Did you know you can use Pay Per Click to upsell your clients on your product lines? It’s not bait and switch if you do it the right way. Let’s say you have a Super-Duper Widget that you just have to get out to market, but customers are still hot on your old Widget style. Obviously, widget is your keyword and the product that you are marketing. So let’s play it up.

You write your keyword-optimized ad and send ad clickers to a landing page optimized for the popular Widget that your company sells. There are three ways that you can upsell them to your Super-Duper Widget, the new and improved version. Here are four ways to upsell from your Widget landing page:

• After discussing the benefits of Widget, include a link to the new Super-Duper Widget, which will take clickers to a new landing page
• After the buyer clicks on “Pay Now” for the Widget, ask them if they want to learn about the new and improved Super-Duper Widget and give them a link to click on for more information - they can opt to buy that one instead of the Widget
• Redirect clickers to the Super-Duper Widget landing page instead with a message at the top of the page that says something to the effect, “I know you wanted to see the Widget but I thought you might like the Super-Duper Widget instead; if not, click here” and you can send them to the Widget landing page with one click
• Send your buyer to the Widget landing page, but include a pop-up for the Super-Duper Widget with a way to close the box if the clicker isn’t interested

Which of these ways is best? It depends. This is where you have to know your customers. Some marketers swear by pop-ups, but some don’t like them. It’s up to you. Any of these ways of upselling can be used and different marketers have tried them all to varying degrees of success. Any way you look at it, however, you can use Pay Per Click to upsell your customers to the latest product offerings your company has.

We saw this coming. Google AdWords Pay Per Click has now added landing page loading time to its quality score analysis. You can also see how that is affecting your AdWords campaigns in the keyword analysis page within your account. That’s good because it means that advertisers won’t be operating in the blind. It will allow you to tweak your landing page so that you can actually improve your landing page’s load time more easily.

What this really means for advertisers is you have the opportunity to beat your competition not only on relevant information and keywords, but on quality landing page optimization and less code bloat. Because items like Flash, lots of Javascript, and other heavy-code elements on the page tend to slow down load time, you can work on improving your landing page and see the results of that improvement in your Google AdWords Pay Per Click account.

Load time grades are based on landing page as well as keyword so you’ll have to look at it from both angles. And domains that have multiple landing pages will each be graded on all the landing pages on that particular domain. So you have multiple chances of getting right. You can learn more about landing page load time in the AdWords Help Center.

(Source) For example, people searching with terms like “prom dress” usually want to be able to browse a variety of styles and colors, and may not click on an ad that promotes a “red floor-length strapless prom dress.”

I don’t agree with that statement at all. Most searchers in 2008 still don’t know how to conduct a search properly. But I do agree with the principle that this statement is being used to back up. You do want your PPC ads to point to a page that is geared toward selling the specific item your ad mentions. It’s more about keywords and optimization best practices than anything.

Let’s take that prom dress example again. Suppose you have a web page that is beautifully written and ready to take order for corsages. You don’t really want to write an ad that attempts to draw traffic from people looking for long evening gowns. You want your own to be optimized for the keyword “corsage”. Otherwise, why advertise?

If you are just looking for general traffic related to prom dresses and such then by all means write your ad toward that mindset and send the traffic to a general web page related to prom dresses. It could be your catalog to allow browsers the opportunity to find the dress they want. But the bottom line is keyword optimization. Without it, you are shooting yourself in the PPC foot. And that hurts.

Internet marketing has branched off into a wide variety of specialties. Among them are pay per click, social media marketing, search marketing, SEO, display (banner) advertising, video marketing, article marketing, viral marketing, etc. etc. But do these marketing efforts have anything to do with each other? Can you use them to compliment each other? Absolutely.

In fact, that’s precisely what you should be doing. pay per click advertising allows you to reach your target market through inexpensive advertising that you pay for AFTER you reach the market. It’s a post-pay system as opposed to pre-pay, which is what many offline marketing efforts are. Many online marketing methods don’t require any pay at all. So how should they work together?

Effective online marketing is centered around driving targeted traffic to one page that makes an offer. Whether that offer is a free download, a newsletter subscription, a product for sale, or something else, it must a focused effort and measurable. The beauty of online marketing is that you can drive traffic to one page, close the sale, and pay for an action based on its value to the end goal. PPC does that well.

