$7 for 1 lead???

- Is your target audience just Italy? Have you tried free methods of building a list. Such as putting in a signature of your posts? Or creating a blog and using social media? If you are really struggling have you tried fiverr.com you can write guides and build your list by putting a link to your squeeze page in the report. You get paid to build your list that way as well. Which you can then use in advertising.

Everything is relative. If a lead can generate a $50 dollar sale, I'd say a $7 dollar lead cost is well worth the cost. On the other hand if if costs 7 bucks to generate a sale for 5...end the program immediately so you stop the hemorrhaging.

-CG

It happens all the time, nothing new here.
That's what we call TESTING.
Just optimize everything out there, you'll end up by better conversion rate, cheaper CPC, and more profits.

Seems to me that your problem isn't traffic - it's conversion.

You need to get that conversion rate up to 40-60% before doing anything else.

Without seeing your landing page, I can't offer any other suggestions... but your conversion rate is AMAZINGLY low... you really need to see that as your major problem, and fix THAT first...

Just my two cents worth!

StexM,

Just an observation. It seems like you jumped from tactic to tactic concluding on your initial results that the methods don't work.

My experience is that you must learn how to drive paid traffic (or any traffic really) in order to figure out that particular approach. You don't get good (and profitable) by trying something initially then abandoning that method for something else after your first failure.

Choose one method and stick with trying different things within that method until you have it mastered. Your trials should be on a small and inexpensive scale while you learn what you are doing. Sometimes trial and error is necessary, other times you can profit from the advice of others experienced in the method. You can also learn from authoritative advice and paid products that are high quality.

Jumping around from this to that is what causes frustration and discouragement. You'll never figure things out if you adopt a "one and done" marketing approach.

The very best to you,

Steve

I use blog ads for promos. Get a lot of clicks for FREE items, but selling is another mater - any way. Sad words is just too expensive. Look at other platforms that are near you.

Hey StexM. Your tale of woe sounds all too familiar. I know there are many people who've had great success using only the internet to market their wares. Not I. Like you, very expensive and highly non-productive. I have developed a no-cost method of developing high quality leads that you will have a better than 50% chance of introducing your product/opportunity to. If you're interested, PM me.

What exactly, is the IM niche?

More importantly, what is each lead worth?

You obviously haven't done enough testing to determine that. This is a perfect example of why newbies shouldn't get involved in PPC. Sometimes you have to spend a great deal of money testing before you get a campaign profitable.

StexM,
I had Chrome translate the website for me. I certainly can't comment on flow of the copy, etc because I don't speak or read Italian and the translations never read like the original language. What I can say is your copy is all about you.

Your name, your years of experience, how successful you've been...

Quite frankly, no one cares. They want to know how much they'll make.

I think you're having trouble because you're attracting the wrong people...primarily because your message is far you "me" oriented.

Remember the most basic message of copy, the prospects favorite radio station is WIIFM (What's In It For Me)

You should take the focus of your copy and change it to focus on what the prospect will get, not how smart and successful you are.

Well, that is a high number to pay per lead for sure. But IF you have high ticket products to sell, it might not be that bad.

You need to find out an average of how much money you can make off a lead. Once you find that number out, then you can feel more comfortable spending money to get leads.

Let's put it in an example; if that lead buys your product for $14, you are $7 in profits. Then you should have more backend offers. You should also follow up with that lead very well. And if that lead buys another product from you, that is pure profit then!

I hope this helps!

I wish you the best of the best!

keep up the great work!

Cheers!

I'm surprised that you concluded that the leads from solo ads are reshuffles, low quality leads. If you have had this experience I suspect it is the seller(s) you were dealing with. I have 25-30 regular solo ad sellers that I buy from every month and I get great leads, and I am also in the "MMO/Home Biz/IM Software/WP Plugin" niche.

I also get great results from ad swapping and click banking. I would recommend monetizing your funnel with a few CPA or PPL (pay per lead) offers. Normally the revenue I make from the CPA/PPL offers in my funnel brings down the cost per lead drastically. I also average around a 40% conversion rate on my solo buys. For example, let's say I buy 200 clicks for $100. If I get a 40% conversion rate that is 80 new leads. If I can get 20 of those leads to opt-in to a CPA/PPL offer which pays me $2 per lead, that's $40 in revenue. Now I have brought the cost of the solo down to $60. If I get 80 new leads for $60, that's $0.75 per lead. I also have an affiliate offers in my funnel that pays $48.50 per sale (it's a $97 product). If I make even one sale of that on top of the CPA revenue, that brings the cost of 80 leads down to $11.50, or roughly $0.15 per lead. That doesn't always happen, though. However, my average cost per lead from my solo buys last month was $0.38.

In order to be successful with solo ads, there must be a few important variables in place.

1. A good seller who will send your offer to his/her buyer traffic
2. A squeeze page that converts at 40% or better.
3. A properly monetized funnel.

If you can get those 3 things right, solo ads can be very profitable for you.

At first, I failed miserably with solo ads, but I learned fro my mistakes and through constant testing and tweaking (this should never stop), I have been able to achieve a profitable outcome with my solo buys.

You also have to have a multi-faceted traffic strategy. By this I mean you need to have several traffic generation methods all working for you at the same time. You should be doing things like creating YouTube vids with links back to your squeeze page, Facebook fan page with links to your blog and squeeze page, JV giveaways, download page swaps (funnel swaps or integration marketing), ad swaps, click banking, guest blogging, forum posting, blog commenting, interacting on Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, free WSOs, WSO classified ads, Warrior Forum ads, banner ad buys, media buys, PPC (btw there are many other options besides Bing & Adwords in this area), article syndication, etc.

