28 – How to Advertise Your Business Online

Episode 028 How to Advertise Your Business Online
Episode 027 Wayne Pickering “The Mango Mango Man” this guy actually has a mango variety named after him. He’s 71 and I guarantee 20-year olds listening to this would be envious of this guys health, stamina and a beast of a body. You’ll want to hear his daily routine.
Sponsor. Kick Start Guide to Advertising Your Website Online
This is for anyone who NEEDS more traffic to their website and can’t afford to risk a ton of money. I’ve pulled out all the stops and I’m giving you all the tips, tricks, and techniques that I have fine-tuned over the years. This e-book is based on what WORKS! https://www.greatinternetmarketing.com/promoteonline.htm I’ll have it in the show notes.
Now let’s get into your training about advertising and promoting your business online.
This is going to be a brief primer to show you lots of things you could be doing with regard to advertising and promoting your business. Some of them would take a week-long training session to even get half way competent. What I want to do is let you know what you could be doing. That way you’ll be able to dig in deeper and we can either train you or you can find some credible training on the things you actually like and want to implement.
The first thing you need to know is that there are lots of places to advertise besides Google and Facebook and there are lots of ways to do it. You also need to know this is an incredibly complex topic. Just about every idea I give you today could be a multiday seminar in learning how to do the idea correctly. I will be giving you plenty of ideas to pursue. You’ve got to pick the ones you like.
If I have developed one overriding rule when it comes to advertising online when you have to pay per click or to pay per view on videos is that in the beginning of each ad you must OBSESS on it and check it every 15 minutes or so until you see how the ad is performing.
Why am I so obsessed about obsessing? One-time years ago,…I’m laughing now, but I was crying at the time…. I put an ad in Google on a Friday and got busy over the weekend. I checked it Monday and I had run up….I’m kind of blacking it out because it was so traumatic …. I don’t remember exactly something like an $8000 bill with no sales coming from the ad. That was the beginning of my obsession with obsessing over pay per click or pay per view ads.
Not all ads are pay per click or pay per view. Some are on a certain number of impressions, i.e. how many times the ad was displayed. That doesn’t mean anybody paid attention to it but it was displayed. Some run for a certain amount of time. Some run for a certain amount of time with a guaranteed minimum number of impressions. Who cares if the ad ran for a month if nobody saw it? Anyway, there are lots of ways you can run ads and you need to know about them.
Another rule I would suggest is that you stick with one way in the beginning until you master it and prove one way or the other that that ad type is working for you or it isn’t. If it is, you expand it. If it isn’t, you try a different ad type.
The good thing about paid ads is that you can turn on traffic whenever you feel like it quickly. You can test ideas and promotions quickly. Depending on search engine positioning is easy for me to teach you, but very difficult to get results. Paid ads will get you results quickly even though the results may not be what you hoped for. But it’s better to know quickly that your ad was no good rather than to wait weeks or months to find out it was no good. I call this “failing fast”.
Before I get into some techniques for paid ads, I’m going to throw you a little curve ball here, I think you’ll like. Wouldn’t it be nice to use a bunch of free and cheap methods to get traffic to your sites and promotions rather than making Google and Facebook richer? I think so. So, I’m going to show you some of the tools and ideas my companies use to get traffic. And then a little later we’ll go into paid advertising.
INCENTIVE BASED MARKETING
Incentive based marketing is nothing new. It’s been around for a few decades. It can be traced back to the early 1980’s when Airline companies began their “Frequent Flyer” programs. These programs rewarded people for their Travel. And in turn, people traveled more and became loyal to their brand.
Incentive based marketing is based on rewarding your customers for a desired behavior. When applied to online marketing, it translates into rewarding your traffic for taking the actions you want them to take. This means you can get your web traffic to do what you want. For example, opting in to your email list, downloading an e-book, watching a video, encourage referrals to your site. You can also increase fans, followers, and social buzz. Using Incentives in your marketing strategy can yield huge increases in your social sharing, drive user engagement to your posts, and increase customer loyalty too.
