The Fastest, Easiest Way to Test New Ideas

I don't know about you, but I've spent a lot of money developing products and ideas that nobody wanted to buy.

What a horrendous waste - especially considering how many other ideas there are that people will spend money on!

If you understand how to use Google AdWords, you'll never need to invest more than a few hundred dollars - or in the worst case a few thousand dollars - chasing a product idea that has no chance of working.

Let's say you've got a product idea. The product itself costs $50,000 to develop, and you're sure it's a good idea because it solves a really thorny problem.

So here's what you do: You write a report, e-book or white paper about how to solve that problem. You create an opt-in page where people can get your report in exchange for giving you their contact information.

Then you buy keywords, send people to that page and see how many people you can get to opt in.

That alone will tell you something!

And if you can't get anybody to opt-in to your report - or if you can't find keywords that people are searching for - then that's a good sign you should abandon the project before you throw any more money at it.

When people opt in, send them an email (or maybe even call them on the phone) and ask them what they're looking for. If your report is any good, they'll be happy to talk to you, and you'll get LOTS of input about the kinds of problems they're trying to solve.

It's impossible to do this and not learn some major things that you did not know or anticipate.

Not only will this process validate that you're solving a worthwhile problem, it will also fine tune your efforts so you're dealing with the real problems that real people have!

It's worth repeating: after testing your concept on Google AdWords, you'll never throw good money at a lousy product idea. And when you need assistance or investment money, you'll have proof that people are looking for what you have to sell.

The GoogleCash Method: The Safest Way to Enter a Market

A couple of years ago, an astute young man by the name of Chris Carpenter came up with an ingenius traffic-brokering strategy called "GoogleCash." Here's how this works: You join an affiliate program, in which a website pays you for sending them traffic whenever one of those visitors buys something. Then you buy clicks on Google AdWords and send people through your affiliate link. You get commission on the sales, and your profit is the difference between the cost of the traffic and your commission.

GoogleCash can be made to sound easier than it actually is. However, when you identify a good niche, a good site and some keywords, this most definitely can be made to work. It's literally the world's fastest business opportunity - you can jump into a new market in as little as 15 minutes. No inventory, no email lists - you don't even need a website.

Now here's the thing: GoogleCash is really a game of doing quick research and cutting your losses. You set up ten different campaigns in ten different markets and you get out of the ones that don't pay as soon as you've got some results under your belt.

Well this also ties back into the first part of this article, the part about testing new ideas. Before you enter a new market with your own product, why not test the market with the GoogleCash method? GoogleCash has some disadvantages (for example if you don't own the website, you can't change anything) but the advantage is you're not married to a product. You can abandon something that doesn't work and try something else.

This is a lot better than guessing! Test the water first with GoogleCash, then develop your product. The flipside of that is that once you have a GoogleCash campaign that's working, you can build your own products into it and keep even more money in your pocket.

One 'Trivial' Change Can Cut Your Bid Prices by 95 %!

Why the Bid Price is NOT the Price You Pay & the Huge Difference that Makes for You
What to do when your Keywords Get Disabled

Today I'm going to talk about the thing that many newcomers find most confusing about Google - and I'm going to explain why it's a really ingenious twist that will actually help you.
The price you bid is almost never the price you actually pay. You almost always pay less.
First, it's a little bit like Ebay: You pay 1 cent above the position below you, not the maximum that you bid.
But there's an even more important secret that is the key to getting lower and lower prices, even while other bidders are jumping into the game:
Your Click Thru Rate (CTR) is MORE important than how much you bid.
The Click Thru Rate is the percentage of people searching who click. If 100 people search, your ad shows up 100 times, and one person clicks through, that's a 1% click thru rate.
So let's say I've got a 1% CTR and I'm paying $1.00 for position #2.
Let's say you've got a 2% CTR --- you only have to pay 51 cents to get position #2 and knock me down to position #3.
That means if you're 2 times as relevant, you pay 1/2 as much!
The rules are simple, but the implications are huge.
When you achieve high click-thru rates, your bid prices go down, down, down and your traffic goes up.
The difference can be quite amazing. Here's an example of two ads - they are ALMOST IDENTICAL but one got nearly TWENTY TIMES the CTR as the other:

Popular Ethernet Terms
3 Page Guide - Free PDF Download
Complex Words - Simple Definitions
www.bb-elec.com
2 Clicks - CTR 0.1%

Popular Ethernet Terms
Complex Words - Simple Definitions
3 Page Guide - Free PDF Download
www.bb-elec.com
39 Clicks - CTR 3.6%

