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Chapter 6

Reaching Out to Your Prospects


Okay, so you’ve figured out your business model(s), explored
the competition, determined your marketing strategy, automated
your site, and now, you’re ready to make money.

Again, it’s all about driving traffic to your site.  

How do you attract quality traffic quickly, cheaply, and easily?
Well, hang on, and we’ll review the top tactics you need to employ in order to get visitors that will convert to
cash.

Here is an overview of the marketing tactics we will cover:

  • Online Public Relations

  • Email Newsletters

  • Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

  • Offline Promotions


Online Public Relations

If you had a choice between getting a full-page story written about your company or paying for a full-page
advertisement for your products/services in a publication, which would you choose?

Any marketer will tell you to go with the story that someone else writes (or seems to write) about your company
because it’s more credible in the eyes of prospects than if you buy an ad, which is seen as blatant self-
promotion.

Just as with marketing in the offline world, you should spend a significant amount of time on public relations,
no matter what your product is.

There are plenty of books out there on how to write good press releases. For some we suggest,
click here or visit our Books and Other Publications section at www.WhatWeSuggest.com.

Basically, you want to make sure that your press release is newsworthy, interesting, not too sales-oriented,
and controversial, if possible, so that you can cut through the clutter and get some attention.

For the best way to distribute your press releases online so that they have the best shot at getting picked up
by a journalist or a blogger and written about, click here or check out the Online Public Relations Solution at
www.WhatWeSuggest.com.

In addition to using an online press release service, you will also want to blast out press releases directly to
media contacts (publications, radio stations, TV stations). The best way to do this is to invest in an electronic
fax service, which allows you to email press releases quickly and easily. For our recommended solution, click
here or visit www.WhatWeSuggest.com and look under Electronic Fax Solution.


Email Newsletter Solutions

You might want to use the tactic of email marketing to keep in constant contact with your prospects and
customers. As any good marketer knows, repetition is the key to maximizing sales. We’re not just saying you
should send out sales pitches all the time, but rather send out email newsletters with good helpful advice to
your prospects that helps you build credibility among your prospects.

Many marketing studies point to The Rule of Seven, meaning that you must hit your prospects on average
with seven communications before you get them to buy. Remember, we live in a cluttered world with lots of
advertising messages battering your prospects every minute of every day. To cut through that clutter, you
should look into sending email newsletters.

  • We recommend using an Email Newsletter Solution that is:

  • Simple for you to manage;

  • Helps you stay out of trouble with the law by avoiding breaking the rules of the CAN-SPAM Act, which is
    legislation that protects consumers from spam (unwanted email);

  • Enables you to customize the design of your newsletters; and,

  • Lets you track all communication and consumer click-through behavior so that you can maximize the return
    on your investment for your marketing investments of money, time and effort.

For the Email Newsletter Solution we recommend, click here or check out www.WhatWeSuggest.com.


Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

As we discussed in the Advertising Model section above, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising [or search engine
marketing (SEM) as it is sometime known] is a popular way to buy visitors (traffic) to your site.

The popularity of PPC advertising has skyrocketed in the past several years in part because you can easily
track the return on your marketing investment and also due to awareness created by the success of Google
and Yahoo!, which run the two largest PPC advertising networks, which link traffic buyers (advertisers) to
traffic sellers (sites that want to make money via the Advertising Model.)

We’ve already discussed how you can use the Advertising Model to make money as a Web site owner. Again,
if you have a Web site with considerable traffic, you may be able to get advertisers to buy advertising space
on your site. But in this section, let’s look at it from the other side of the fence. If you want to drive traffic to
your site, you are the advertiser, paying to attract visitors to your site.


Think Like Your Customer

You learned in your Marketing 101 class that you have to focus on the customer and meet their needs, solve
their problems, ease their pain.

When people enter keywords into a search box like the one at Google.com, Yahoo.com or any other search
engine, they have a pain. They have a need. They have a question that they want answered. They want to be
served the solution in the form of information as to how they can resolve their problem. They are saying: “I’m
searching for….” or simply “I need….”

Your job as a marketer is to put yourself in their shoes. You must ask yourself: What keywords are my ideal
prospects going to type into their search boxes?

As we already explained, marketing strategy is about targeting and positioning. In the section on Automating
Your Site, we discussed positioning your product or service to maximize the number of visitors that actually
buy from you. But first, you must get the right kinds of visitors to your site. Visitors who are most likely to buy
the product/service you are offering. How do you get such “qualified” visitors to your site? You have to select
the right keywords.

If you don’t select the right keywords, you simply won’t get the traffic you want to your Web site. You won’t get
a chance to show that brilliant advertising copy that will motivate prospects to click through to your site, read
your unbeatable offer, and then buy your product/service.






Building Your Keyword List

To start building your keyword list, you simply sit down (either alone – or better yet, with a group of
colleagues), start brainstorming about the kinds of keywords that are relevant to your product/service, and
then jot them down on a pad of paper or in a Excel spreadsheet.

Start by thinking about what you are selling and then think of relevant words that people might search on in
order to find your types of products and services.

Think of keywords as the bait that will lure prospective customers to your Web site. The keywords that you
want to bid on are appetizers that you are hoping will whet the appetites of the right kinds of visitors – either
visitors who are ready to buy now – or browsers that you can quickly convert to customers.

As in any brainstorming, it is best not to limit your thinking at this stage. Include any and all suggestions. You
want to avoid missing any keywords that might prove to be valuable.

Your goals are to maximize visitors that buy from you and minimize visitors that don’t buy from you. Later,
when you start testing your keywords, you will see that the actual results of your campaign will determine
which keywords work and which don’t.

