Suppose you are trying to rank highly on google for a broad search term like “love letter”. You would have to have some pretty major page rank or serious incoming links to get to page one. Wanna know why?

Click on the image above. “Love Letter” has nearly 7 million competing pages in Google.

How to Write a Love Note - Step 2

OK, so “love letter” is out if you want to get on page one. Let’s try a longer keyword, suggested by Fender85, “How to Write a Love Letter”. Sounds like a much better term to try and rank with.

I’ll let you do the search on google this time, “How to Write a Love Letter“. If you click on that link, you’ll see only 26,000 competing pages. Much, much better.

But I bet we can do better still. Let’s get even more specific…

How to Write a Love Note - Step 3

At the bottom of the search page for “How to Write a Love Letter“, we see that google gives us some more ideas, namely, How to Write a Love Note.

What do you see when you click on that link? That’s right, only 43 competing pages! (well, hopefully it will be 44 by the time you read this post).

How to Write a Love Note - Step 4

So now we know how we get a first page spot on google…not for our original idea, “love letter”, but for our more defined phrase, How to Write a Love Note.

We do so by writing a short article, 300-500 words, with a keyword density of 3-5% using our chosen phrase, How to Write a Love Note.

Once our little How to Write a Love Note article is written, we post it to our blog, ping the article using Pingoat.com, Digg it, Stumble it, Delicious It, Reddit it, etc, etc.

Some services you can use for this include onlywire.com and socialposter.com

After all of that work above is done, we sit tight and keep on checking How to Write a Love Note. on Google…looking for our number 1 spot!

How’d we do?

P.S. Since posting this about 20 minutes ago, I now rank #2 for our search phrase…that was fast!

P.P.S. If you want to stay on top of tricks like this, sign up for my newsletter over on the right there, and I’ll send you all my best ideas!

P.P.P.S. If you’d prefer to just go straight to the source of where I learn these tricks, head over to Wealthy Affiliate…I’ve been a member there now for 2 months and it’s the greatest IM investment I’ve made so far!

Here’s the lowdown:

Text Link Ads (yep, still using them): $57.91

Build a Niche Store: $221.33

Wealthy Affiliate Commissions: $70

Clickbank (from my LEARNING at Wealthy Affiliate): $232.50

Adsense (havn’t even checked…)

Total: $581!!!

The downside: expenses! In May, much of my clickbank earnings came from direct linking campaigns to my merchant (and some bum marketing). Ad campaigns have costs…I’m not proud of my adspend, but I’m learning how to put a good campaing together. So my expenses for May’s

adwords were: $196.03

Wealthy Affiliate: $29 

Total profit: $356.71

Better and better each month. 

My good friend Mike Filsaime had a seminar a while
back called 'The 7 Figure Code'. It was designed to
show people how to create their own 7 figure business
just like Mike has.

Over 100 people paid $5,000 to attend the seminar. He
turned it into a DVD product (which now sells for
$1,297) and to this date, over 3,000 people have
purchased those DVDs.

Sounds like a pretty good deal to me, and for $7 shipping, I was willing to take a look.

Here’s the fascinating part of all this…I received the same promo from two different A-list marketers, Michael Rasmussen and Frank Kern. Each one used radically different marketing methods that are worth dissecting and studying to learn how to apply their techniques to your own marketing efforts.  In this post, I analyze both promotions, disucuss the Laws of Persuasion used by each marketer and discussed their differences.

Check this out…I’ve posted both emails below…and then analyzed them for you. See what you can learn from this…

Mike Rasmussen’s Promotion 

Here is Mike Rasmussen’s email, skim through it if you like, then read my analysis:

Hey Suzanne, Michael Rasmussen here with a VERY time
sensitive announcement. This will only take a minute,
so make sure you read this short email right away.

There’s an incredible free offer available for you,
but only if you take action right away. There’s
nothing to buy. You’re about to get an unbelievably
valuable PRINTED course for nothing, so don’t put this
off. Read it now.

*************************************************
If you’re in a hurry, just go ahead and take a
look at this web page to see what I’m talking
about in this email.

http://www.michaelrasmussen.com/YourFreeDVD
*************************************************

Here’s the deal:

My good friend Mike Filsaime had a seminar a while
back called ‘The 7 Figure Code’. It was designed to
show people how to create their own 7 figure business
just like Mike has.