When you set up your marketing campaign, it’s important to use a squeeze page, or landing page. Then you can use both free marketing methods as well as pay per click methods to drive traffic to that page. When you do that successfully, you’ll reach some members of your market through social marketing, other members through pay per click, some through SEO, and still others through article marketing or other methods. The common element is a well-optimized landing page.

When it comes to optimizing your website for PPC, you need to pay attention to certain factors and get your website ready for taking orders. As the Google Analytics Blog notes, the difference between website optimization and search engine optimization is that website optimization is focused on preparing your website for sales while SEO is about achieving high rankings. Note that difference. It’s important.

The first step to website optization is to know your customers. What are they looking for? Have you analyzed your traffic patterns to see where they go and how long they stay there? You need to. And you need to know why they leave.

Don’t spend time on useless activity. If you have a page that gets 100 visitors per month and another that receives 10,000 visitors per month, you need to focus on the high traffic web page. Where are visitors going on that page, and why? When are they leaving? Are they buying what you have to offer?

In a word, know which page on your sites are high value and get the traffic. After you’ve determined that, set some goals for that page. What do you want it to do? After a little goal setting, you are then ready to start driving targeted traffic and to get it ready for converting sales. You need to establish your sales funnel. How do you see the sales process working?

Get the answers to these important questions then begin your testing. You’ll need to test different elements on those high value pages to see which ones work best. As you do your testing, note what visitors respond to the most and give them what they what.

Website optimization is a long process. Don’t expect it to take place overnight. It is very important and should not be left out. If you do your website optimization correctly, you should see real results as you develop your website more.

Is your landing page loaded with free Pay Per Click offers? Are you closing sales?

There have been some internet marketers lately saying that free offers are just giving away information and that this doesn’t lead to sells. I think it does. It just depends on how you do it. But even more importantly, should you pay good money on Pay Per Click advertising to drive traffic to your landing page just to give away free information?

Again, some people would say no. But if the offer is right, you can do it. The real benefit you get is a list that can prove to be valuable over time. By getting names and e-mail addresses, you have a list that you can market your products to over the long term. Just think about what it might cost you if you don’t build that list of 1,000 names. It will cost you future sales.

But spend $10 in clicks for every name you acquire and that $10,000 list could turn into huge profits long term. Let’s say you can turn that 1,000 names into a 10% conversion for every future product you offer. That 100 sales at $10, $20, or $100, whatever your products sell for. Even a low end product, say $10, can make you money. Ten products and you’ve made your money back. 1 product at $100 will break you even quicker. The power, and the money, is in the list.

That’s why I say free offers still make you money. You don’t want to give away everything you know. But you do want to give away what you can to get that list. Then market to that list like crazy.

So you’ve set up your pay per click campaign and you’re all set to go. How can you ensure that potential customers get the click?

One thing you want to consider is that you don’t just want anyone and everyone clicking on your ad. You’ll be paying for traffic that isn’t converting. So you want to ensure that so many customers don’t click on your as well. How do you do that?

The surest way to target a particular customer that you want to click on your ads versus someone you don’t is to target the right keyword. Make sure that the keywords you are targeting in your ads correspond with what is on your landing page and, even more importantly, make sure the keywords you are using on your landing page and your pay per click ads correspond with what you are selling.

For example, if you are selling tube socks, you don’t want to target the more general keyword “socks” as your primary keyword. Tube socks are much more specific that simply “socks.” Make sure that you narrow your targeted keywords to the right keyword for each of your campaigns. Match types will help you do this a lot. Learn how to target the right keywords with match types.

Another thing you have to pay attention to in order to reach the right customer is to write your headline in such a way that it encourages the click. You want your keyword in the headline, but you also want to spark some level of curiosity, fear, greed, or one of the basic human emotions. Use trigger words that get people to notice your ad.

The last thing to do in your pay per click ad to ensure you get the click to write a description that is specific, narrowed, and, like the headline, sparks an emotion. Your description must state precisely what your customer expect to find on your landing page. You should include a benefit in that description using a trigger word that sparks one of the basic emotions.

If you do these things in your pay per click, you’ll target the right customer and get the click - every time.

It’s important to understand the difference between your display URL and your destination URL in your pay per click ads. Your display URL is the URL that searchers see when they encounter your add. Usually, the best URL to use for your display URL is your index page or website home page. But that isn’t a requirement. You might use a subdomain URL or a particular URL if you so choose, but if you have a long URL with a long string of special characters, I wouldn’t use that for a display URL. Google AdWords limits your display URL to only 35 characters so you are a bit limited in what you can use anyway. Other search engines have similar policies.