Measurement eliminates argument. Keywords that you might think are ridiculously irrelevant at this stage
might prove to be winners later and vice versa.

Err on the side of having more keywords rather than less. And, as we will discuss in more depth later, don’t
just think in terms of one-word or even two-word keywords. You want to “own” niches, so you want to think in
terms of “keyword phrases” so that you can dominate when a searcher looks for something very specific that
is relevant to what you have to sell.

You might find that “red leashes for German shepherds” doesn’t get any clicks, but don’t make that
determination yourself. Don’t assume anything. That’s what’s great about the search engines. They’ll tell you
in a very cold and calculated manner if you don’t get any clicks or conversions.

So assume nothing and test everything. The more keywords, the merrier.

Also, you will find that general keywords will probably be high-priced. You are looking for relatively low-cost
keywords that convert well, and by testing, you will be able to home in on that subset of keywords where you
should be spending the lion’s share of your PPC budget.

So it’s okay to test general terms, but spend more time looking for highly niched keyword phrases. Remember,
you want to get rich in a niche. A general rule is that browsers are more likely to search with general terms,
whereas people closer to the buying stage tend to be more specific in the terms they search on.

By choosing more specific keywords, you are more likely to attract higher-quality prospects at a relatively
lower cost. You might not get much traffic on these more specific keyword phrases, but the visitors you do get
are more likely to be ready to buy.

Remember, when building your initial keyword list, you are doing little more than guessing. Later on, by using
the right online tools and performing the right analysis, science will replace guesswork.


Expanding Your List with Keyword Suggestion Tools

Choosing the terms that make up your initial keyword list is easy. And because it is so easy, it is often the
downfall of many inexperienced marketers.  

Many of our clients have had initial success with PPC advertising but then they get lulled into a comfort zone
in which they think that they’ve covered all of their keyword bases. Usually, they make a big push to create a
list without ever revisiting it. After creating the initial list, laziness or busyness usually takes over. This is a big
mistake.

Most search engines provide keyword suggestion tools, which will generate related terms for any keyword you
type in. So, after you brainstorm in order to come up with a list of common-sense, obvious terms that you
should be bidding on, then use free tools – like Yahoo! Search Marketing’s Keyword Selector Tool, which you
can find at www.Overture.com, then click “Visit The Resource Center” and then Keyword Selector Tool. Or go
directly to http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch/ and click on the Keyword Selector Tool to expand your
list a bit more by typing in a relevant keyword you have thought of yourself, and then let the engine provide
you with a list of related words for you to try.

Take advantage of Yahoo!’s free tool but you might also want to check out paid keyword tools, which will
probably give you more - and more relevant - keywords to use in your campaign. For our suggestion on a
Keyword Selection Tool, click here or check out www.WhatWeSuggest.com.


Summary of Keyword Lists

Generating your keyword list is the first crucial step in launching your pay-per-click advertising campaign.
Once you have an initial list, you must constantly monitor and modify it to keep up with the ever-changing
search landscape.

When generating your list, keep in mind that you want to err on the side of testing more keywords rather than
less. Also, you want to make sure to focus on multi-word keywords (keyword phrases), which are more likely to
attract qualified searchers to your site.

Although you will start by generate an initial list through brainstorming on your own, you also should take
advantage of the many free and paid keyword expansion tools available through the search engines and third-
party vendors.


Buying Keywords on Google and Yahoo!

So you might be asking what you do with all these keywords in your keyword list. Well, you want to bid on them
and buy them.

What does that mean? Well, just say you are selling children’s books. You might want to buy the term
“children’s books” so that when someone types that phrase into a search engine like Google or Yahoo!, your
ad comes up on the right column (Google) or elsewhere (Yahoo!) on the search engine results page.

You only pay whatever you agreed to pay per click when you sign up on Google, Yahoo! or other search
engines like MIVA, Ask.com, and others.

If you are new to pay-per-click advertising, we recommend that you visit the advertiser sections of Google and
Yahoo! and read about how to participate in these programs.

For the best deals on PPC advertising, enter Google by clicking here and Yahoo! by clicking here, or visit Pay-
Per-Click Advertising Networks on our recommendation page at www.WhatWeSuggest.com.


Offline Marketing Tactics

You are starting a business online, but don’t forget that many of your prospects will never find you on the
Web, and many of them might not even be on the Web. So you have to do offline marketing promotions as
well.

Just think traditional marketing. You want to make sure that you have a good professional logo (again, visit
our recommendations page at www.WhatWeSuggest.com to see the Logo Creator Solution we suggest).

Once you have your logo, which includes your Web address and email address so that people can easily
contact you, plaster it everywhere. Make business cards, postcards, bumperstickers, T-shirts, whatever you
can think of.

For our recommended Promotional Items Provider, that can create coffee mugs, pens, sweatshirts and other
clothing with your logo on it, click here or check out the provider we suggest on our recommendations page at
www.WhatWeSuggest.com.

For our recommended printer, click here or check out Print Provider on our recommendation page at www.
WhatWeSuggest.com.

Put your Web address and email everywhere – in your email signature file at the bottom of every email you
send out, at the end of articles you write, on signs that you put in the windows of your car.

Think like an advertiser. Get your brand out into the world to drive people to your site. You never know who
might see your logo, visit your site, and buy something from you.

Go to the next chapter.
eMarketing In-a-Box: How to Attract, Retain and Monetize Your Website Customers Copyright 2007 All Rights Reserved
emarketinginabox.com All Rights Reserved
paul@emarketinginabox.com I matthew@emarketinginabox.com
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The Book:  E-Marketing In-A-Box
Learn How to Attract, Retain and Monetize Your Website Customers
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