it into www.DomainTools.com.

Did you find a keyword-rich domain that’s available? If so, you should definitely consider snapping it up! (Even if you already have another URL, you can set this new domain up to automatically forward visitors to your existing URL.)

You want to get that domain working for YOU — instead of your competitors!

Keyword hotspot #2: A well-written title tag

Your title tag is a simple piece of HTML code that’s located in the “head,” or top, of your Web page.

Within the source of your web page, it looks something like this:

<title>Insert keyword-rich site description here</title>

In your title tag, include a descriptive, accurate bit of text that describes your business clearly, letting potential visitors know EXACTLY what they can expect to find on your site.

For example, if “discount yoga mats” is your main keyword phrase, then in your title tags you could write something like:

<title>Discount yoga mats - Great selection of discount yoga mats for all yoga levels and all types of yoga</title>

As you can see, your main keyword phrase “Discount yoga mats” is in there twice, and the word “yoga” is used a number of times.

Keyword hotspot #3: Your headline tags

A headline tag (or <h> tag) is like a brightly colored post-it note within your HTML source code that alerts search engine spiders to your headline and subheads - places that contain important information, according to the search engines.

HTML <h> tags look like this:

<h1>, <h2>, <h3>

As you can see, they always contain a number, since the search engine spiders view them in order of importance - an <h1> tag is more important to note than an <h2> tag, for example.

Framed around a headline, an <h> tag looks like this within your source code:

<h1>Looking for a great selection of discount yoga supplies for all yoga levels and all types of yoga?</h1>

You should use an <h1> only once around your main headline, and <h2> tags around your subhead, like so:

<h1>Looking for a great selection of discount yoga supplies for all yoga levels and all types of yoga?</h1>

<h2>We’ve got the best quality yoga mats, yoga videos, and yoga gear at the deepest discounts!</h2>

(Notice how we included more “yoga” keywords in the subhead? This is another keyword hotspot opportunity you shouldn’t pass up!)

Keyword hotspot #4: Your image tags

The only thing search engine spiders can “digest” as they crawl your web page is text. Spiders can’t index images so they skip right over them. But by placing keywords within the source code of your images, you can transform them into spider bait!

Here’s an example of what a regular image looks like in your source code:

<img src=”myimage.jpg” height=”120″ width=”476″>

As you can see, this piece of HTML code identifies the location of the image - “myimage.jpg” - to ensure it gets loaded to your web page.

But by adding an <alt> tag, which is simply a place to insert text within this image HTML code, you can add more of your keywords to your web page, like this:

<img src=”myimage.jpg” alt=”Blowing Bubbles Bubble Gum Factory - homemade bubble gum - bubble gum kits” height=”120″ width=”476″>

So instead of finding boring old source code attached to your image, the search engine spiders will find more keywords to index!

Keyword hotspot #5: Your description “meta tags”

A description meta tag describes the purpose of your web page and ideally sits just below the title tag in the source code of your web site.

Description meta tags look like this:

<meta name=”description” content=”Blowing Bubbles Bubble Gum Factory: your one-stop homemade bubble gum kit source offering entertainment for the whole family!”>

The text you include in your description tag usually appears as the blurb that’s included in your listing in the search results. This blurb gives searchers an idea of what your site is about before they click through to it.

However, not all search engines use your description meta tag to summarize your site - some will generate a random description from your web page content!

Even still, it’s worthwhile to include the tag in your source code for the ones that do feature it in the listing.

Keyword hotspot #6: Your keyword “meta tags”

A keyword meta tag usually sits right under your description meta tag. At one time the keyword meta tag was essential for letting the search engine spiders know the keywords a web page was optimized for.

Keyword meta tags look like this:

<meta name=”keyword” content=”homemade bubble gum kits, make your own bubble gum, making bubble gum”>

Here are a few guidelines for writing spider-friendly keyword meta tags:

• List the 2-3 keywords you’re optimizing that particular page for in order of importance, with your main keywords appearing first.
• Separate keywords with a space comma or space, but avoid words like “and,” “or,” and “but” which take up room and are ignored by the spiders anyway.
• Don’t overdo it on your keywords. If search engines think you are “keyword spamming,” you run the risk of being penalized.

And last, but certainly NOT least…

Keyword hotspot #7: Your salescopy

In the search engine’s eyes, your web page content is a VERY important element of your web site.

… This because search engine spiders “crawl” through your site looking for text that tells them how to categorize your material.

