10 Things I Learned After Spending Over $1.4 Million On Pay Per Click Ads

After spending close to 1.5 million dollars on paid advertising, there is several things that I learned that kept me from going completely bankrupt. I’m going to teach you those 10 things, and we’re starting right now.

Hey, guys. It’s Marcus here, aka the Affiliate Marketing Dude. And if you like learning this kind of stuff and want to learn more about how to make money with paid ads, affiliate marketing, and anything that has to do with making money online, make sure you subscribe and click that little bell notification icon so you get my new videos and you can join us every Wednesday here, live on the channel, ask your questions, and get the answers.

For now, let’s dive into what I learned spending a bunch of money on pay-per-click advertising.

The first major lesson I learned doing pay-per-click ads is that people want things fast. They want to be able to find what they need at a glance, very quickly. And while we’d like to think that people are reading every word of our website, this isn’t the truth. The truth is is people are skimming your website, looking for the information they want right now. They’re not consuming everything. That’s why we’ve got to make our sites in a way that people skimming, people reading, and people just checking it out for the very first time can get exactly what they want at a glance, without digging, very, very fast. Because let’s face it, if they can’t find what they want in three seconds or less, they’re out of there.

The second major lesson I learned is that you can quickly and easily typecast your audience.

What does this mean? Well, this means quite simply that you can go into a market, test some ads, figure out what people want, figure out what they click on, figure out what their pain points are, and typecast them very quickly so that you know what the market wants for future marketing. You may have seen on my channel where I’ve done this in the tattoo market, finding out exactly what tattoos people want, in the money making market, finding out exactly what people’s pain points are, and even in the addiction market, where I polled my audience for less than few thousand dollars, got 3000 responses, full page responses, of people telling me in detail what their number one struggles are. And now that I know that information, armed with that, I can make a fortune in any market.

Now, the third most important thing is to remember that pay-per-click marketing is controllable.

A lot of people freak out when it comes to pay-per-click marketing. But they don’t have to. You see, you set the prices, you set the amount, you set how much you want to spend. And when it’s done, you hit “pause”, and you never spend a dime more than that.

So, what I advise to do is test really, really small with maybe five, 10, 15, or 20 dollars, if you’re in a bigger, more expensive market. Figure out what your market wants, what they click on, what they desire, what they need, and then go from there. You can test very small. So, the idea of needing a bunch of money to start isn’t exactly true. And while you may have seen that I’ve spent close to 1.5 million dollars on one platform alone, that wasn’t all in one day. That’s right, I started very small with five dollars here, see if I could make 10. 10 here, see if could make 20. And on, and on, and on we go in a very simple way that I’m actually testing realtime to get real results fast. Sometimes I’d get these results in less than a day. And for less than 50 bucks, I can get a perfect snapshot of any market really fast.

That brings us to number four: when you’re first starting out with paid traffic, you’ve got to remember that direct solutions are the best. You want to go for things like “how to remove an item from a credit report”, “how to publish a book”, and maybe something like “hard drive not working”. These are very specific, which means you’ll get the exact click that you want. And remember, when doing paid traffic, all clicks are not created equal.

So, when doing your direct response type ads, you want to embed the links to your offers within the content that has the answers the users are looking for.

Now, number five is something very easy, but overlooked a lot. It’s amazing how many people I see, seasoned marketers, who don’t do this one.

Number five is ask for the click.

In your ads, you want to make sure that you ask for the click. Ask the visitor, “Go to my website.”, “Click here to download.”, “Download free report here.”, “Click here for X.”, “Click here for Y.” And on your websites, make sure you’re telling them to click on the offers. “Fill out the form.”, “Click this.”, “Download here.”, “Click here to see more X.” Very important that you do this because this is what people respond to.

A bonus tip: make sure that all the links on your site are blue and underlined, because that’s what people are used to clicking.

And number six: building your list.

That’s right. You can build a mailing list extremely fast with paid advertising. In one market, I built a list of 450,000 people in just a few short weeks while I was making money. And no matter what market you’re in, you can build a list extremely fast by offering something of value to your market: a free report, a free video, a free assessment, a free evaluation. Anything you can give them to get them on your mailing list. And the key is to put your best offer on your thank you page so you recoup all the money that you paid getting the visitors there in the first place. This is known as a self-liquidating offer. It’s something that’s going to pay you back for the money you spent to get your customers to your website. This is something that will pay you back for getting all those visitors to your website. So, you’re not really spending money building your list. You’re actually building your list for free while learning about your market.

Number seven: deep keyword research will make or break you.

This is important because so many people go out there and they try to think of the most logical keyword to use for their market. And the problem with logical keywords is they’re so logical that everyone uses them, which drives the competition up, which drives the amount you have to pay-per-click through the roof, which unfortunately means a lot of failure for a lot of marketers.

Instead, what you want to do is find keywords that get people at different places in the buying process. Perhaps instead of going for “Canon TWI”, or whatever that camera is called, you go for “TWI video sample”, or something like that. And instead of going for “credit repair”, go for things like “How to remove items from my credit report.” Instead of going for “rehab”, why don’t you go for something like “How do I stay sober for seven days?”, or something like that? Very, very specific, very tight-knit. This is will get your click costs very low, and your visitors are going to be more likely to buy because you’re providing them a direct solution based on what they’re searching for.

I go over this keyword tactic in many of the videos here on my channel, which again is why you want to subscribe, click the little bell, and watch my latest videos, and join us live so that you can learn all this stuff.

And now, number eight. Number eight is to have small targeted ad groups.

You want small targeted ad groups so that you can quantify your results based on each keyword set. You’re going to notice that, oftentimes, most of your money is going to come from a handful of keywords. While a lot of marketers out there just put a thousand different keywords in their ad group, they have no idea what’s selling. When I go in and I do this tight-knit, I’m spending less, I’m getting better data, and I’m making more money because I’m being more direct.

So, get rid of the words that are not converting, and focus on the ones that are. And you do this by having three to five different keywords in each ad group focused on your market. Now, this is really good because you can change your ad in each group, and find out what converts to the right people so that you can put more money in your pocket.

Number nine is a very simple one as well, and this is use your keywords in your ad.

A lot of people waffle this, but if I’m going for the keyword “remove items from credit”, I want the words “remove items from credit” in my ad. Sounds basic, I know. But a lot of people don’t do this. This is going to result in a much higher click-through rate, which is going to get you more visitors, which is going to get you more data, and in turn make you more money.

And lastly, number 10. Number 10 is pretty basic, but I want you to get a different domain name for each separate niche market.

Now, if you’re going for something like “credit repair”, you can have all your ads under one main credit repair domain name. But if you branch out into something like “check your credit”, you might want to get a different domain name for that. Same thing with tattoos. You might find out that, hey, butterfly tattoos are really raking it in. I’m going to want to get myself a butterfly tattoo domain name.

Also, when you’re doing these, you want to have them for testing. And you’ll notice that having a tight-knit close market domain name is actually going to make your click costs less because your quality score is going to be a lot better because everything’s focused around the keywords you want, which is kind of how we should do marketing anyway.

So, I hope you enjoyed these 10 tips on what I learned after spending 1.5 million dollars on paid advertising. It’s actually a lot more than that. That’s just one account. And I hope you use these so that you can get results.

Now, I would highly urge you to check out the next video that’s going to pop up. It’s all about paid ads, how to make them work, what I did, what sites I used, and more. Make sure you subscribe right now, and then check out that video.

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