Notice what happened: All I did was reverse two lines - and the Click Thru Rate jumped from 0.1% to 3.6%!!!
That means that the ad on the right gets more than TWENTY TIMES as much traffic for the same amount of money. Just think how much money we'd be leaving on the table if we didn't discover this???
This is just one of dozens of tricks I've found that push your bid prices down, down, down while your traffic goes up. (Of course you get all the secrets in my toolkit.)
Beat your best and you'll get more and more traffic for less.
I just explained how Google ranks your ad higher as your CTR goes up. Overture does not do this. In Overture, the highest bidder always wins.
That rewards people who have more money than brains.
Which means that for the smart marketer, Google is vastly superior!
Before I go, there's one other thing I need to tell you: This is precisely the thing that gets people all tangled up over disabled keywords.
Keywords get disabled for one and only one reason: The message in the ad doesn't match what the person wanted when they typed in the keyword!
How do you fix this problem? By organizing your keywords into narrow themes and by testing different ads, like I described above, until peoples' clicks vote on the words that actually sell! This is an absolutely foolproof method, and my Definitive Guide shows you dozens of variations on this method that you can use right away.

Read the original article here.

How to Build a Sales Pipeline

By Philippe Lavie, President, KeyRoad Enterprises

How do you get prospects who are not looking for the “things” you are offering to start to look?

Many of my clients have asked me what their sales people can do to increase their pipeline with qualified leads. The simple answer is to spend more time on effective business development activities. Such activities necessitate at least 20% of a sales reps time and include, but are not limited to:

Networking with existing friends, colleagues, and acquaintances.

Attending industry/trade meetings and walking the floor

Securing speaking engagements at local and regional associations or interest groups

Hosting breakfast meetings for like titles

Cold and warm telephone prospecting

Direct mail/e-mail/fax prospecting followed up with direct telephone calls

The most effective way to build one’s pipeline is to engage in a five to seven touch-point campaign combining direct mail introduction, followed by phone calls, in a very specific sequence. The thing I don’t understand is that most sales reps know that sequence, but most sales reps will also stop doing it if they can find any excuse to use their time somewhere else.

So Where Do We Start?
Warren Culpepper, author of the Culpepper Report, writes that there is a 5-year cycle in IT purchasing. Therefore 20% of your total potential universe is actively looking for a way to improve its operation through the use of your technology at any given time. By the way, your competition knows that too. It also means that 80% is not actively looking at any given time. Not looking means that they do not perceive, at this specific moment, that they have a need to satisfy, a goal to achieve, or a challenge to address. So my question is: Do you want to spend your time calling on the same universe that the rest of your competition is also calling on, or do you want to spend your resources and energies calling on the 80% that are not actively looking today, and bring to the forefront of their priority the understanding that their operation does need your offering to help them achieve a goal, solve a problem, or satisfy a need? Imagine two companies, one that is looking and one that is not. Both have similar profiles, work in the same industry, and have a similar history. Do you think that their C level executives share similar goals? If no one has contacted them because they are not looking at that present moment, do you think you could leapfrog your competition if you were to call on them first, and get them to discover that they need your offering?

So What Works, and What Does Not Work?
The Kenan-Flagler Business School of the University of North Carolina interviewed senior business executives to understand the circumstances under which they would accept a telephone call from a salesperson. The findings were as follows:

	Always	Usually	Occasionally	Never
A recommendation from someone inside the Company	16%	68%	16%	0%
A referral from outside the Company	8%	36%	44%	12%
A letter(s) from a salesperson followed by a direct call	4%	25%	40%	31%
A contact at an off-site meeting	3%	16%	28%	53%
A direct telephone call from a salesperson	0%	8%	19%	73%

This research clearly shows that cold calling does not work very well. Although important to do, (as one the business development activities), a sales rep could quadruple her chances to reach the desired executive if the call was preceded by one or two introductory emails. Such emails or snail mails would sensitize the executives to challenges, pains, or goals (s)he could relate to. We suggest a five to seven touch-point campaign using email, snail mail, and phone calls for the highest return.

Whom Should I Call On?
Now, before you even think of sending an email or making a call, it would be important to identify whom to call. While for some sales reps it appears obvious, I would recommend that for each potentially important account, a targeted conversational list be developed. The two main reasons are that “You can’t sell to someone who can’t buy” and “Buying is always a committee decision”. Another thing that amazes me is the length of time and number of resources sales reps and companies spend talking to people that have no buying power or no idea or understanding of the prospect’s critical business issues that would justify them buying from you. Often we talk about “the power line”, this imaginary dividing line that exists between executives that have a budget to manage, and those that can create/define/allocate a budget. When your sales people call on a company to create a vision of what the prospect could do with your offering, are they better of calling above or below the line? Would her opportunity be better qualified if she was able to talk with the “above the line” decision maker who has the authority to secure unbudgeted funds? Would her opportunity be better qualified if she could get the prospect to realize that the way they do business is costing them ten times more than the benefits they could generate by implementing your offering? Would her opportunity be better qualified if her sales cycle was aligned with her prospect’s buying process? Remember, “People buy from people who empower them to achieve their goals”.

