Are you making this crucial mistake with your ads?
The largest competitors in the industry were very heavy into paid search. We decided not to reinvent the wheel. It was working for them so we felt that paid search would be the best and fastest way to continue growing.
This was before Facebook ads were big and Adsense was really the only and best game in town. Since we had cash we hired the supposed best search experts in our area to help with SEO and also run our pay-per-click campaigns.
Their strategy was to cast a wide net by targeting many keywords, see what had the best value, and then focus in on them as we moved forward. We initially invested $10,000 of our backer's money and waited for the leads to roll in.
We were excited.
Crickets.
We were optimistic.
Crickets.
We were nervous.
Crickets.
We blew through $10,000.
The venture into pay-per-click ads was a complete failure. No contacts, no sales, no money. This added to other things that were going on and the founder was forced to close the business. A proven business model with a large backer failed.
So what went wrong?
Well a lot of things added to the business closing but I had to do a lot of thinking about that pay-per-click campaign to see where we went wrong. We had the money. We brought in a top company. We optimized our ads. We bought the targeted keywords. We got our clicks...
So it had to be a failure after people clicked on our ad. Then it hit me.
We were sending our traffic directly to our homepage!
Our home page looked pretty cool, but it was too busy. We should have been sending people to a landing page.
A landing page has a strong call to action and less options and distractions.
A landing page can be split tested and tweaked to see what gets better conversions.
We also could have created different landing pages to match different ads to see if that got us better results.
Even right now for my leadership website I give away a free e-book and when I do any promotion for the site not directed to a particular post I send people to my simple landing page.
It was an expensive lesson but hopefully you can learn from it and not make the same mistake. Don't be the fools that we were and make sure that you create landing pages for all of your inbound marketing.
Steve Browne, online business strategies, tips, guidance, and resources
SteveBrowneDirect
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Ron Rule
http://ronrule.com
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Ron Rule
http://ronrule.com
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