Here would be an example:
Let’s say you have a blog posting with a top ten list. Those of you old enough to remember David Letterman he would use top-ten lists all the time where he would count backwards and get down to the Number 1 reason late night TV sucks or whatever his list was that night.
With an inexpensive plugin called “Viral Lock” You can make your top ten list blog posting and when people get to the number one thing on your list….remember we’re counting backwards so they have seen the other nine so far and are certainly interested in what number one is. To see or “unlock” number one on the list they have to share the posting on social media. The plugin makes it easy to send it to Twitter, Facebook and other social media with a prewritten post that you have put in to make it easy for them to share….like “Hey, you gotta check out this top ten list on Tom’s website” or whatever.
This promotes your blog posting to all their friends and increase warm traffic from people that don’t even know you. It’s warm because their friend told them about you and that this was a good article. If they go over, read it and share it, guess what happens. They’re going to do the same thing by getting down to number one and then sharing it to get access. that’s what going viral is all about. Pretty cool huh?
Just make sure the first nine items give great value so people really want to find the number one thing on your list.
Examples would be: and it doesn’t have to be top ten.
“The top 10 mistakes would be professional speakers make” That might be one I would use to promote my professional speaking system.
“The 5 best gas mileage cars on the planet”
“The 14 longest lasting lipsticks”
It could be anything that suits your topic.
Another way to facilitate this is a program called Pay with a Tweet. It’s a program where you can sell a product for viral action instead of money. They have to tweet or do some other viral action to get access to a product.
Contests and Giveaways
Another great way to incentivize your traffic to take the actions you want is to run a contest. The idea is to run a contest where people have a chance to win by posting on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, opting in to your email list, referring people, and so on. There should be a deadline, such as 30 days, to create a sense of urgency.
The prize you offer should be a good fit for your audience. Avoid universal prizes like iPad because many people will join just to win the prize and they have zero interest in your products and services and will disappear as soon as the contest is over.
For instance, if I wanted more people interested in becoming professional speakers, I would offer my Wake ‘em Up Video Professional Speaking System as a Prize. Very few people who hate public speaking are going to join to try to win that prize. Most of the people that join are going to be great prospects for all my public speaking training products and services.
Contest Dominator would be one service to use for this and I’ll have a link in the show notes.
Loyalty Reward Programs
Loyalty Rewards Programs are similar to contests except they are meant to always run and never end. Users are rewarded for their actions with “points”. These points have no real value anywhere other than your store and your products and services and the point structure is completely made up by you. Once a person has collected enough reward points, they will be able to redeem them for a prize or one of your products.
The goal here is to have your website traffic earn points by buying stuff, tweeting, sharing, referring people, downloading, viewing videos, or whatever action works best for your business. People can redeem their earned points for “rewards” that you offer. For example, you can offer your e-books, videos, mp3’s, coupon codes to get discounts, etc. as prizes. Adding digital products like e-Books, audio files and videos as your prizes can help motivate your audience for a low cost.
Here’s a program that will track all the points and rewards for you. It’s called
https://squareup.com/ I’ve never used them so I can’t endorse. We’ll probably do some testing with them and give them a try.
OK. Now we can talk about paid advertising. . . Specifically PPC.
All of those ways before other than having to purchase the tracking programs don’t cost you any money. Other than giving your prizes out and again as I said, if they’re digital, so what? It’s just a few electrons you’re giving away as prizes to get a lot more people involved spreading your products, services and information virally. Alright, let’s get in to paid advertising. Specifically pay per click (PPC)
I don’t want to disappoint you but I absolutely must keep this general. By the time I get done recording this something will have changed and by the time you hear this way more things have changed. I can hardly log in to my Facebook ad area where some button that was there yesterday is not there anymore or moved somewhere else.
When you’re ready to actually advertise, you need to get some training from us or from someone competent or you may blow a ton of money on worthless ads which most uninformed people do.
I’ve already told you to obsess on ads when you first put them up. The next thing that might sound counterintuitive is that you should write your ads to try to get people NOT to click. NOT TO CLICK! Yes, I said NOT to click.
