Is Pay-Per-Click Still Working?

by John Soares on July 19, 2010

I know this is a broad question that we’ve discussed before. And I know pay-per-click search engine marketing is working well for many people in many niches. But one person who’s been successfully selling information products for over 20 years told me recently that PPC isn’t working well for him and his colleagues anymore.

Here’s My Situation…

I have two potential information products in two different niches (not how to make money) that I know quite a bit about. Both would be a combination of e-book/audio/check lists, and I would sell one for about $17 and the other for $27 or $37.

In neither niche do I want to spend much time doing Third Tribe Marketing stuff: writing regularly on a blog, commenting on other blogs, becoming a well-known authority, etc. I want to create the products, build a simple site for each, do an occasional blog post for SEO purposes, write a couple of ezinearticles.com articles, issue a couple of press releases – and get the bulk of the traffic through PPC.

I’m not asking you to tell me how to do PPC. I already know a bit about it, and I’d learn a lot more before I started. And yes, I have a Google Adwords account and have been using it to do keyword research and get traffic estimates for given cost-per-click, etc. And I understand basic relationships between cost-per-click, closing ratios, the cost of the product, and profit/loss.

I’m Asking You…

What’s been your personal experience with pay-per-click over the last year or so? Are you making money with it? Have your closing ratios increased or decreased? Has the cost per click of your important search terms gone up or down?

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Free Podcast Interviews With Successful Bloggers

by John Soares on July 12, 2010

Many of us who sell and market information products online use blogs as a primary means of reaching potential customers. So we need to improve our blogging chops.

Fellow bloggers Sid Savara and Srinivas Rao have just what you need. They’ve created an excellent resource for you at BlogCastFM: an ongoing series of podcasts with successful bloggers.

Just Who Are These Successful Bloggers?

Many of them are Third Tribe Marketing types that I’m quite familiar with, including:

And there are many other well-known bloggers:

  • Yaro Starak
  • David Risley
  • Jonathan Wells
  • Dragos Roua
  • Dan Andrews
  • And a couple dozen others

What Do They Talk About?

Lots of stuff you want to know to improve your blogging, including:

  • How they got started blogging
  • Their successes and failures
  • How they get more traffic
  • How they get guest posts on A-list blogs
  • How they use their blogs to sell products and services

And each interview is at least 30 minutes long, so you get a lot of good information.

How Do I Get My Hands on These Podcasts?

You can download the podcasts for free and listen to them at your leisure. (I typically  do it when I’m driving.)

I’m getting a lot out of these interviews. They’re one of the best free resources you’ll find.

Let me know what you think of the podcasts!

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Consolidating Your Online Marketing Base

by John Soares on July 7, 2010

We all need to make the best use of our time as we pursue our goals, and we must make sure we’re doing the highest priority activities that will give us the highest return on the investment of our precious minutes and dollars.

To that end, I’m making some important changes in what I’m doing regarding selling information products and marketing myself online. I think of it as consolidating my base so I’ll have more secure footing for later expansion.

What I’m Doing More Of…

Concentrating on Creating Information Products

I have several products that I will create over the next few months that I think will be outstanding and of great value, both in the selling information niche and in the personal development niche. (See my Intelligent Productivity blog for more about the latter.)

Redesigning This Blog

Some of you may have noticed I put my picture in the sidebar. But that’s just the beginning. I’ll have an elegant, attractive, and user-friendly design completed by the end of July. (I’m using the same guy who redesigned Intelligent Productivity.)

Expanding My Use of Twitter

I’m having a custom background created. It may even be up right now at @TheJohnSoares. And please follow me! (I took the picture in Zion National Park.)

I’ve also started using Hootsuite to monitor the site and to schedule Tweets. I’m working on strategies to increase my number of quality followers, but I’m not rushing it. (And I’m always open to advice…)

Getting More Education

I just joined Dave Navarro’s More Buyers Every Month Group Mentorship Program.  Dave’s a Third Tribe member who I’ve been paying more and more attention to over the last couple of months. I’m very impressed with how he runs his blog and his mailing list, and I’m also very impressed with the quality of the workshops he has inside the More Buyers Every Month Group Mentorship Program. From what I’ve seen so far, he’s ethical and honest, and a very smart guy who knows a lot about creating and marketing information products. (Yes, those are affiliate links — proud ones.)

What I’m Doing Less Of…

Less Time Writing Blog Posts

I have four blogs I post on regularly, including this one, Intelligent Productivity, my hiking blog, and the nonprofit Mount Shasta Trail Association, plus I write occasional posts on the blogs that support my two e-books on freelance writing (click on the covers in the sidebar).

So I’m cutting back a bit on posting to my main blogs. I’ll post once or twice a week for the next few weeks while I’m finishing products, and then I’ll likely increase the frequency.

Less Time Commenting on Other Blogs

Don’t worry. I’ll still be around reading your blogs and commenting, but it won’t be as often. I’m taking at least a couple days a week to disconnect from social media entirely.

I love reading other blogs, and I know that commenting on blogs is a great way to connect with other like-minded people and bring folks here to my blogs. So I’ll keep doing it.

Consolidating My Base…

I’m doing what I need to do to take my career to the next level. I’ve assessed my goals, examined my current tools and methods, charted how I spend my time.

And I’m taking action.

What about you? What are you doing to improve what you’re doing online? How good are your time management habits? Any thoughts about what I’m doing?