Over 100 people paid $5,000 to attend the seminar. He
turned it into a DVD product (which now sells for
$1,297) and to this date, over 3,000 people have
purchased those DVDs.

*************************************************
WHY DOES THIS MATTER TO YOU?
*************************************************

Because Mike paid a professional copywriter $25,000 to
watch the DVDs from that seminar and turn it into a
tightly packed, 85 page report that distills all the
wisdom from that seminar into something you can read
in one sitting.

That means you are literally going to get the same
content that people paid $5,000 for… and you’re
going to get it for free!

Originally, Mike was planning to sell it for $297.00,
and as soon as he sold 3,000 copies, he was going to
pull it off the market. The manuals are already
printed, spiral bound, and sitting at the warehouse
ready to be shipped to your door for free.

*************************************************
BUT ONLY WHILE SUPPLIES LAST
*************************************************

Remember, you don’t have to pay anything for this free
report. All Mike asks is that you pay around 8 dollars
for shipping and handling, but other than that… you
just simply tell him where to ship your free report.
It’s as simple as that.

Go ahead and watch the special video that Mike has
created for you to explain exactly what you’ll be
getting. Do that now, because this offer is only good
until all the reports have been shipped.

Considering that almost every marketing guru alive is
telling their readers about this, you should hurry and
watch the video right now. Here’s the URL:

http://www.michaelrasmussen.com/YourFreeDVD

All the best,

Michael Rasmussen

P.S. - By the way, Mike is also going to send you two
additional items along with the report. These items
are actually worth more than the report itself, but
you’ll get them along with the report. Go watch Mike’s
video for full details on the report itself and the
extra goodies you’ll get. Here’s the link one last
time:

http://www.michaelrasmussen.com/YourFreeDVD

Mike’s Laws of Persuasion

Mike’s email uses two primary Laws of Persuasion along with a common marketing tactic. Can you pick them out? He uses the Law of Scarcity and the Law of Social Proof. Notice how right from the beginning, he hits hard with how quickly you need to act because supplies are limited, and he urges you to take action now. Reread the first 2 paragraphs, he hammers this Law several times in just a few sentances. Do you find this compelling? (I didn’t).

Later he describes the source of this content:

Over 100 people paid $5,000 to attend the seminar. He
turned it into a DVD product (which now sells for
$1,297) and to this date, over 3,000 people have
purchased those DVDs.

This is an example of Social Proof…Other people are doing it, so you should too! Really, 3000 people have purchosed those DVDs, so here’s a chance to get it FREE!

Again, consider how persuasive this is…is it making you want to buy? Maybe, maybe not. It didn’t do much for me.

Frank Kern’s Promotion

Now here is Frank Kern’s version of the same promotion. For those of you who don’t know Frank Kern, he’s a hippie-surfer who has great (free) content on his website and is very entertaining.

Hey - you know all the promos you're getting about
Mike Filsaime’s “free” offer?

Do you think anyone took the time to actually GET the stuff
and investigate it before they sent you blatant promos for it?

Well, I got it …and I went through the offer with a fine tooth
comb. And I made this video for you that reveals the “catch”.

It’s here on my blog:
http://www.elabs7.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=ljhv,a94e,ax5,334q,jkmr,h27h,b1vn

Have a good weekend,
Frank

P.S. Don’t hassle me about how bad I look in this video!
I didn’t have time to get my professional team of stylists
in to bring me up to our usual “hollywood” standards  

Here’s the video.
http://www.elabs7.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=ljhv,a94e,ax5,334q,jkmr,h27h,b1vn

Frank’s Laws of Persuasion 

Frank is using a different set of Persuasion Laws here, namely, the Law of Liking, and the Law of Reciprocity. You see in this email, Frank has done us a favor first of all…he’s ordered the product and gone through it with a fine toothed comb to find out what the “catch” is in the Free Promotion. (Keep reading and I’ll tell you at the end).

He’s done us a favor, which automatically triggers a response in use to reciprocate the favor. in his email, Frank is asking us to take a look at his video, so we do…and we are entertained by it.