You have to pay each time someone clicks on your ad. Do you really want click happy people that will click on anything, wasting your advertising money? I don’t think so.
Sure, you could get lots of clicks by wording some ad like “Brittany Spears Sex Tape” but what percentage of those people would be interested in your let’s say Tennis product? First of all, you’d never get an ad like that approved in any of the legitimate ad companies. It has to be something that represents what you actually sell. If it’s too general, you would be paying for thousands of clicks to an audience that will never buy your product.
I know this is an extreme example, but it does tell the story.
Let me give you some examples:
Let’s say you had an e-book on “How to Tie Ties for Fly Fishing”
You could write an ad:
“Outdoorsman click here for a great deal.”
“Outdoorsman” is way too broad. Yes, people that participate in fly fishing are technically “Outdoorsmen” The other way around is not true. An outdoorsman could be a hunter, a hiker, or a bird watcher. If someone from one of those groups clicked on your ad and saw fly fishing stuff, they would immediately leave and you just paid for a click for no reason.
Let’s try another ad:
“Fishermen click here for a great deal”
This ad is better, but not great. I don’t know a lot about fishing, but I do know there are all kinds of fishermen.
Deep sea, Ice fishing, Angling and a bunch of others.
The best ad of these three would be:
Love Fly Fishing? Click Here or something like that.
You are trying to make sure the ice fishing person does not click on your fly fishing product which is the whole point of this section. To get them not to click unless they are the exact person that would be interested in your product.
The granddaddy of PPC is Google Adwords.
You now have Facebook and Bing is a good place to learn, because it has less traffic and prices will generally be a little cheaper.
Outbrain is another place you can look into if you have a more broad-based product. It’s a different type of system and I’m sure you’ve seen their ads on many high traffic sites and you could be right there within a matter of days.
Video Ads
I feel the best deal on this is YouTube. I believe YouTube is more fair in that at the time of this recording, in some of their formats for video ads your ad has to play for 30 seconds before you pay. In other places you can advertise video, sometimes it only plays for 3 seconds and you pay. That could just be somebody seeing it and it took them three seconds to stop the video and you still had to pay. So, I like YouTube for this.
Let me discuss that with you for a second. You’ve all seen those ads on YouTube that have the “Skip Button” on them, right? And also, let’s say you had a 60 second video ad. If someone clicks the skip button before 30 seconds, you don’t pay. People were still exposed to your product or service, but it cost you nothing. That’s a good deal. Most sales trainers will tell you that it takes multiple exposures before people buy. It’s darn nice when you can get those exposures for free don’t you think?
Now let’s say your ad was only 15 seconds. If people watch all 15 seconds you pay, if they click skip you don’t. So, if they play the whole thing, no matter how long it is, you have to pay.
So, I would really spend some time learning YouTube advertising. Keep in mind there is enormous amount of traffic at YouTube and many people including myself use it as a search engine before they search in Google.
FACEBOOK
Now let’s talk about Facebook. One of the main reasons Facebook is so popular with advertisers is that you can target so precisely. We kid around that you can pretty much target an ad to your neighbor across the street if you wanted to.
Another thing I’ll say about Facebook advertising. It’s INCREDIBLY complex. Yes, I know they make it easy for you to “Boost” a post, but to do Facebook and have any chance at all of success, takes training. You will most likely throw money down the drain in large quantities if you don’t get good training and as I stated before we’ll help you with it and there are other credible people who can help you with it. it changes so rapidly, you really have to be dedicated to it not only to learn it, but to keep up with the changes.
Here I just want to explain a couple of big concepts that you should concentrate on first to prepare for advertising on Facebook.
Pixels
I’m going to try to do a very simple explanation of the concept of “pixeling” your visitors.
A pixel is a little piece of code your put on your web pages . . . by the way, while you’re at it Google has a pixel code too. So, you may as well get both of the pixel codes that below to you and put them on your webpages at the same time. So, you get a geek or tech person for this, or if you’re in my program my tech guys do it for you, and you get the little piece of code from both Facebook and Google. Again, I’m trying to keep this simple so you get the big concept.