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If you’re like me, you have lots of ideas for information products that you’ll eventually create and sell. I continually update lists of potential products, and for the best candidates I create folders and Word documents with ideas for developing and selling the product.

As many of you know, I’ve been a full-time freelance writer since 1994. My most recent information product is Intelligent Productivity for Freelance Writers: Manage Your Time, Make More Money, and Get More Enjoyment from Life, which I launched in early March.

There’s a good chance I’ll eventually teach workshops where I share my writing productivity techniques. And of course, when I do that I’ll also create a product from the workshop — a workbook and audios or perhaps videos.

So shortly after I launched IPFW, I also set up a site just for the workshops.

Why and How I Created FreelanceWritingWorkshops.com

#1. I wanted a separate website that can get its own Google juice and draw traffic.

Intelligent Productivity for Freelance Writers has its own website and sales page, but freelance writing is a very competitive niche. Thousand of writers have blogs, many of them quite good with a lot of traffic. Having a second site with tightly targeted keywords makes sense as method to reach more people.

#2. I chose a domain name with important keywords.

The domain contains three important keywords: freelance-writing-workshops. I used my Google Adwords account to research good keywords, and then I bought the domain for a few bucks at 1and1.

Search engines give significant weight to keywords in domain names. I think this is the main factor for my results, which I discuss below.

#3. I wrote a post that’s rich in keywords.

You’ll note that I use important keywords in my post, and that I mention states in the western United States. This increases the possibility of getting longtail traffic from someone looking for a writing seminar in Arizona, for example.

#4. I plug both my writing ebooks.

If someone finds the site, there’s a good chance they’ll click on the sales pages for one or both of my two ebooks.

#5. I can eventually sell a workshop product on the site.

A sales page would be much longer than the current post and would likely help pull in more search engine traffic. Plus I could direct traffic to the site from other sites and through word of mouth.

The Results

Traffic has been minimal so far. However, I a few people have clicked over to my ebooks.

The site has a Google Page rank of 1, which is a good start.

Putting “freelance writing workshops” in the three main search engines (without the quote marks) gives:

  • #5 on page 2 of Google
  • #5 on page 1 of Yahoo
  • #1 on page 1 of Bing

Why You Should Do the Same

One of the key factors for SEO is the length of time you’ve owned a domain. Having a site up, even if it only has a bit of content, can help you in search engine results down the road when you decide to make the site a higher priority and put up more content and get back links to it.

Why You Shouldn’t Do the Same

There’s a strong argument in favor of having your products and services as subdomains or pages of your main flagship domain. That way all the information helps build the page rank and authority of your flagship domain.

For the most part I plan to have my future products as part of my flagship websites: here at Selling Information Products Online and over at Intelligent Productivity. But in some instances, like the case here, I’ll also have separate sites pushing specific products. (Important: If you do the same, make sure you write different sales pages for each site so you don’t get penalized for duplicate content.)

My Other Domains

I have 14 websites. A half-dozen are these small sites with keyword-rich domain names that are important for products I’ll create in the future, most of them related to my other main site — Intelligent Productivity.

Your thoughts and suggestions? What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of this strategy?

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Blog World Expo 2010 in Las Vegas: My Unanswered Questions

by John Soares June 28, 2010

Many of you know that Blog World New Media Expo 2010 in Las Vegas on October 14-16 is a big deal. (See the discussion in the comments in a recent Kikolani/Kristi Hines post.) I’m strongly considering going. First I’ll discuss my goals, and then I’ll ask you important questions. What I Want from the Conference [...]

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Selling Information Products Weekend Reading 2010-06-25

by John Soares June 25, 2010

Selling Information Products On this blog I wrote about: 4 Reasons Why You Should Write the Sales Page First. You readers really liked the idea of getting the sales page done before you tackle creating your information product. E-Mail Marketing With Lists — Survey Results. I shared Paul Cunningham’s excellent survey of bloggers’ results using [...]

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4 Reasons Why You Should Write the Sales Page First

by John Soares June 23, 2010

I wrote last week that I’ve been busy with a high-paying freelance writing project, so busy I only had 30 minutes a day to work on my new product. With that 30 minutes I’ve been outlining the ebook portion and…writing the sales page? I say you should write the sales page first, before you create [...]

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E-Mail Marketing With Lists — Survey Results

by John Soares June 21, 2010

I found Paul Cunningham and his Blogging Teacher site recently on the Third Tribe Marketing forum. Glad I did, because he’s released a free 14-page report with detailed analysis from 30 bloggers polled on the Third Tribe Marketing forum and on Darren Rowse’s Problogger forum on how, why, and with what success they use e-mail [...]

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Selling Information Products Weekend Reading 2010-06-18

by John Soares June 18, 2010

Selling Information Products On this blog I wrote about: How I’m writing my ebook about information products in only 30 minutes a day — because I’ve been so damned busy. Why I saw a substantial traffic decline for one of my info product sites — and what I did it about it. Yet another major [...]

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Declining Traffic: Why It Happened

by John Soares June 17, 2010

Since January I’ve noticed the decline in traffic to the blog and sales page for my first information product: Writing College Textbook Supplements: The Definitive Guide to Winning High-Paying Assignments in the College Textbook Publishing Market. At first I didn’t think about it much. Sales have been increasing since I rewrote the sales page along [...]

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