Direct Marketing is perhaps the most accessible and rewarding opportunity for average people to get started in a profitable and proven business.
PPC traffic with affiliate products is the budding direct marketer’s wet dream:
• No product creation
• No inventory
• Little or no overhead
• Extremely low cost of entry
• Instant and cheap feedback on performance
That’s one of the reasons why AdWords Guides are so popular on Clickbank as well as other digital product marketplaces.
However, for every successful new player on the Pay Per Click stage, I’d be willing to estimate that 9 others fail miserably and withdraw with their tails between their legs. And I’m being generous.
This unfortunate majority could have learned their lessons the hard way, but the fact is they probably learned few lessons if any at all. Failed PPC is so unforgiving that its victims will run from it faster than a hypochondriac from a coughing chicken funnel hacks masterclass.
To save you from the agony of becoming part of the ridiculous metaphor above, here are the top 10 blunders that kill your profits in PPC and send your credit card pining for the hills.
1) Poor Keyword Selection:
Too many beginners jump in and pick the most obvious looking keywords. Problem is, everybody is doing the same thing. You therefore end up with over inflated prices for keywords that won’t convert anyways. The classic example is the newbie who tries to promote an internet marketing package on the keyword “make money”. That will set you up for a brutal awakening in a hurry.
2) Paying Too Much For Keywords:
Sometimes, a marketer will have chosen the right keyword (often amidst a mass of poor choices). Thinking they are looking at the golden goose, the entrepreneur will bump their bid up in order to appear on the very top of the page, sometimes refusing to settle for anything but first place. Unless you have a very sound strategy in mind as well as a top level sales funnel, this will drain your bank account fast.
It will also make a perfectly good keyword seem unprofitable. If you are making money for each click at $0.40, you may not be when paying $1. Settle for less traffic and stay in the green.
3) Ignoring Quality Score:
Never mind the fact that you could get Google Slapped, quality score can have a much subtler but just as devastating effect on your AdWords pay per click campaigns. Quality score is a general measurement of several factors that allow Google to evaluate how relevant and user friendly your ads and landing pages are to the customers you propose to leach away from the search engines with your ads. The higher your account quality score, the less you pay, even for higher positions. If your account quality score is generally awful, you may have to pay more for your keywords even if you are getting a higher CTR on your ads.
4) Poor Ad Grouping:
Ad groups are not like “one-size-fits-all” souvenir sweaters. Too many new comers make the crucial mistake of dumping all their keywords into one or 2 ad groups, sitting back and watching as the campaigns crashes and burns.
Not only will doing this murder your quality score, it will reduce your conversions and force you to pay much more than your competitors for the exact same keyword, all other factors being equal.
5) Inadequate Budgeting:
This can work two ways. Leave your budget too high for unproven campaigns and come back the next morning to a loaded credit card. It’s been done thousands of times and there is no shortage of new comers who will perpetuate this mistake until the cows come home. The other side of the medal is having a daily budget so low that your ad serving gets cut off everyday. You will never benefit from the best CTR and ad position this way, and ultimately be paying more than your competition for the same keyword.
6) Misusing the Content Network:
For advanced PPC marketers, the search and content networks are a blessing in disguise: using them properly is sometimes so difficult that the real competition is thin, making for spectacular profits. For the beginner, using them is like navigating a mine field on a pogo stick: a recipe for disaster.
It’s a good idea to stay away from them until you can establish profitability Google search only.
7) Choosing the Wrong Product:
This can be either one of two mistakes. Firstly, matching the wrong keyword to the wrong product will bring poor results. Secondly, some products are over-marketed on Adwords. Look at the category toppers on clickbank and you will see some products with brutal competition where only the strongest have a chance of surviving. Often the competition from beginners on these terms or products inflates the bids to a level so high that nobody can make money on them.
8) Poor Copywriting Skills:
Sadly, most landing pages are scant more interesting or captivating than aunt Rita’s vacation picture album (sorry, Aunt Rita).
If you can’t grab and maintain your prospects attention, finally delivering value targeted to their initial search, they will create now value for you. Proper copywriting will not only ensure that prospects read your marketing message to the end, it will also encourage them to reward you for your efforts by taking action.
9) Choosing all Countries:
We’re not racist here at Net Frontier Marketing, but not all traffic is created equal. Chances are if you’re selling products or services, you should stick to the big, industrialized Anglophone countries and only venture out of those charted territories with a lot of prudence. In a lot of countries, people have limited buying power, and while they will readily click on your ads, they likely either can’t afford to purchase, can’t have it delivered where they live or just plain speak poor English.
10) Failure to Test and Adapt:
This is a big one. Lots of first time advertisers put up a campaign with all their keywords in one bunch and one ad. They have no mechanism for testing conversions whatsoever. This will almost invariably lead to failure of what would otherwise be a profitable campaign.
Imagine that only 20% of keywords are bringing in almost all the sales. The rest is just wasted money. Without knowing which keywords are which, you close the entire campaign and “throw out the baby with the bath water”. The smart marketer just skims away the unprofitable keywords and reaps easy rewards.