Your destination URL can be longer and you can use special tracking codes or special characters in that URL. For instance, if your landing page is a page within your website and you have a tracking code then you can make that your destination URL while your home page is your display URL.

There are some limitations to the display URL-destination URL combination. They have to be on the same website, for one thing. In other words, your display URL can’t be at www.mydomain.com and your destination URL at www.thisdomaininstead. You can’t use redirects and bridges either. No cloaking. Those are considered blackhat techniques and could get you banned from the pay per click search engines.

When it comes to the combination of display URL and destination URL, you want the visitors to your landing page to trust you so don’t give them any reason not to.

Should you use pay per click to drive traffic to your opt-in page even though you get no immediate return on investment?

This might seem like a waste of money, but you can actually sustain long-term income by paying for traffic that you get no immediate return from. It’s called list building.

It’s a long known truth that the value of an e-mail list in the list itself. For that reason, many marketers are not at all uneasy with spending money to acquire names and e-mail addresses. While you can purchase or rent a list, it is far better to pay for the names you acquire through pay per click ads than it is by using other paid methods.

No matter what you pay for your clicks, for every new subscriber you get to your opt-in newsletter or e-zine, that’s a name you can market your products and services to over and over again. All you need to do is offer a freebie to get them to join your list. Then you can market to those subscribers over and over again. But to do that effectively, you’ve got to add numbers to your list. You’ve got to get subscribers. Pay per click advertising is one way to drive traffic to your opt-in landing page so that you can start building that list.

I had a friend of mine ask me recently if I’d ever use pay per click advertising to drive traffic to a social networking profile. I’ve thought about it a bit and I can’t see any reason why I’d do that. Social networking is not the stopping point, in my mind. It’s an avenue that leads to a boulevard through an alley connection.

Here’s what I mean: Pick any social networking site (LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo). How many of them actually allow you to sell your products or services at their sites? Before you answer, consider whether or not you take payment through those sites. If you don’t take payment then your selling through those sites. You are using those sites to drive traffic to the place where you are selling. In that case, if you use pay per click to drive traffic to a site that you are also using to drive traffic with then you are really just “filtering” your traffic and probably losing sales.

Whatever method you use to drive traffic to your sales page should not be filtered by any additional steps. That includes pay per click, social networking sites, e-mail newsletters, blogs, etc. Use your tools to drive traffic directly to your sales page because how ever much traffic you send will ultimately taper off if that traffic has to go through another door or window. If you send 100 visitors, for instance, to your Facebook profile using pay per click, a good portion of them will never go beyond that profile page - most of them, in fact. You could be losing a good 80% of that traffic to thin air. The 20% that does decide to move on to your sales page will then be filtered again as most traffic that lands on your sales page will not convert. Count on losing another 80%-90% of that traffic as well.

Whenever I’m running a pay per click campaign, I send traffic directly to my sales page - that is, the page where I will close the sale, take the order, collect payment, and send my “Thank You” message. Anything else means I’m throwing good money out the window.

Do you have an affiliate program you’d like to promote through pay per click? There are two really powerful ways you can drive traffic to your affiliate promotions page with pay per click. Here they are in a nutshell:

Affiliate Landing Page - You have a landing page dedicated just to that one affiliate program, right? You should and you should optimize that landing page around one single product or idea. Don’t optimize it around the company name. Most people aren’t search for a company. They’re searching for a product. So optimize your landing page around keywords related to that product. Write your pay per click ad around the same keyword concept and drive traffic to that landing page.

Company’s Product Page - You don’t need a website for this technique, but you do need your affiliate code. Instead of sending traffic to your own website, drive traffic to the website of the company itself. If they company has a good web page that will close sells, find out what keywords it is optimized for. You can do this through services like Secret Page Spy and other research tools that will analyze web pages. Once you get the list of keywords, write your pay per click ad and in the destination URL you’ll put the company’s landing page URL there for the product you are trying to promote, PLUS you’ll add your affiliate code so that you can get credit when someone clicks on it. In the display URL, just put the company’s home page. Whenever someone clicks your pay per click ad and buys the product, you’ll get a commission.

Kevin Gold makes a convincing case for making sure that readers who click on your pay per click ads know exactly what they are heading over to see on your landing page. Of course, he says outright - and I believe him - that some users will not read the landing page but just go straight to the offer. I was quite surprised, actually, to read what he said about it:

People will completing the form, completely ignoring the extremely clear call-to-action, copy, images and other qualifying elements and telling their stories why my client should give an extreme home makeover! Nothing - and I seriously mean “nothing” ever indicated a thing about giving away or signing up for the show!