The spiders also check how relevant your site is to certain search terms, so you’ll want to be sure to pepper your top-performing keywords strategically throughout your salescopy.

The optimal spots to put keywords on your web pages are:

• At least once in your first paragraph of content (two or three times, if possible)
• At least once in your last paragraph of content (again, two or three times would be better)
• A few more mentions in the body of your content if you can get away with it

In addition to your main keywords, you should also use slight variations and synonyms of them.

For example, if your keyword phrase is “legitimate home business opportunity,” be sure to include similar phrases, such as “legitimate home business opportunities,” “legitimate business opportunity,” and “work-at-home business opportunity.” Not only will your content read better, the search engines will love it!

… Finally, I just want to point out that you should only try to optimize each page of your website for 2-3 keywords MAXIMUM. (That includes your main keyword and one or two secondary keywords.) You simply won’t be able to do an effective job if you try to optimize your site for too many different keywords at once.

(However, you CAN optimize each page of your site for 2-3 different keywords — and I highly recommend you do exactly that! But that’s a topic for a different newsletter…)

It will take some time and effort on your part… but the resulting flood of qualified traffic you’ll get from the free search engines will be well worth it!

Seven deadly web design sins

(Make sure YOUR site isn’t committing any of them!)

Whenever I go surfing on the Web, I’m always afraid of what I’ll find…

… Because I come across so many sites suffering from DEADLY design sins, I want to stab out my eyes with a pen!

Think I’m being dramatic? Maybe just a bit… but these fatal errors are guaranteed to be killing the sites’ conversion rates — and I just want to grab the site owners by the shoulder and tell them, "It doesn’t have to BE this way!!!"

So today, I’d like to tell YOU about the top "seven deadly design sins" — so you can make sure you’re not committing any of them on your website. (Because any one of them could be pulling your potential sales right into the gutter!)

Here they are…

Deadly design sin #1: No eye-catching headline to grab your visitors’ attention

It takes average web surfer 10 seconds MAXIMUM to decide whether to stick around on a site or move on to another one. You have to make those 10 seconds count!

You have to capture your visitors’ attention RIGHT AWAY and convince them your site has exactly what they’re looking for.

And the best way to do that is with a well-formatted, attention-grabbing headline that’s packed with intriguing benefits and compels them to read further.

Here’s an example of one that’s NOT:

Welcome to my diet site! I sell over 50 different weight loss products, from pills, to nutritional supplements, to popular weight loss books. Feel free to browse through my selection and find the product that’s right for you.

Here’s an example of a well-formatted, benefit-laden headline…

… See the difference?

Above and beyond the lack of formatting, there are no benefits listed in the second example at all. It talks about what the site sells, but not about what these products will DO for the people who buy them.

Plus, by telling visitors they have to browse the site to find what they’re looking for, you’re putting all the hard work on THEM. Your copy should lead visitors straight to the solution they’re looking for — not make them have to hunt for it.

Deadly design sin #2: Distracting banners and links!

On your site, don’t put up banners or links that send people to someone else’s site! (And that includes Google Adwords ads.)

You want to keep people on your site — not drive them somewhere else!

Everything on your site should directly relate to its ultimate PURPOSE — whether it’s to get more opt-ins for your email list or to sell your product! Anything on your site that doesn’t serve this main purpose should be immediately deleted.

Of course, if the purpose of your site is purely to promote affiliate products or sell advertising space, then obviously you’ll want to include banners or links… but otherwise, you shouldn’t have them on your homepage at all.

If you try to promote affiliate products on a page that’s also meant to sell a specific product, you’ll end up doing a lousy job of both.

Deadly design sin #3: Too many dizzying colors or fonts

Nothing screams "amateur!" louder than a dizzying mishmash of different fonts and colors.

To make your site look professional, use a basic color scheme with just 2-3 colors maximum and a couple of fonts only. Look at any well-designed site and you’ll see that they’re pretty conservative about the colors and fonts they use.

(Remember, you want to make it as easy as possible for your visitors to read the words on your page!)

Deadly design sin #4: Patterned backgrounds

Make sure your background stays in the background!

If you add textures or use dark backgrounds on your site, people won’t easily be able to read your copy. And if you aren’t making it easy for them to read your copy, you aren’t making it easy for them to buy your product!

Tests have shown over and over and over again that the highest conversion rates are seen on sites that have BLACK text on a plain white background, with colors limited to the margins.

