Get Paid To Advertise Your Stuff

A Little Known Google Secret For Getting Paid To Promote Your Products & Services

By now, you guys know that we’re not great fans of advertising. In fact we actively avoid advertising in most cases…

However, we’ve found a way of combining Google AdSense (AdSense) and Google AdWords (AdWords) to ensure WE GET PAID to advertise even if we don’t sell our own products!

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…and, as it’s working so well for us, we thought we’d share it with you!

When we first tried Google AdWords we got disastrous results. It felt completely hit and miss and even when people did click – they didn’t buy! But, we kept at it, all the time looking for ways to get just the right number of clicks while working on increasing our conversion rates. And things were beginning to work in our favour; we were just about making more money from sales of our products than we were spending on Google AdWords.

But it still felt like advertising to us. We were still in the usual catch 22 of paid for advertising where: the more people saw us – the more we paid. So we dug a bit deeper and decided to add AdSense to our landing pages. And this is what led to our system where we get paid to advertise and then get paid again when you buy.

Now you’re likely to be thinking, “This all looks very interesting but I have no idea what AdWords or AdSense is!”

Well, {!firstname_fix} allow me to explain…

AdWords is an ingenious solution from Google that allows you to bid on certain searched for words and/or phrases. Your bid price determines where in the list your ad will appear – and the more you spend the higher you get. However, it’s even more clever than that – the better conversion rate you get (and remember, as Lean Marketers we’re always measuring our conversions) the less Google expects you to pay to get the best slot – so Google rewards you for writing a well constructed ad that generates clicks.

Google gets paid when someone clicks on your ad, either from the google search engine or from the content (AdSense Ads etc.) on other people’s sites. You put a maximum amount you want to spend per day for each campaign into their system and the rest is worked out automatically.

That’s the simple explanation – we’ll explain more about using this excellent marketing tool in a later article.

AdSense on the other hand is when you allow Google to place ads (usually targeted based on your content) onto your website. The ads will be relevant to the content on the page, so the more specific the content, the more targeted the ads will be, and the more click throughs (more on those in a moment) you will get. You get paid by Google every time someone clicks on one of these ads on your site. So the more click throughs you get, the more revenue you’ll make.

AdSense ads are easy to set up. Google takes you step by step through the process and provides you with a bit of HTML code to add to the pages of your website.

Google gets paid by the advertisers (see AdWords) and YOU get paid by Google.

So now you know the basics, here’s how we use these tools to get paid to advertise!

1. First off – we have very targeted web pages and web sites that only talk about what people have searched for, that are well indexed in the search engines. These web pages typically contain a free download or a free self-test so we can encourage visitors to join our mailing list.
2. We then set up Google AdWords to promote our freebie/quiz. We run multiple (low daily spend) campaigns, split testing the ads, measuring the response rates and click throughs, changing headlines, changing landing pages and generally tweaking until the response rates are as good as we can get.
3. We also measure conversion rates (how many people actually buy our product) and tweak the copy and page layout to get that as high as possible.
4. When we are sure that the campaign is profitable, we up the daily spend, again measuring and ensuring the campaigns stay profitable.
5. At the same time, we also place Google AdSense ads on our landing pages. Then, when Google sends targeted visitors to this page via our Google AdWords ad on their search engine, the visitors also get to see Google AdSense ads which a good few will click! And when they click – we get paid!
6. By ensuring we have targeted pages we keep upping the clickthrough rates on the AdSense ads, until, after some hard work and a little luck, the Google AdSense INCOME exceeds the Google AdWords SPEND.
7. Once we have this equlibrium our advertising campaigns (which bring us qualified leads) pay for themselves and we get 100% profit from the sales we make of our own products. This is Free targeted advertising – now that’s LEAN.

Note that we always aim to have more ways to get paid (AdSense clicks plus our products) than we do to pay (AdWords clicks). Plus our landing pages have a clear MWRs (Most Wanted Responses): to get people on our mailing list; to sell our product immediately; to have visitors click the AdSense ads on our site.

Here’s a diagram that sets out the essential building blocks.

Recommendations

1. Monitor your results – use the kaizen approach – do » measure » review
2. Set low daily limits to start with on the AdWords campaigns and only increase when you’re sure you are converting.
3. Be sure your AdWords campaign is profitable before bothering with AdSense.
4. You do need to put some effort in up front – often you don’t get it right first time so be prepared to tweak.
5. You must have well defined and easily accessible targets – proper niches – and choosing the right keywords can be tricky.
6. Once the campaign is running smoothly just monitor it weekly and tweak as necessary – there is little ongoing work.
7. Look out for seasonal variations (some words will be hot at certain times of year) and take advantage of them, adjusting your campaigns accordingly.

Warnings

• Google is a business. They are in the business of providing searchers with the information they are searching for. If you try and “trick” Google (by putting ads up that link through to unrelated pages), they will penalise you. Think of it this way; when you use the Google search you are looking to find the most appropriate information as quickly as possible, so make sure that your ads send people to the correct place for their search.
• Some people think they can just set up a links page, with no relevant content and put Google AdSense all over the pages and people will just flock to them, click on the ads and they will become millionaires. This just isn’t so! Plus, never, click on AdSense ads on your own site in order to falsely get Google to pay for your clicks – they will find out!
• Read Google’s terms and conditions. Do not try to cheat them or break the rules. Google really is a good tool and you do not want to be banned. There are lots of stories about people getting their sites banned – you have been warned. One of the rules is that we can’t tell you how much we earn from the AdSense campaigns – sorry!
• Payment – you pay for AdWords as you use them, but only get paid for your AdSense when you reach a minimum income limit – this may be a problem if you’re running on a tight budget with no cashflow.

If you want to know lots more about making money from google AdWords, then here’s the book we read when we were learning…

We’ll share more in future editions about how we use AdSense and AdWords to make our business more lean.

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