Category: adwords

Computer Repair Biz Get Google Adwords Snub – Where to Now?

PC Computer Repairmen & Women -Adwords’ Shunned Can Find Solace Here

Google Adwords upends the table, here’s how to react…

Google Adwords will no longer accept ads for computer repair, virus and related services. This has affected everyone from the Geek Squad on down.

If this also happened to you there are two quick points to be made.

First the Good News: Cash in the pocket. What ever you were paying for Google Adwords is now available for new opportunities.

Second, there is a smart way to focus some of that new found cash.

What’s Changed on Screen?

Absent ads, the Google 3 Pack is getting top billing and you want to be there if you are not already. And by being there I mean being there for the top 10-20 keywords relevant to your services in as many nearby zip codes/cities/neighborhoods as possible. Google has gotten hyper local and this has good and bad points. The key to know is that it is powerful way to get new customers from close to you.

Who Am I

My name is Earl Netwal, I call myself the micro business specialist and have been doing internet marketing consulting in Minneapolis for almost 20 years. I first got started with ebay during its first years of existence.  Currently, I work with a number of businesses including a couple of computer related firms.  One of the two had all his Adwords ads disapproved last week.

If you are in the same boat, I suggest you invest at least half of the saved adwords spend and direct it toward gaining, sustaining or improving your Google My Business page and its visibility. That is where you will most likely get new leads from via Google.

Just because they won’t take your money, doesn’t mean you cannot benefit from the exposure they offer…for free.

My strategy has two elements, once a basic Google My Business Page is properly set up and optimized.

The first is round robin of pre-scheduled Google Posts averaging every 3 days or 12 times a month.

The second part is a silo’d sequence of press releases on a once or twice a month basis.

The combination of regular activity, and regular back-linking from press release distribution points will provide Google with proof of not only activity but importantly, when done correctly market area.

It will take time, but we want Google to understand the actual market we serve. New posts that feature common questions and answers combined with a geographical strategy designed to claim your shops turf will enhance your visibility on Google Maps and the 3 pack.

You will be competing with everyone else locally. For the most part it will take most a while to figure out that they need old fashioned SEO once again. And especially they need google My Business Page SEO support.

For a while there may be a first mover advantage, especially for those who already appear for some searches. An active strategy can help you leap frog you over some of your slower moving local competitors. Remember that the Geek Squad has also lost its very high buck ad words campaigns. You can now out compete them if you dare take immediate action.

This is not new, although it is different.

Apparently, Google felt the pc repair niche was overrun with scallywags milking unsuspecting consumers, thus lessening the public’s confidence in Google as a search resource.

Google previously clamped down in Garage Door Repair and the Locksmith niches.

I have two locksmith clients.  They needed ultimately to prove they were real people with real locksmith businesses. It took one well over six months to get through Google’s “not telling you anything” opaque screens and regain his high 3 pack visibility. (PS he currently has over 300 legit Google Reviews and a 4.9 overall star rating)

Google is using a different approach this time – shutting off a significant revenue stream, basically without warning. What ever will follow will likely be months away, and the clear winner for now are those in the Google 3 pack. They are getting top billing for free.

You can do everything you need to do yourself, or you can allow me to set up and run the system for you.

That helps it know to show us on the top of the page when someone in that market area searches for one of our “keywords” or services.

Call me at 612-408-9924 and leave a message -please give me your website and other pertinent info and a good time to contact you. I will take a quick look at your site before contacting you to better discuss how to proceed. Please allow me a day or two to respond.

How To Keep Google Adwords Costs In Check

You can get significant marketing results with Google Adwords but unless you are careful and manage your results well, it can become quite expensive. That said, it can be a powerful and quick way to drive traffic to your web site. Ideally, you want ads with high click through rates, lower costs, and better response overall. We will discuss several of the best ways to take charge of your pay per click expenditures in the paragraphs that follow.

Experiment with cost per click AND cost per thousand impressions.

Some websites (and yours may be one) have highly targeted traffic to a particular offer. If that’s you, you can buy in volume on a cost per thousand (CPM) instead of cost per click basis. Do use “CPC”; (cost per click) in addition as well, but try CPM as well, to lower overall costs.

Keywords Matter
In almost any competitive niche, you will dicsover that the most obvious keywords tend to be very expensive. Be careful, because you don’t want to bid on the keywords that are really expensive – you could go broke pretty quickly. It is often better to search out less expensive keywords, and to organize them into effective ad groups wtih matching ad copy. You want to get the highest possible position at the lowest possible cost per click.