The second Law is the Law of Likability. Frank is just plain likable, and it comes through in this carefree email to his list. He’s not trying to sell us, he’s just sharing his video.

You know what got me to click on his link in the email to watch the video? It was the PS:

P.S. Don't hassle me about how bad I look in this video!
I didn't have time to get my professional team of stylists
in to bring me up to our usual "hollywood" standards  

I wanted to see how bad he looked here, so I clicked and watched his video.

These two emails are a great example of why you should consider subscribing to email lists or RSS feeds of the great marketers..so you can study their marketing methods and learn from them.

Which of the two marketers did you find more compelling? If you had to buy from one of them, which one would it be?

Would you buy from me?

PS OK, here’s the catch to the “free” offer. When you order, you are given a free issue of his membership magazine (I think it’s even a print copy). If you decide to keep it, you pay $29/month, but can cancel at any time by calling the phone number given. I imagine lots of people will forget, or will want to keep the magazine, and as a result, Mike Filsame will make a lot of money off of his “free” offer. Plus there are a lot of upsells after you click purchase.

PPS I ordered it too, and have not received the hard copy yet, but did look at the process maps, which I really like…I’ve written about process mapping in affiliate marketing before so this is really an interest of mine.

Live broadcast right now on 30 day challenge tv…don’t worry, you can view it later as well.

Sign up free here:

http://www.ThirtyDayChallenge.com/challenge/11628

BTW, the aff link is just for “points” for which you can get prizes…like memberships to some of his other sites.

If you don’t want to use it, just type

www.thirtydaychallenge.com

All I can say is that so far it has been mind blowing! Myself and 3 others have taken him up on this challenge. THere are 4 different forum threads going, with each of us cross posting to one another, and hundreds of views of the threads by other members of the forum.

There is so much more to SUCCESSFUL affilaite marketing than just trying to sell. The keys to the vault are in tracking and improving what’s working and scrapping what isn’t…the real question is how and what do you track?

It seems simple on the surface, but it takes work, effort, the ability to make a plan and follow through, and a blueprint for where you are going. It doesn’t mean that you know where you will end up, but the PROCESS of getting there is the single most important aspect of success.

In one year, I will kiss my “day job” goodbye. Hold me up to this promise, OK?

PS You can check out the four thread’s of “C’s challenge” in the Forums at Wealthy Affiliate (sign up for a trial membership and see what you think)

Not so much.

I was still getting clicks on my ads, and visits to my page, and even click throughs to my merchant’s page…but I have not sold a single ebook in that niche for about 10 days. Ugh.  And in the meantime have spent about $150 in ads, while selling 7 books @ $26 each.  So if I’ve done my math right, I”m still close to break even.

Before sending traffic to my landing page, I was getting a sale about every 15-20 clicks to the merchants page (via direct linking).  But since making my own landing page, not a single sale!  Something about my landing page is turning people off.

I’ve started threads on wealthy affilate, and PM’d both Kyle & Carson for help.  Each has given me great input to improve things, but something was still missing.

I contacted a forum member through the “Jobs” section who was offering free adwords advice.  What he really give me was free landing page advice, at least for starters.

I had paused my ad campaign, earlier, and over the last 2 days I added a few pages ot the mini-site (two of them suggested by him are no brainer ways to add relevancy to your mini-site…so simple that it’s easy to overlook!).

I started a new adgroup using identical keywords as my previous best performing adgroup, and I created 2 ads with only one word difference between the two.  I’ll run this test tomorrow to check for CPC, CTR and CTR to merchant.  I will make 1 change daily to either the adgroup, the keywords or the landing page to fine tune the response.

I feel like I am on the verge of “breaking through”…I have had success at selling ebooks via direct linking & PPC, and am now trying to do the same with my own landing page.

Then the opt in is a different beast all together.  I don’t want too many eggs in the basket at once, so stay tuned.

The Thirty Day ChallengeWhat is the 30 day challenge? It’s 30 days of learning about affiliate marketing, packed with information taught by the best in the business.

It’s 100% free…the course is designed to teach you how to use FREE tools to do everything you need to do to earn your first $10 online.

