Avoiding The 3 Biggest Pitfalls of Online Advertising

You’ve spent the time, energy and money to create a great website.

You may even be offering a gift to help you build a list.

But there’s one problem … NO ONE is visiting your website.

It’s tough to build a list and get clients when no one is visiting, isn’t it?!

Website optimization can be expensive

Paying someone to optimize your website can be very expensive. And doing it on your own can be a hit-or-miss endeavor.

Free online marketing techniques

Marketing techniques such as writing and posting articles, press releases, or posting comments on blogs and forums are all great ways to drive traffic, but they can be time consuming and can take awhile before they really start driving significant traffic to your website.

Pay-per-click advertising

Google Adwords on the other hand are a great way to instantly drive traffic to your website. In fact, you can write an ad and have it on page one of the search results for your primary keywords in less than 15 minutes.

Just in case you’re not familiar with Google Adwords, they are the paid ads or sponsored listings that show up at the top and right-hand-side of every Google search results page. These ads are called “pay-per-click” ads because while your ad may show many times on the page, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad and goes to your website.



Pre-qualified traffic

This is great because you’re only paying for people who have raised their hand and said they’re interested in what you have to offer, so they are already pre-qualified.

However, before you decide to drop all of your other online marketing strategies and throw your entire budget into Google Adwords, you first need to know a few basics, or you can quickly spend a lot and not have much to show for it when all is said and done.

Avoiding the Pitfalls

Here are 3 main pitfalls you need to be aware of BEFORE embarking on a Google Adwords campaign to avoid losing your shirt and to ensure greater success.

Pitfall #1: Not testing your conversion rates first

Before you start spending money to drive tons of traffic to your website, make sure you have a web page that actually converts visitors. That means you’ve tested your landing page (the page you will send your traffic to - and more than likely this is NOT your home page) and your visitors are either signing up for your gift or buying whatever you’re selling.

You’ll want to test things like your offer, your headline, your first sentence of copy, your graphics, and font colors. If you’re already getting traffic to the page, test your results first before you start paying for traffic. And remember to only change one element at a time when you are testing.

If you’re not getting any natural traffic to your website, you can start testing your ad with a small Google Adwords budget. Just be willing to commit to that budget whether or not you make any sales.

Once you have tested the page and it’s working (consistently converting traffic into prospects and/or clients), you can start driving more traffic to the page with confidence.



Pitfall #2: Not syncing up your ad copy with your landing page

If your ad is promoting red tennis shoes, then your keyword should be red tennis shoes (or some close variation) and the headline on your landing page should talk about red tennis shoes.

This may seem rather obvious but many people are paying good money to place ads on Google and are not following this simple rule. I have even seen big companies like Nike run a “shoe specific” ad that directs you to their website home page. And when you get there, there’s nothing on that page about the shoe they were advertising.

People will not spend time searching your website for the product or service you promised them. If it’s not right there on the first page you send them to they will leave. Then you’ve just paid to drive people to your site and they left without becoming a prospect or client - that’s a total waste of your budget.

Make sure your keywords sync up with your ad copy and your ad copy syncs up with the content and offer on your landing page. Carefully lead your paid visitors by the hand and make it easy for them to get what they are searching for, and they’ll reward you by joining your list or buying your product or service.

Pitfall #3: Including too many keywords in your campaigns

When someone is searching for information online, they type in keywords that represent the topic they’re interested in. In order to be successful using Google Adwords, you need to know what the best keywords are for your product or service.

Once you have those keywords, you need to create a separate Google Ad Group for each set of related keywords. Unfortunately, most people throw all of their keywords into one ad group, and then wonder why they don’t get any results.

To avoid this pitfall, select a narrow group of related keywords and include these keywords in your ad title and copy. Also include your keywords in your landing page headline and copy. When you do this you stand a much greater chance of converting your traffic.

As a solo-professional, your website can be a wonderful sales and marketing tool for your business. In fact, it can do much of the heavy lifting when it comes to lead generation.

And clearly getting consistent, quality traffic to your website is necessary for this to happen. However, make sure you aren’t throwing money away by paying for traffic without first making sure you’re ready to capitalize on it.




Here’s a perfect example of this in practice. One of the people I’ve helped recently, Carrie Greene of www.CarrieThru.com, had been running her Google Adwords campaigns for several years and was not getting very good results. Once we fine-tuned her list of keywords, her ad copy and her landing page she was able to lower her cost to get visitors by over 55% AND she added more subscribers to her list in just a few months than she had in all of the two years prior.

When you know what you’re doing, little tweaks can go a long way. And once you dial in your ads, they can become an ongoing, valuable source of new prospects and revenue for your business. Helping you drive more traffic to your website cost-effectively is just one area we can focus on if you choose to become a member of my new Diamond Program. In fact, we’ll work together for an entire year to optimize all of your marketing so IT works harder for you, so you can stop working so hard in your business. To request an application for the program, please visit www.DiamondCoachingGroup.com

© Copyright 2008 Debbie LaChusa

Debbie LaChusa created 10stepmarketing to help solo-professionals and small business owners market their own businesses more successfully. Debbie believes creating a marketing plan is the first step in building a successful business. Don’t have a marketing plan? You can get a marketing plan template to help you create one when you subscribe to The 10stepmarketing Ezine at http://www.10stepmarketing.com



September 2, 2008 · Filed Under Advertising, General Online Business

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