It might seem "boring" from a design perspective… but better sales are pretty darned exciting from an income perspective!

Deadly design sin #5: Too many distracting graphics, animations, or video clips

Many website owners make the mistake of thinking that having LOTS of images, fancy graphics, animated gifs, or video clips will make their site more interesting.

Ehhh… wrong.

Unless those visual elements help persuade people to buy your product — by showing visitors what your product looks like, or demonstrating how it works, for example — then they’re useless decorations that will distract your visitors and prevent them from following through on the action you want them to take.

Deadly design sin #6: Slow-loading pages and graphics

How long does it take for your homepage to load? If your answer is longer than, say, 3 seconds, you’ve got trouble on your hands!

Remember the 10-second rule… if your homepage doesn’t load quickly, your visitors will lose patience and click away. Web surfers are extremely impatient people. If they can’t begin reading or viewing your page right away, they’re going to leave and go to another, more user-friendly site.

If you absolutely MUST use large graphics on your homepage, provide a small icon that links to the larger graphic and warn people they may have to wait as it loads.

Here are a few things you can do to speed up your loading time:

• Reduce the file size of the graphics on your page. A great tool to use for this is WebGraphics Optimizer (www.WebOpt.com)
• Specify the dimensions of your graphics files in your HTML code, with a tag that looks like this:

  <IMG SRC="graphic1.jpg"height-"240"Width-"65">

• Substitute colored text for a graphics file whenever possible

And last but not least…

Deadly design sin #7: Huge blocks of text that are nearly impossible to read

Here’s a question for you… Which of the following text samples do you find easier to read?

Sample #1:

Are you sick of trying diet after diet and painfully denying yourself all your favorite foods but never seeing any lasting results? Or joining the latest supposedly "healthy" eating craze, only to discover a few months down the road that most health experts say that following that eating plan is actually BAD for you? I know exactly how you feel. For decades I was a "yo-yo" dieter. I would try out the latest celebrity diet trend and lose maybe 5 - 15 pounds, but then gain it all back as soon as I started eating "normally" again. In fact, usually I’d end up gaining even more weight, which is why I got on the scales one day and discovered to my horror that I now weighed over 200 pounds, not exactly a healthy weight for someone who’s only 5′ 2"! In my desperation to get back to a "normal" weight, I tried every single diet plan I could. I ate nothing but pre-packaged calorie-reduced diet meals. I took pills. I drank diet shakes for breakfast and lunch, and forced myself to ignore my growling stomach all day long. And yet time and time again, I broke under the strain of self-denial and ended up "cheating." I can’t tell you how many nights I’d cave to my cravings and end up gorging on bags of chips, tubs of ice cream, and entire pans of brownies. And then I’d wake up the next day, absolutely sick with self-hatred. Well, I’m happy to tell you that those days are now over for good! Because FINALLY I discovered a healthy approach to food that allows me to eat my fill and walk away from the table feeling satisfied, and stay at my "ideal" weight of 125 lbs, which I’ve been able to maintain for over two years and counting!

Sample #2:

Are you sick of trying diet after diet — and painfully denying yourself all your favorite foods — but never seeing any lasting results?

Or joining the latest supposedly "healthy" eating craze, only to discover a few months down the road that most health experts say that following that eating plan is actually BAD for you?

I know exactly how you feel…

… For decades I was a "yo-yo" dieter. I would try out the latest celebrity diet trend and lose maybe 5 - 15 pounds, but then gain it all back as soon as I started eating "normally" again.

In fact, usually I’d end up gaining even more weigh — which is why I got on the scales one day and discovered to my horror that I now weighed over 200 pounds.

Not exactly a healthy weight for someone who’s only 5′ 2"!

In my desperation to get back to a "normal" weight, I tried every single diet plan I could. I ate nothing but pre-packaged calorie-reduced diet meals… I took pills… I drank diet shakes for breakfast and lunch, and forced myself to ignore my growling stomach all day long.

And yet time and time again, I broke under the strain of self-denial and ended up "cheating." I can’t tell you how many nights I’d cave to my cravings and end up gorging on bags of chips, tubs of ice cream, and entire pans of brownies.

And then I’d wake up the next day, absolutely sick with self-hatred.

Well, I’m happy to tell you that those days are now over for good! Because FINALLY I discovered a healthy approach to food that allows me to eat my fill and walk away from the table feeling satisfied, and stay at my "ideal" weight of 125 lbs — which I’ve been able to maintain for over two years and counting!

