The Six-Figure Second Income: How to Start and Grow a Successful Online Business Without Quitting Your Day Job (24 page)

need to put yourself in visitors’ shoes when they type in that term.

Are they searching for dog grooming supplies? Dog grooming tips? Dog grooming

centers? Dog grooming for short-hair Chihuahuas—or maybe for long-haired Afghan

hounds? Yet if you want your ad to show for the broad term dog grooming, Google wil be

only too happy to take your money and fol ow your instructions.

You’re much better off by becoming highly specific to your information product, which

in turn should be specific. Therefore, you might have terms like: Schnauzer grooming,

how to groom a Schnauzer, Schnauzer care, Schnauzer fur, Schnauzer hair, and so on.

This is where your research on the topic wil come in handy because you should have

discovered the insider language of the hobby. For instance, lovers of Yorkshire Terriers

often cal them Yorkies. So the key phrase list should contain not only terms like

Yorkshire Terrier grooming, but also Yorkie grooming. Your ad might even be more

effective with the slang than with the outsider’s term of Yorkshire Terrier.

Google has an outstanding tool for you to use to research key phrases. Its location

changes from time to time so just go to Google and type in Google keyword tool. You’l

be taken to a free and exceedingly powerful tool.

Just type in a general phrase and Google wil quickly show you al the related phrases

people use. You can then click a few buttons and add those phrases to your list. Google

wil even estimate for you the number of visitors that search for the term and the rough

amount of competition for the term.

By the way, the Google keyword tool is an excel ent place for you to do some info

product research, too. You may put in the term dog grooming and discover there is a

very active search community around some narrow topic like non-electric grooming

techniques or whatever, and it might be a topic you’d never have thought of on your own.

Also, remember to use misspel ings, which can be an overlooked goldmine. If I had an

info product having to do with crème de menthe, I would be wel -advised to list other key

phrases like cream de menthe, cream de mint, crème de mint, crème di ment, and

probably a dozen other variations. Al those visitors are after the same concept but spel

it every which way. Your competition may think,
″Well
anybody who knows the slightest

thing about crème de menthe wil spel it
correctly”
—and that would be a mistaken

assumption.

Terms related to your competition are another fruitful resource. If Joe Blow is a

powerful force in the Schnauzer grooming community, then you might ask Google to

show your ad whenever someone types in Joe Blow Schnauzers. Of course, I’m not

suggesting that you say anything nasty about him, but simply have Google show your ad

when someone types in his name.

Occasional y, you’l get a letter from a wel -known person asking you not to use his or

her name in any way. For instance, Oprah Winfrey is famous for having an army of

lawyers watching for any use of her name whatsoever. If you ever use such names and

get a letter, it’s an easy matter to tel Google to delete that key phrase from your list.

Google AdSense

You may have heard the term AdSense and wonder how that’s different from AdWords.

When you use AdWords, you’re paying Google to stick your little ad on its web site for

visitors to see. When you use AdSense, you rent space on your site and al ow Google to

stick other people’s ads on your site, and Google pays you for that privilege. How great

is that?

Warning: Do Not Use AdSense on Your Landing Pages!

The answer is it’s not great to use AdSense on your landing pages. Your grandmother

would have cal ed it penny wise and pound foolish.

Think what you’re doing when you use AdSense on your landing page. You’ve labored

to create a good info product and have further labored to drive visitors to your web site.

You recognize that they’re highly distractible people whose attention you have for mere

seconds before they decide to bail out of your web site and go check the sports scores.

You have careful y fanned the spark of their attention so it turned into a smal flame,

which just might result in their signing up for your special report and then—you al ow

Google to direct them to someone else’s site and most likely not return? How stupid is

that?

Using our romance analogy, it’s as if you went to al the effort to get the attention of

that special someone, say the right words, cultivate the relationship, build a bond, and

right when you have the chance for something serious, you stick in an Elvis impersonator

in your place because he slipped you a couple bucks.

This gets back to the rule I gave you earlier: Before you have the contact information

of your visitors, do not distract them with anything. Only deliver good, solid, believable

content and offer to deliver even more content if the visitors leave their contact

information. Only then can you afford the luxury of distraction. Once you have their

contact information, you can redirect them to your home page with al sorts of interesting

diversions on it.