What Conversation to Have With a Specific Title?
How many times have you been delegated down to the project manager when you started to have a product feature function monologue with a C level executive? Aside from being upset, did you understand why? People get delegated to people they talk and act like. Should you prepare yourself to talk at the level of the title you want to reach? Of course you do. But many sales executives do not know how to get ready for such calls, nor are they interested in taking the time or applying the discipline necessary to prepare. Our suggestion is that Marketing is, or should be, responsible for preparing the necessary conversational tools and prompters for sales people to have intelligent conversations around critical business issues with their prospects’ C level executives. We recommend you check into the process called Sales Ready Messaging to create these conversational prompters, scripts, tools, and aids. You will empower your sales people with the information and the discipline to have these intelligent conversations and marketing will once again become relevant to the sales organization. We call this “ loading the lips” of the sales people with business issues and information relevant to a conversation with a C level executive, while staying far away from product demo or technical presentation.

Your Next Steps
After having identified the universe for your offering (territory plan), having decided whom you should be calling on (targeted conversational list), and after having created the tools and prompters for your sales people to engage in prospecting and selling your offering (sales ready messages), it is also important to remember to:

Write your prospecting letters

Pick up the telephone and call

Manage the rejection that comes with selling

Set aside “sacred time” on your calendar dedicated to prospecting (at least 20% of your time)

Track your response rate and successes

Change your message if it does not work

Be prepared to have that conversation if the prospect says: “Tell me more, I am interested”


Spending an equal amount of time or more prospecting with people that are not yet looking, will generate better qualified, less competitive, and an easier selling cycle than focusing on those prospects that are already looking. That said, if you get a call from someone who really wants to buy from you, please take the order.

---

Philippe Lavie is president of KeyRoad Enterprises, an affiliate of CustomerCentric Systems. KRE helps companies implement customized sales processes designed to drive increase revenue and greater accuracy in their pipeline management. Based in San Francisco, California, Philippe can be reached at: plavie@keyroad.com.

Read the original article here..

The ONE Thing That Separates the Men from the Boys in the Google AdWords Game

There is ONE central idea, one key concept that Google wants you to understand. If you have this right, Google will literally reward you by giving you lower prices on clicks, and your customers will reward you by buying what you have to sell. If you DON'T have this right, you'll pay way too much for clicks, your campaigns will get disabled, and your whole Google experience will be unpleasant. The one thing that matters on Google is relevance. You might think of this as "message to market match."

This will make complete sense once you understand a bit of Google's history. Google started in 1998, after the "big boys" in the search engine game like Yahoo and AltaVista were well-established. At the time, few people would have bet that Google would overtake them all - but in five years they have done exactly that. What's even more remarkable is they did so without a bunch of hype and loud marketing. They literally built a better mousetrap and the world beat a path to their door.

So what happened?

Google's mission in life was to build a search engine that would give people exactly what they were searching for, as fast as possible. If you were searching for "California butterflies" they wanted to give you the very best and most popular California butterfly websites on the very first page of results. They developed an amazing mathematical formula for figuring out who visited websites and why, and using that information in their search engine.

So.... when they began to sell Pay Per Click advertising, they were extremely concerned that advertisers also put out messages that were highly relevant. Google rewards you for being relevant, and they let people who are searching vote for you. If your ad gets clicked on, it's relevant. If it doesn't, it's not. It's that simple.

If you can't get 5 out of 1000 people (0.5%) to click on your ad, Google disables your ad. The higher your click thru rate, though, the less you have to pay for the position you want.

So this creates a "Darwinian" effect, a deliberate natural selection that weeds out bad advertisers and rewards good ones. What's good for Google's customers is good for Google and good for you. When all the dust has settled, what really matters is that your ads and your content be relevant to the keywords you're bidding on. Your message must match what the person is thinking.

So... what were they really thinking when they typed in "California butterflies?" That is the question. Figure that out and put it in front of them, and you'll win on Google. Write an ad that matches exactly what they're searching for and you'll beat your competitors by a country mile.

A Valuable Little Piece of Customer Psychology for You:

Here's a little mental trick to help you write Google ads.

Imagine that you are not you. You are your customer.

You're not the dude with the cool solution. You're the guy or gal with some stupid problem. You've got an itch and you want to scratch it. And you're not in front of your computer. You're sitting in front of their computer. What do you type into the search bar on Google? And what do you hope will come up? Answer that question and you'll be successful marketing online.

Click here to read from the original article link

The 10 Big Lies of Work at Home Opportunists

By Michael Hetzer
The Artful Affiliate
http://www.michaelhetzer.com

1) Earn $300/hr filling out surveys! I mean, get serious. If you could really earn $150/hr. as a paid survey-taker, would anyone bother to go to college? We'd all just sit at home in our pajamas and "fill out short surveys" and wait for the checks to pour in.