I sent an email to a friend whom I’m coaching in internet marketing and it contained nearly this exact same text.

Sign up now before they take down the 2007 material! I found out about it in late August of last year, and missed out on all the 2006 information which I heard was outstanding.

Did I mention it’s free? Just sign up for it. It’s all good. You can get through more than one day at a time in some cases, but whatever you do, don’t skimp on the exercises, especially the research part, it’s super valuable information! I should do it all again before it goes away.

Then you’ll be all set to do this year’s 30 day challenge as well.

Enjoy!

Google rewards relevancy. If your keywords bring up ads that are relevant to the search result, and your landing page is relevant to the searcher’s initial query, you’ll get a higher quality score than the next guy (who’s not paying attention). and as a result, your ads will place even higher with a lower cost per click. Alternatively, you can decrease your maximum bid, if you don’t mind giving up a few ad spaces (I find 4-6 to be decent positions most of the time).

Here’s how I went about create an adgroup with “laser focused” keywords and ads. I won’t share the niche, but I’ll come up with a reasonable substitute.

Let’s say your niche was drinking coffee, and you were targeting a market who needed their caffiene fix…they’re constantly trying to drink more and more caffiene!

First you’d do some basic keyword research, making sure your phrases are competitive. In the adwords game, that means that there ARE other advertisers, but the cost of advertising isn’t going to be too outrageous.

Let’s say you type in the following phrase:

“Increase your caffeine intake”

And see a few advertisers, and only about 3000 competing google pages. This sounds like a great place to start.

Make sure you have created a landing page

First be sure you’ve spent a little time on a landing page. It can been blogger, wordpress, weebly, squidoo, your own domain name minisite…you name it. Your landing page, of course, has to have “slippery” content that’s going to get visitors to click on your links, which are pointed to an affiliate promotion. Preferably with a reasonably high commission of 50% or more.

Since this is an article about Adwords and not Landing pages, I’ll keep moving forward.

Part 2 to Come soon…

For example, in the header of the page, I had the text that reflected the NAME OF THE DOMAIN.  Even though that target page had a different focus.  By putting my domain name there in big headline letters, I may have been confusing people who arrived via a different keyword search.

That was easy enough to fix, but hte sort of thing that perhaps is only paid attention to by a more experienced marketer.

I now have that single page nicely tuned, so I copied the page, and targeted for a different keyword that I looked up in Wordtracker. I did a search that resulted in about 3 good longtail keyword phrases.  My plan is to optimize a page for each keyword, and then create a new adgroup for each landing page.

This really is a lot of work, it’s not “Make Money Fast” on the internet.

I know this is a product that sells, and I’ve proven it already.

But now I’m focused on making this a profitable campaign and squeezing all I can out of the niche through many different angles, mastering one angle at a time.

Worse, is the fear of stopping something that’s working in order to test something that’s unknown.  Without exception, experienced marketers have learned that a well optimized landing page for your ad, keyword or article, will result in MORE affiliate sales than a direct linking campaign to the sales page.  The trick is in learning how to keep your landing page from getting in the way of your sales.

Ed Dale calls this “slippery-ness” of your content. If your content is slippery, your reader will click through to your link to learn the rest of the story, read the punchline, or satisfy his curiosity that you’ve raised in your copy.

Wealthy Affiliate includes one-on-one mentoring and coaching with Carson & Kyle via PM on the site.  After then landing page I had set up last week (the one I started with Site Rubix & polished with Dreamweaver), I thought I had a “perfect” campaign set up.  OK, not really, but it was at least a campaign in which I thought I’d followed all the basic rules of affiliate marketing:

• Compelling landing page
• Targeted keywords
• Common Keyword Technique (learned on Wealthy Affiliate’s 8 week course)
• Good Converting Merchant Product

Thankfully Carson was honest and pointed me to additional tutorials on the site.  I modified my landing page (yes, it’s better), then simply redirected my current (converting) direct linking campaign to have those same ads point to my own landing page & mini-site.

So far, my CTR (click through ratio) is good, but it’s only been a few hours.  The real test will be if my content on the landing page is “Slippery” and results in clicks to my merchant page.

I’ll keep you all updated.