You put these little pieces of code on all your web pages. When someone visits your webpage these little pieces of code….I’ll call it….. “tag” that person. Now don’t freak out. This isn’t a violation of privacy. This is very common. This happens to you probably hundreds of times a day if you are surfing the Internet.
You have just “Pixeled” the visitor. The code does not reveal to you personal information about that visitor. Just that the visitor visited a certain page on your website. Facebook and Google keep track of all of it for you.
You don’t know who the person was, but Facebook and Google do.
By pixeling the visitors to your webpages, you are able to run ads that specifically target all the people that visited a certain web page.
I’m sure you’ve all experienced visiting a website or even searching for something Amazon and all of a sudden, ads start showing up for that product or for the website you visited. You got pixeled. Sometimes you get cookied which isn’t exactly the same and I don’t want to get into the techie world on this to confuse you. Basically, stick with pixels and you’ll be fine.
Audiences
Now let’s talk about the concept of “Audiences”. What you are doing when you pixel people that visit your site or blog post or shopping cart is building an “audience” of people that you can then target with ads.
These people have already shown interest in your product, service or topic because they visited your page.
Let’s say you sell Golf Clubs. You pixel everyone who visits your putter page and then you advertise putters to them on Facebook. You would be wasting your money if you advertised to me because I’m not interested in Golf and haven’t visited your golf page. But by advertising directly to people who visited the putter page on your site, you have an infinitely higher chance of selling them a putter and other Golf related stuff because they’ve already shown interest.
You say, “Tom, I don’t have much traffic.” I want to use ads to drive new people to my site that have never been there.
No problem. Pixeling is not the only way to use an audience. You could build an audience that has golf in their interests on Facebook. Even if they haven’t put golf in their interests if a lot of stuff on their Facebook profile is about golf, Facebook is smart enough to show your ads to those people. It knows. It’s like the Wizard of Oz. It knows all and sees all. hahaha
Of course, when you drive them to your site, ….those people that came there because they had an interest in golf on Facebook, you are pixeling them when they hit your site and then shoot ads back at them again now that they’re in your group of people who have visited your site. so, you can make even more targeted ads based on the fact they’ve already been to your site.
I don’t want to dig too deep here and confuse and scare you off of advertising. Just know that you can target people on all kinds of stuff, how much money they make, where they live, what their interests are, their gender, whether they are parents or not, their political leaning and all kinds of other ways.
Lookalike Audiences
There is another outrageously cool thing Facebook will do for you. And that’s create lookalike audiences. Well, what’s that? I almost said Lookie Lou audience hahaha
Let’s say you have a customer list. You can upload your customer list to Facebook and not only can you create an audience of customers that already know you that happen to be on Facebook you can advertise to that group of people on Facebook that already knows you …..wait till you hear this. Facebook will go out and find another couple million people that are similar to your customers and make an audience out of them who you can advertise to. I want to repeat this. You upload email subscribers, your customers, and Facebook is not going to steal them. I know they’ve had some breaches but you are relatively safe in doing this. Facebook is going to analyze your list (at least the people on the list that are on Facebook which is just about everyone) and go out and find a couple million people similar to your list and make an audience for you to advertise to.
The more you advertise, and the more results you get, the better it gets because Facebook is narrow the lookalike audience down and sharpening who that lookalike person is so they are more like your actual customers each time. They’re also getting rid of the people that aren’t really a good lookalike customer for you. So, the longer you do this, the better it gets.
You can do the same thing with your email subscriber list. This is really powerful.
Cold, Warm, Hot Audiences
Before I finish up today I want to give you a little strategy about creating ads for different types of audiences and then I’ll tell you the technique people use to get rich with advertising online. First let me describe Cold, Warm and Hot Audiences and in general what you should do differently for each.
