Internet Marketing & How To Attract Prospects: Lessons Learned – Don’t Have All Your Eggs in One Basket

I Was Just a Newbie

When I first started my online business and internet marketing career almost two years ago, my mentor taught me the method of attract marketing and real time lead generation using the quickest and most direct way of attracting new business, Google Adwords / Pay Per Click.

Prior to my actual marketing launch, I had of course learned to create and then had implemented all my business infrastructure and had it up and in place on the web … my business web site with embedded videos for personal branding, lead capture pages with good, effective ad copy, and lastly my auto-responder follow up e-mails. So there was a lot of learning and implementation on my part first before I ever really started my actual marketing campaigns on Google to attract prospects into my new business.

Once I launched my marketing campaign on Google Adwords, I continued to improve, enhance and expand my marketing with better ads and ad copy. I created additional capture pages that targeted new and different keywords for generating leads and to attract more prospects, and I also began split testing my PPC ads to optimize results from all of those campaigns.

I got very good results from my Google Adwords campaigns starting the very first month. I started making sales and money almost immediately. Although my pay per click campaigns were expensive, I considered this just a necessary business expense. However, I continued to make lots of new sales and profits in my business. I was also now building my business team, so I was very pleased with the way that my new business was growing.

The Lesson – the Google Slap

As a fairly new internet marketer at the time, I had not been told of nor was I aware of the “Google slap” … I had never even heard of it. Well, about eight months into my new business, I found out what the Google slap was and I found out the hard way.

One day while split-testing some new ads, all of a sudden and within a matter of just minutes, my Quality Scores on all my ads dropped from great to poor. My click-thru-ratios (CTR) had been well above average … they too dropped to zero. Finally, the cost-per-click (CPC) dollar amount I needed to bid to continue to have my ads displayed went so high that I could no longer afford to run them. What the heck was going on?

FYI -  when you submit an ad to Google, they check you out for compliance with their guidlelines before they approve and actively display your ad. They also preform this check when you re-submit an edited or changed ad or ads during your split-test process.

I was able to get a little-known 800 number for Google Support so I actually called them and managed to get a live Google Adwords Support rep. on the phone. I was told that my business web site was found no longer to be compliant with their new guidelines i.e., it did not contain what they considered to be good, relevant content. Remember, Google’s primary focus is providing the best experience and most relevant content to their users, the people who search on Google. (Most of my home page and lead capture pages were all video with very little textual content at the time)

The same Rep. also told me that Google no longer considered affiliate marketing, MLM/Network marketing and home businesses valid business models and they were going to start shutting down all pay per click ads related to those types of businesses. (This statement was later found not to be true, but it certainly caused me to panic at the time)

So within a matter of less than one hour, my business had been completely shut down by the Google slap. I was devastated .. what was I going to do?

The Outcome – Putting Humpty Dumpty Back Together Again

What I did do, and mostly out of anger at the time, was swear that I would do whatever it took to resurrect my now-dead marketing and get back in the game and on Google again. I was determined to come back and beat them at their own game.

I had also learned a valuable lesson … the hard way … not to have all your marketing eggs in one basket. But in my own defense, I had only been taught from my mentor that singular method to attract prospects into my business, Google Adwords / Pay Per Click. I didn’t know such a thing as the Google slap even existed, much less that it could happen to me. But it did. And ignorance is no excuse, as they say.

I spent the next three to four months – 1.) Rebuilding my web site from scratch, this time using an SEO optimized web site builder program called XSitePro2 and writing lots of good relevant content into all my web pages. 2.) I immersed myself into learning everything about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) that I possibly could, coupled with -  3.) Maximizing and optimizing all my ad copy. I plugged into people like Frank Kern and Dan Kennedy. 4.) I started a massive article writing and marketing campaign, not only to start to attract new prospects again, but to start building large numbers of back-links to my web site on the Internet so I could again get ranked on Google page one, but this time for free! And guess what? It took some time, but I was able to do it!

Conclusion and My Advice to All Online Marketers

So that, my friends, is the lesson I learned the hard way  … not to have all your marketing eggs in one basket. I now have a diverse, multi-dimensional marketing strategy in place for my business, where the loss of one piece will not completely shut me down. I highly recommend that if you are not employing these same tactics for yourself … to steadily attract new business, you need to start doing so immediately. You should be utilizing every avenue of marketing available to you, especially the free ones such as video marketing, article marketing, and a lot of the SEO techniques and methods.

Note: After doing my taxes for that year, I found that I had paid Google almost 40% of all the money I brought in from my business … in pay per click costs, so it turned out for the best with respect to my advertising costs too. I am now able to attract more prospects and my marketing costs today are negligible, especially compared to what I used to pay Google for pay per click!

In closing, the biggest and hottest new trend now for savvy 21st Century online marketers is utilizing a personal blog as your central marketing hub, but instead offering value via free and helpful training and information to people, not direct promotion, and also building a large “tribe” of online friends … but whose function is to provide reciprocal content syndication to/from all the social media sites. Using this new methodology to attract new prospects, you ideally then funnel them all into building a long term list with whom you have established trust and credibility from your blog. You will then be able to market just about anything to this list of people for many years to come and generate an income most people only dream about, but never realize. If you are already into this new trend (and if not you should be) then you’re already headed into a fully multi-dimensional and extremely profitable world of marketing online.

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