I can assure you that your marketing competition does not get this concept but instead

drools at the possibility of making a few dol ars from AdSense. Google is smart for

tempting them but you’re also smart for not fal ing for the temptation. You wil instead

cultivate those visitors into a significant income stream, not one-time pennies from

AdSense.

I’ve covered Google AdWords here, but once you have that up and running, you’l be

able to set up more or less the same types of advertising campaigns on other PPC

services like Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo!’s Sponsored Search. They have different

labels for things but pretty much work the same way.

What you may find over time is that the most passionate dog lovers are found through

one of those services and the most passionate tomato growers seem to be at another

service. I don’t know why that is, but I do know that it’s worth testing the various PPC

services to see how they differ for a given product. Remember to test different PPC

services for each info product you launch because results could vary from one product to

the next.

Organic Search

Earlier I mentioned the term organic rankings to describe that left zone of results on a

Google page. I also may have tantalized you with the statement that those listings are

free.

They are indeed free but you must earn the right to appear in that left zone through the

quality of your web pages and their popularity. An entire industry has sprung up to help

you get your pages ranked organical y—the business is cal ed search engine

optimization, or SEO for short.

About the only thing as secret as the formula for Coca-Cola is the formula for how

Google ranks web sites for organic search. Google has said that it takes several

hundred factors into account when arriving at its rankings. Even though we don’t have the

exact formula, we do know from Google that several large and fundamental factors

determine the visibility of a web page. Let’s look at them.

Major Factor: Who Links to Your Site

Google was started by two Stanford students who had a revelation. They concluded that

there was no way they could review and rate the quality and value of each web page on

the Internet. They then realized that they didn’t have to rate the quality but instead could

notice which pages received the most links and traffic from other pages. After al , if

someone builds a great site devoted to kite flying, pretty soon the kite community wil be

buzzing about that new site. People wil link to that site from other sites, blogs, e-mails,

and al over the web. The Google guys realized that they could quite effectively predict

the quality and value of sites by monitoring who was linking to whom.

Major Factor: What Is the Theme of Your Page

Google does not employ dozens of PHD wizards in linguistics, physics, statistics, and

other fields for their fashion sense but instead to make Google’s software smarter by the

day. One of its chal enges is to send a spider or robot—it’s nothing more than a smal

computer program—to most pages on the web on a regular basis. Google cal s it the

Googlebot. When the Googlebot visits your web page it tries to make sense of what it

sees. It cannot understand pictures on the site but instead looks at other factors, one of

which is the nature of the words on the page.

Googlebot scans your Schnauzer page and notices that there seem to be many

references to Schnauzers, grooming, pet hair, and so forth. The Googlebot also looks at

the pages linking to your Schnauzer page and notices that they say things like, “For a

great article about how to groom your Schnauzer to win the dog show, just go to

www.SchnauzerGroomingSecrets.com.″

Googlebot concludes that not only does your web page talk a lot about Schnauzers,

but even other sites refer to you in Schnauzer terms. If those other sites had links that

said,
″Here′s
a good dog
site,″
then Googlebot might not conclude you were al about

Schnauzers.

It’s in this way that Google arrives at its own conclusions about what your page is

about. Wouldn’t it be valuable to have Google actual y tel you what it thinks is the theme

of your page? Wel , you can. Just go to the Google Keyword Tool I spoke about earlier

and look for a button cal ed Website Content. When you click it you should be able to

enter a web address and Google wil return a long list of words it thinks are what that

page is about.

You may very wel be shocked at what Google thinks is the page topic versus what you

had intended. This is good news because now you can adjust the content of the page so

that over time Google does in fact think it’s about organic heirloom tomatoes, and not

about compost bins or whatever.

Do you see why general pages with al sorts of stuff on them are great for lazy

marketers but bad for getting found? Google looks to deliver highly targeted answers to

very specific questions people type in. When you create detailed, useful, relevant pages

that are tied to one narrow concept, you’l shoot to the top of the rankings, above al the

general pages that kinda sorta are about a given topic.

Getting Found Locally in Google

Google recently came out with an excel ent tool for anyone who wishes to market to a

geographic location. On the one hand, if you’re offering that kidney stone remedy info

product you real y don’t care where your customers come from.

However, what if you are a plastic surgeon, plumber, home builder, or real estate

agent and you mostly get business from a 20- to 50-mile radius from your office? For

that matter, what if you have any info product that might appeal to a local market like

offering a list of Chicago attractions for tourists?

When you type that sort of local term into Google, a special type of map usual y