A cold audience is one that has probably never heard of you and never visited your site. Maybe you are just running a targeted ad toward people interested in real estate investing. For an audience like this you need to get your credibility in front of them in the first few seconds of your ad. Maybe you hold up a book you’ve written or maybe you hold up a handful of rent checks or your real estate portfolio. You’ve got to get their attention right away because they don’t know you. It’s usually not a good idea to ask for too much from a cold audience. Maybe you offer a freebie where they have to opt in or maybe you don’t even ask them to opt in. You might just give them info to impress them they should know and pay attention to you.
A warm audience is one that visited one or more of your pages and has either heard of you or shown a greater interest in you or your topic because of the fact they visited your web page or pages. Remember you pixeled them when they hit your web page. This audience should recognize you, your products, services, and/or topics and should be more receptive to your message without hitting them in the face like you did for a cold audience. You could give them some good tips and make a freebie offer they have to opt in your email to get or you could make an offer to buy something. You have to split test to see what works best with that audience and I’ll cover in a minute. For a warm audience you are trying to move them closer to being customers or spending more money with you. You can’t be obnoxious about it, but you want to move them forward from where they were as a cold audience.
A hot audience is usually an audience of actual customers. These people know you and hopefully they liked what they purchased from you. You can simply make additional offers to these people, but don’t overdo it. You don’t want them to go from hot to bye bye. Keep giving them value for free in addition to offers and they’ll stay for a long time. Maybe forever.
So, pay attention to what kind of audience you are advertising to and try not to mix them. You’ll get a much better response if you keep the cold, warm and hot audiences separate when you advertise to them.
Split Testing
The last topic I’ll cover today is split testing. This is how people get rich. The highly simplified idea here is that you run two ads for the same product and see which ad sells the most. When you find the winner of those two ads, let’s say it as ad “A” and ad “B” . And let’s say ad “B” sold way more than ad “A”. So, ad “B” is the winner and you want to run another ad to try to beat ad “B”. If you beat ad “B”, let’s say with ad “C”, ad “C” is now the winner. Now you are trying to beat ad “C”. You keep doing that until you can’t get any higher response. If your response goes down, you go back to ad “B” again. If it goes up, you use the new ad. Whichever ad wins you run it along with a new ad. You keep two ads competing against each other until you can no longer beat a particular ad. If sales, keep going up, you keep split testing. If they go down, you go back to the highest selling last ad. After doing that I’ve had final winning ads that ran for many years.
The guy that taught me this had one ad that from the first version of the ad, to the final version of the ad after all the split testing, sold 19 times as much as the first ad. Which would you rather have from an ad. 1 sale or 19 sales? 2 sales or 38? 3 sales or 57? I think I know your answer.
If you have a good shopping cart system like KickStartCart.com I can teach you how to do this in about 5 minutes. Many people are too lazy to do this. They get one sales promotion up there, pat themselves on the back, and they just take whatever they get. If it doesn’t sell, they quit. If it sells a little bit, they’re all proud of themselves, but that’s only the beginning. You must split test and keep improving what we call conversion rate. I.e. if you had 100 people visit your sales page and 5 people bought, that would be a 5% conversion rate. So, you want to keep trying to beat that. Get it up to 6%, 7%, 8%, 10% or whatever you can and once you maximize it, you can usually run the ad for a long time.
There are many ways to advertise and promote your website. If you are new at this Internet game, I suggest you pick one way and get very good at it. Then when you have a handle on one method, you can add another method and get good at that one.
What I see far too often are people that want immediate results so they try to do everything at once and nothing gets done well. Fall in to that trap and your web operations are destined to failure . . . or you’re going to burn a lot of money and get really poor results.
Sponsor
If you want a more in depth look at all these methods and a lot more methods I didn’t have time to cover today, check out our very inexpensive e-book “The Kick Start Guide to Advertising and Promoting Your Business Online”
At https://www.GreatInternetMarketing.com/promoteonline.htm also in the show notes. It will really go much more in-depth on all of these methods and have links to the different programs you can get and implement. I also go a lot into video, video equipment, video ads and things like that.
That was episode 28.
Upcoming in Episode 029 is Sponsorship and collaboration expert Charmaine Hammond. Our dogs made an appearance on this episode.
Don’t miss it.
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