In Gold’s example, his call to action had nothing to do with an offer to be on a show. It was clearly selling a product “as seen on the show.” Yet, people still e-mailed or filled out the contact form asking to be on the show. His company had nothing to do with the scheduling of the show. I believe this indicates that people don’t actually read the information on your pages. Some people will go straight to the offer.

If you sell a product or service online and expect people to click on a buy button, put at least two buy buttons on your page. Put one at the bottom of the landing page for the people who will read everything and put one at the top for the people who will read nothing. If your landing page is a long sales letter, put a buy button (or two) somewhere in the middle of the page for the people who will read some of the sales page, but don’t need it all. That way, you make it easy for people to buy your product no matter how much they read.

Pay Per Click Journal would like to thank you for your continued readership. We will not be posting tomorrow or on New Year’s Day. But we would like to take a look back over the last three months of our life and highlight some of the more popular blog posts we’ve made since October.

Our first blog post was made on October 13. Since then, we’ve published 76 posts. These are 10 of our favorite:

• Who’s Going To Manage Your Pay Per Click?
• Google AdWords Vs. Microsoft AdCenter
• Microsoft AdCenter Upgrades And New Features
• Keyword Match Types: When Is Narrow Too Narrow?
• Yahoo! Search Marketing Quality Index
• Landing Page Optimization Is Of Supreme Importance
• PPC Bidding: How To Aim For Position No. 3
• Google Analytics Gets An Upgrade
• Landing Page Basics: Is Too Much Enough?
• Microsoft AdCenter Offers Free Pay Per Click Training

We hope you’ll check out these Pay Per Click Journal posts from the past three months. Meanwhile, if you have a favorite post about pay per click advertising, we’d like to know about it.

Do you pay attention to your bounce rate? You should because it could be giving you clues about the effectiveness of your pay per click campaign or your landing page. Here are some things that a high bounce rate might be telling you:

• Your landing page isn’t attractive - Ugly sites can sell, but if you have a high number of visitors jumping into your site then leaving quickly, it could mean that the elements on your landing page are clashing. You might want to rethink your page design.
• Your pay per click ad is misleading - If users click your ad to find one thing then land on your landing page to find something else then they will back out in a hurry. Don’t mislead in your ad. You’ll be paying for clicks that will never convert.
• Your music is horrendous - There are very few good reasons for putting music on your landing page. Don’t force your users to listen. Instead, give them an option by asking them to click a button if they want to hear that Guns N Roses tune.
• Your page loads this too slow - Slow loading pages are a killer. People will not wait. If your landing page is loaded with Flash and other pages with a lot of information to load then you are killing your profits.
• People aren’t looking for what you have to offer - Sometimes it really isn’t your fault. Maybe your PPC ad isn’t misleading, but when clickers land on your landing page they aren’t finding what they thought they would find. If that’s the case then you might want to reconsider your keywords.
• Or maybe it is your keywords - Of course, you may just be using the wrong set of keywords for your marketing campaign.

As you can see, there are any number of reasons why you may have a high bounce rate. It is usually not for any one reason alone. It could be a combination of these reasons. Isolate the problem by fixing one thing then restarting your campaign. Sometimes you can watch your bounce rate gradually decline by tweaking your ad, your landing page, your keywords, and other elements one at a time.

(Source) The question you need to ask is why would you want to inundate a ready to buy customer with info that he could find elsewhere and with ease? Even if you consider a prospect who’s interested in details and that the techno part of you gadget is the latest, wouldn’t such a customer want to get the details from a knowledge based site, or he might have already found out all the info beforehand.

This is an often overlooked aspect of a landing page. I still see these long sales letters all over the Internet. Perhaps some of them are selling, but my guess is that many of them are just full of fluff. People somehow think that if they include every bit of information possible on a landing page then they are more likely to close the sale. Actually, the opposite is true. People don’t want to read long stretches of text that say nothing other than “buy me, buy me.”

Instead, focus your landing page on providing only the information that is necessary to close the sale, but keep in mind that not everyone who lands on your landing page is ready to buy. You’ll have people who are interested in the product and they’re only looking for information, but they’re not ready to buy yet. Provide a resource page for them so they can get more information when possible. But make your sales landing page be all about closing the sale for the people who are ready to buy. And make it easy for them to make the purchase that they are salivating to make.