2) Earn $300/hr as a paid shopper! One fabulously famous woman in New York City earned $7,000 in a month as a paid shopper and was featured in The Wall Street Journal. No one, not even her, has been able to repeat the feat. Frankly, I doubt the veracity article (It was the online edition). Do the math. Nothing adds up. Even if the article is true, at $7,000/mo she didn't earn $300/hr, and that would be before expenses. Finally, am I being a stickler by pointing out that mystery shopping is not really a work-at-home job?

3) Get a free car! In the scheme of work-at-home schemes, this one is actually true. True, that is, if you're willing to drive a car so covered with ads it looks like it belongs in NASCAR. I mean, what will the neighbors think? Waiting lists go on for months and it is not available in all cities - a fact you only find out AFTER you subscribe to the service.

4) Earn $100/hr. stuffing envelopes! The keyword term "stuffing envelopes" gets hundreds of thousands of hits in a typical month, which just goes to show you how far this notion has seeped into the national psyche. It's nonsense. Most bulk mail is processed by bulk mailing houses that use equipment, or employ low-paid, immigrant labor at their facility. Think about it, how would you get the envelopes to stuff? They'd have to mail them to you! In reality, this is a thinly-disguised pyramid scheme, or multi-level marketing (MLM). You pay a sum, then recruit your friends and family to pay a sum under you. No envelopes are getting stuffed, but money is changing hands. It's a great idea, if you don't mind ripping off your friends and family.

5) Earn $1000/day as an eBay drop ship seller! Drop shipping is when you sell other people's products without even having them in your possession. You run the listing on eBay and when it sells, you send the order to the drop shipper. Trouble is, eBay is clogged with these products. You can easily spend hundreds of dollars per month on listings that look, well, remarkably like the listings of other people just like you, who are, just like you, trying to sell the very same drop-shop products on the very same margins. Look at it from the manufacturer's point of view. What a diabolically great way to dump a lot of junk without any marketing expenses. Seriously, if it was so easy to move this junk on eBay, why aren't they selling it there themselves?

6) Start earning $1000/day as an affiliate marketer! Affiliate marketing is when you work as an online manufacturer's rep for the products of many different companies. This is not a scam, but nor is it quite as easy as it was in 2002, when this home-based work exploded. The lure of fast money drew in tens of thousands of people, mostly dabblers, who bid up advertising costs, wrote bad ads with no websites and little or no understanding of what they were doing or even the product they were selling. Google has adapted to try to push them out, though the high cost of keywords has done more to that end than anything. You can still make $1000/day, but you'll have to know a lot more than you did in 2002. Good. I run my own a course in how to get started in affiliate marketing the right way. Learn more by going to: http://my1stgoogle.michaelhetzer.com

7) Earn money while you sleep with our automatic money machine. Sell XYZ product and build your own income empire. Pay attention to the word, "build." This is code-speak for MLM. As soon as they ask you to make a list of 25 of your friends and relatives, run screaming for the BACK button. It's MLM, and the world is still waiting for the first MLM business that actually makes money for all but .05% of the people who join (or should I say, got scammed).

8) Make money part-time assembling crafts and jewelry! If only this were real. It's isn't. You don't actually assemble anything, unless, that is, you feel like it doing it for fun. Sure they send you all the parts and instructions and help you sell your "product." But your real product is the craft and jewelry assembly business. Yep, it's another MLM. You earn money is recruiting others into the scheme, usually friends and family.

9) Earn money while you sleep! I love this one. Especially since it means nothing. I can teach anyone in 10 minutes how to earn money while they sleep. These claims are usually related to pre-packaged, online stores. For example, for a fee, you get a website "stocked" with pharmaceutical products. You get paid 50% commission on everything someone buys off the site. Basically, it's a pre-packaged affiliate marketing plan. Now, ask yourself, how many spam emails do you get a week for pharmaceutical stores? Behind every email is a poor soul trying desperately to recover his/her investment. To help them out of their pickle, the packager sells them bulk email lists, pop-unders and all the things that seasoned affiliate marketers know are money- losing propositions. These poor souls, who wanted merely to earn some easy money at home, are sinking in quicksand, the harder they work to get out, the deeper they sink. Shameful.

10) Earn $100/hour with your own candle business! When's the last time you bought a candle from anything but a store, or perhaps an in-home party? Uh, never. That's right. So what's going on? If you've read everything up to here, then you already know what this is. That's right. Sign up your friends and family to start their own candle business. What a world! Just think, if these people had their way, we'd all be making and selling candles to each other.

================================================
Michael Hetzer is the founder of My 1st Google, an online training course that teaches affiliate marketing. He is an author, consultant, and sought-after speaker on the subject of affiliate marketing under the heading, "The Artful Affiliate." You can contact him at: Michael@michaelhetzer.com