When writing for the Web, you should limit your paragraphs to six lines maximum. And make sure you vary your paragraph lengths so they don’t all look the same! A "choppy" paragraph structure makes online text MUCH easier to read.

And if you want your visitors to read all the way to your "order" button, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to do so!

… So there’s my list of the "seven deadly design sins" that all serious website owners absolutely MUST avoid if they want their sites to do a good job of converting casual visitors into eager customers. If you’re committing one of these fatal errors, make sure you start working on getting it changed today!

What’s the best thing to sell online?

Every week, I get dozens of emails asking me the exact same question: "Derek, help! What should I sell online?"

Now, I’m not going to tell you exactly what product you should sell to make great money on the Internet.

(After all, if I told the thousands of you who read this blog to start selling "Product X," then you’d be facing quite a lot of competition, wouldn’t you???)

But what I will do is tell you exactly what TYPE of product you should be selling, if you want to reap the greatest profits from all your online efforts.

And that type of product is…?

INFORMATION.

Yes, you read that right. Information is by far the most profitable kind of product you can sell online.

Why? Think about it for a moment… What do the vast majority of Internet users go online to search for?

That’s right. Information. Which means that by selling highly sought-after information on your website, you’re giving people exactly what they’re looking for!

And that’s a recipe for online success.

Here are some more reasons why information is the best type of product to sell on the Internet…

When you sell "hard" products that require physical delivery, you have to deal with the cost and hassle of manufacturing, stocking, and packaging — not to mention shipping your product. And all those things take a serious bite out of your profit margin.

However, when you sell information — in the form of an electronic "eBook," for example — once you’ve created your master copy, you can make countless duplications of it, at NO additional cost. Your manufacturing, stocking, and packaging expenses are non-existent!

And because you can deliver your electronic eBook instantly to your customers, your shipping costs are zero, as well.

That means your profit margin is 100%!

Your customers will be especially attracted by the promise of instant gratification. They won’t have to wait days (or even weeks!) for their product to arrive — it’ll get downloaded to their desktop in just a minute or two, which means they can start accessing that information right away.

And once your website is up and running, you can automate your entire business so it takes just an hour or two a week to run! You can set up your order form and "shopping cart" system to automatically process the order, put the money in your bank account, and electronically deliver your product to the customer. It’s the perfect "hands-free" business!

… And you don’t even have to be a writer!

To create a best-selling eBook, you don’t even have to be a professional writer! You can hire someone else to do the writing for you. Simply tell them what topics you want your eBook to cover, and then let them go to it.

(A great place to hire writers who won’t charge you an arm and a leg is www.elance.com.)

Or, if you’re just starting out and don’t have any extra money to invest in product development, you could create an "interview compilation" book. All you have to do is interview various leaders in your industry then type up the interviews and put them all together in your eBook.

For example, if you want to sell a book on how to house-train a puppy, interview three or four well-known dog trainers in your area. Then type up the transcripts of the interviews and put them together in an eBook.

You could even consider compiling articles written by other people that focus on a particular topic of interest to your customers. Maybe there are already a bunch of articles online that talk in detail about the different ways to house-train a puppy.

All you have to do is get permission from the original authors to reuse their content, put all the articles together into an eBook, and ta-da! You’ve got a product on your hands.

How do you get permission from the authors?

Simply explain to them that your eBook will provide great publicity for them and let them know you are planning to widely distribute the final product. Make sure they understand they’ll receive full credit for their work and that their contact information will be made available to readers (along with mention of other products and services they might offer).

Once you have compiled all of the contributors’ work, you should have a highly valuable publication on your hands. And you didn’t have to write any of it yourself!

The FASTEST way to be making good money online.

You can write a profit-generating eBook — and build the site to sell it — in as little as 2-3 weeks. There’s no faster way to make a solid income selling your very own product online.

And once your site is up and running, you can get feedback from your visitors and customers and start testing new ways to sell to them, so you can perfect your product and your sales process so it’s making maximum profits in the minimum amount of time.

But that’s not all… Once your eBook business is truly booming, you can start adding more products on to the back end, which you can then sell to your customers and boost your profits still higher!

So that’s my best possible answer to the never-ending question of, "What do I sell online?"

If you have ever experienced any challenges — or successes! — setting up a site that sells an eBook, please leave me a comment and tell me about them.

I’m eager to hear your stories…

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