Honestly, there are so many ways to drive traffic that you could never implement them all.

I have also found that the simpler the squeeze page the better. My best performing squeeze page consists of a big red headline, a one sentence description and an opt-in form. It consistently outperforms all of the "guru style" pages and other fancy squeeze page designs I've tried in the past. Sometimes keeping it simple is best.

I really wouldn't even bother with Adwords if the best you can do is $7 per lead. Frankly, I'm surprised that Adwords even approved that page. Generally Google doesn't like one page websites in their search results.

At any rate, my conclusion is you have given up too easily on solo ads, swapping, and click banking, which right now are the three most popular forms of traffic generation in IM list building IMO.

Also, if you want to improve your conversion rates immediately, get rid of the "name" field in your opt-in form. Hardly any IMers are using the name field anymore and most people have become accustomed to entering only their email. I would almost guarantee you a 5%-10% increase in conversions just for removing the "name" field from your squeeze page.

Is that some kind of special rule for Italy? I do a ton of FB advertising
and I don't do it that way. Sometimes I promote the page for Likes and
sometimes I run an ad and send them straight to a product page. I've had
great success with both.

Oh... and you can target your audience as narrowly as you want.

I think you don't understand the FB system.

Just from a quick read it sounds like you are jumping around too much. I recommend you pick one traffic source and continue to work with that traffic source.

The other challenge is what you mentioned is it can be hard to get a fair bit or traffic for Italy especially when you start targeting, have you considered using f a different where you can get more traffic?

$7 is fine if you can sell them product worth $1000 and have even 5% conversion. Your cost will be $700 and you will have $5000 worth of sales.

I pay $30 for a lead and make ENOUGH money.

I think the problem with the 99% is they look it the price of the lead which I think is irrelevant. I have a friend who who paid $28 per lead and make 50K one month profit (after all costs including the $28 per lead). But the 99% dont' get that concept and I have it explained here dozens of times.

What do you mean you MUST ? You can do FB marketing without any knd of Fan Page or Post. You can have one where it goes directly to your Website or Sq. Page and not have to worry about any Likes or FB Posts

Granted, your CPC will be more expensive but I do it all the time.



- Robert Andrew

I agree with what has been said before. its all about the data, when doing any sort of PPC or trying to drive traffic to a source to try to get that traffic to convert you need to make sure that you:

1: Have all of your analytics set up so you can understand how well the traffic converts and at what rates as well as other metrics like, language, geo targeting ect ect.

2: It helps to understand what you can made from a conversion as well. Right now you may not know that info as you are building a list, take a educated guess or do some research but be conservative rather than optimistic.

3: Knowing the life time value of your customer is extremely important as well. I know that you may not now know this info if you are at the list building stage. I say this because if you are paying $7 for a lead and if you have a life time value of 2,000 per customer then yeah it makes total sense. Right now you are in the hardest part of the game, knowing your numbers removes the fear and frustration from the system.

Hope this helped

If you paid $7 for a lead, and you could monetize that lead into $100 profit, would that still be too much? It's all relative.

Hi,

It sounds to me like you're trying to SHUFFLE too many traffic sources
instead of just picking ONE and mastering it.

ONLY then should you consider moving onto another traffic source and
master that one.

Trying a traffic source ONCE then moving on doesn't give you a clear
enough picture of what you should be doing.

Is this what you have done in the past?

Plus you need to know your MATHS!

How much can you afford to pay per lead?

What is your A.V.V?

Average Visitor Value!

If you can afford to pay $4 per lead that enters your funnel then that is your
limit until you TEST, TWEAK and Optimize and make it convert at $5 and so
on it goes.

Do you have an effective back ens sales funnel with up-sells, HIGH TICKET
offers etc?

Traffic is NEVER the problem, it is your ability to do the maths and make sure
you can outperform the competition.

Good luck.

Gavin

I looked at you optin and it looks like your giving away an ebook.

I don't like ebooks. If the person downloads your ebook and doesn't read it, then when you make them an offer they will be like...I haven't read the ebook and I will do that first. Which ends up never happening.

I would offer something that they can consume very quickly. It should be very specific and shows a desired outcome. Also the page says something about helping them make money online for free. I'd ditch the free part. Ideally you should probably redo it completely, as it's not very compelling sounding as to your authority on the subject. Also, just collect the email, dump the name. You don't need it and it will probably help with conversion.

I would then come up with a tripwire. A tripewire is and irresistible offer that is of high value for very little money. The point is not to make money, but to turn them from a prospect to a buyer. The reason is that someone that has already purchased from you is like 10X more likely to purchase from you again and buy something of a higher value.

I don't know what your product is, but I'm assuming it's a digital IM course. So maybe take the very best part from it and use it as a tripwire and charge like $5. (test the price). Again this should be something they can consume quickly. Also, offer it to them on the thank you page of the optin. Again it needs to be of high quality. If they walk away dissatisfied, then selling your product is going to be hard at best.

Then immediately offer your product. If they don't buy, then offer it for 2 payments.

If they buy your product, then hit them with an up-sell. You have to be careful on the up-sell. You don't want to offer something that they expect to exist in the product they purchased. Or they will be like what else does it not include. On of the best up-sells is something that helps them to do what your product offers, but get it done quicker....software maybe. You could offer them consulting. Offer to do it for them.

If you do all of this, then the $7 lead cost shouldn't be an issue???

Just make sure that every step you are offering them quality...continuation of proof that you are an authority on your subject.