List Building With Google Adwords

In order to be fair and complete in writing these articles, I feel like I have to address Google Adwords. I will tell you right up front that I have heard of people using it to build big lists. I have added as many as 50 subscribers a day pretty easy – in fact, I think I could have added 500 subscribers per day if I were willing to spend the money – it was pretty consistent, and conversion rates at the squeeze page were good – I think they were around 50%, and my average click was about 50 cents, so each subscriber cost me $1. Which is fine.

The problem for me is that I could not get them to convert to buyers. They would not open their emails, they would not click through to my web pages. Now, I sent them the exact same emails that I send everyone else, the same subject lines, same schedule, everything. My opinion is, if you were to do some robust testing you can probably get Adwords to work – other marketers claim that they can do it.I stopped because I was making too much money on my other avenues of lead generation and wasn’t willing to spend the time to do the testing.

Here’s how you would do it:

1) Decide on about 25 keywords that will be good for your campaign.

2) Create a different category in Google Adwords for each keyword – you have to be able to test each keyword.

3) Create a different squeeze page for each keyword, so that you can track each individual keyword conversion rate at your site. (There is tracking software available online; I cannot recommend any; I track everything by squeeze page conversion rate using my autoresponder, and I track the effectiveness of my campaigns only by the sales they make – that is the only thing that matters, anyway, right?)

4) Use the Google Adwords keyword tool to come up with related keywords for each category you have created.

5) Put a daily limit on your advertising that is equal to 1/10 of your total budget for Adwords advertising. Be prepared to spend it all and have dismal results – if you get sales, great, if not, just be prepared. This way you can advertise for 10 days.

6) Spend at least 30 minutes per day studying the results. Change bid prices, change seo keywords, etc. that are not getting good conversion rates.

7) Begin split testing your email campaigns, starting with open rates. Find out which open rates work well for Adwords subscribers. Once you have that down, start split testing email copy to find out what gets the most click throughs.

If you follow this procedure, and develop a campaign that makes money – gets opens and some sales – I might be willing to pay you for your results – so let me know.