Adwords in not a set and forget game. You must constanly monitor your results and treat it from the beggining as an ongoing experiment. Start with a good keyword tool to identify a wide range of possible keywords. The free Google Keywords tool is one of the best out there, but you can find others that may add additional insights.

Long Tails Can Bring Good Results

There is ofter less competition and thus less cost for phrases of two or more words. Longer phrases also tend to be more narrowly targeted to your niche do whiel fewer people will search for them, those that do are more likely to be interested in your offer. The real payoff is that they are usually much cheaper clicks. I like to focus my capaigns as much as possible on three word keywords, and you should be sure to add a goodly number to your campaigns. Then watch and see not only which get clicks, but which convert into sales.


Now It’s Time To Start Selling

The ad your searchers see need to grab their attention and get them to click. If it doesn’t work well enough, Google will start charging you more when it does.

Your ads should:

• Uses your keyword phrase as often as possible, especially in the title
• Offer a benefit in the first line (not a feature)

• A call to action is good if you can fit it in
• Remove Objections with a Promise
• Use the keyword in the URL

The better written your ad the more clicks you will get. This in turn imporves your quality score and Google rewards you with lower costs per click.

Writing good ads in such a limited amount of space is a challenging art form, but the importance of well written ads requires on on going effort to constantly improve the ads you use.

Start with long tail keywords. Focus on well ritten ads and constantly try to improve them. The net result will be more traffic at lower cost per click.

[tags]Adwords, Google Adwords, Pay per click, PPC, Lower cost per click costs, Online advertising, PPC Ads[/tags]

Leads Leap – A Free Traffic Source

In my last blog posting I discussed one of the Free Traffic resources I have been testing.  Today I want to mention another. It’s called Leads Leap.

Leads Leap is a type of Viral Blog, that allows you to place free ads on it.

If you look in the bottom of the far right sidebar, you will see a widget that I have installed on this blog which lists recent blog posts from Leads Leap.

These are well written high quality posts, that are well worth reading. Every time someone clicks on one of the posts there I earn an advertising credit. Since I have multiple blogs, I have put this widget on a couple of them, and earn ad credits on auto pilot as a result.

In addition to using the widget, you can post links to individual blog posts that your like to your list.

For example:

http://www.leadsleap.com/blog/how-to-come-out-with-innovative-ideas-that-sell/?r=earlnetwal

Again, every time someone clicks on that link, I will get a credit.  So in addition to getting credits, I can share useful information with my blog readers.

Leads Leap also rewards you for recruiting others.

Once you have recruited 20 other Leads Leap members, you get 500 Free Ad credits per month, and this number builds as you recruit more.

You get credits for the actions of the people you recruit and the people they recruit up to 10 levels deep. This is ultimately very significant, but as with all such programs it takes a while to get established. But once you have built the specific gravity, it grows rapidly.

How to use your free ads?  I tend to focus on free offers that have strong appeal and a back end that pays off.  Just like a paid Google Ad, you need to start with an attractive offer that gets people to click, leading to a landing page that inspires people to opt in, and then a follow-up that makes it all worth your while.

Another thing to understand about Leads Leap, is that it’s not a flaky newbie to the scene. It has an Alexa ranking of 23,212 last time I checked which puts it pretty high in the Alexa Universe and should help to give you a sense of how big a deal this is, and could be for you.

I recommend you check out Leads Leap yourself.

Perry Marshall’s Adwords Bootcamp

Two years ago, I attended the System seminar in Chicago. This is one of the premier events on the internet marketing training circuit. These days there are hundreds of major training events, so it may get a bit lost in the shuffle of email hype for every Tom Dick and Mary’s event. But I think it still retains its luster among those who “know.”
The highlight of the event for me was meeting Perry Marshall.  I had just acquired his Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords, and as a result it felt as if I were meeting with a lesser deity. Turned out he was a very likable person as well as a master of Adwords.
Perry has been holding periodic training courses on Adwords that are usually sold out in days. His Bobsled course which he holds at his own house have made millionaires out of many of his students. As a result, he is able to charge a fairly stiff fee for his courses, but then he offers real value for that investment.
He spells out a pretty specific guarantee, that you can read for yourself. When you do, you will get a sense that this is not your typical  hype fest you are being invited to participate in. This is for business people, interested in doing a lot more business this month, using adwords. No fairy scary stuff here. Just hard nose, how to, from the top expert in the field.
If you are ready to take a bold step forward to grow your business using adwords, there is no question about it. You must grab this opportunity. If you do your homework, Perry guarantees you willprofit from the course. How can you go wrong?