One thing that I am often asked by my clients is how they can increase the number of leads coming into their business.  No matter what your industry, I hope that you realize that new leads or customers are the path to growing your business.  This does NOT mean that you should ignore your current customers by any means, instead it simply means that if you were to not generate any NEW business, you would eventually either be OUT of business (as your current customers move on, or leave you) or at the minimum your business would remain stagnant or in decline.

So here are four quick ways to increase your business right NOW online using my favorite method, pay per click (Online Marketing, Paid Search, etc).  Please note that these will get customers to your site, it is still up to you to convert them once they arrive!

1.  Create Ads for your Pay Per Click Campaign with your Telephone Number

I started doing this with our Real Estate Investing business by simply recreating the Bandit Signs that K had made.  I ran several different versions, including the standard “We Buy Houses” but below is a sample of my number one Ad.  The great thing about this format is often we get phone calls from new leads that never even click through to our site…they simply call the number!

2.  The Rule of 3 Plus

The Rule of 3 Plus is simple…target keywords for your online campaign using three words or more.  Think about the last time you were online searching Google for something you wanted to purchase.  If you were in the research phase, you often would do searches in short generalized phrases.  For example if you were heading towards foreclosure you might search “Foreclosure help” or “foreclosures Maryland”.    But if you were actually trying to sell your house that was in foreclosure, you might search for “buy my house fast” or “help stop foreclosure Maryland” or “buy my house Baltimore, Md”, etc, etc.  The more detailed your terms, the cheaper the click through (cost to you) and more importantly the fewer tire kickers you will encounter (aka the more motivated the searcher).

3.  Limit the number of Keywords you are using per Campaign

A simple yet often overlooked tactic when you are using Google Adwords is to limit the number keywords you are trying to build a campaign around to somewhere between 15-20 keywords/phrases.  If you look at your list of keywords, you will often find that a majority of the keywords have zero impressions and thus zero click throughs.  These keywords, while not really hurting your campaign, are actually costing you money.  Google adds what is described as a “Google Tax” to anyone who is doing a broad sweeping keyword campaign.  This total amount of tax seems to vary based on product, keyword, and industry.

Focus your keywords to match those with your landing page and you should find that the overall cost will go down.  The higher the “Quality Score” of the landing page, the lower your costs will be for those keywords.

BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS

4.  Don’t use Google’s Hated List in your Ads

There are certain words that will trigger Google’s red flag indicator.  Using words such as “amazing”, “free”, “sale”, “bargain”, etc will affect your Quality Score (in a bad way), ultimately costing you more money.  Just as a note, Google really, REALLY hates the word “FREE” in any of its ads.  Combine that with the use of a “squeeze” page and your costs will absolutely sky rocket <ask me how I know this is true!>

The truth of the matter is this, Google doesn’t care if you give them money or not.  They simply want to rule the content world by directing its clients (the user) to sites that have good content relevant to the Ads you pay for.  Always keep that in mind and you should be ok.  The best solution is also the simplest.  If you want to have the best returns from using Google Adwords, don’t use these words.  If you currently have ads with them, change them.

Using these three methods in your Online Marketing campaign should result in better results, more quality returns, and lower costs.  Even if you only implement one of these, you should begin to see an improvement.  Clearly this is the tip of the iceberg of what you can do with Google Adwords, yet it is a great place for the new investor or Entrepreneur to start!

Let me know what you think!  Also send me the stories of the results you get from implementing these.

Dan

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