M
y first step in taking advantage of the specificity of the Adsense program was identifying the particular area that I wanted to target; in this case it was the Great Neck section of Long Island, New York.I chose this area for several reasons: it was close to where I was living at the time in northern Queens; it was a highly affluent neighborhood, full of luxury mansions; and finally competition in Long Island is rela- tively weak, unlike the Upper East Side of Manhattan, another affluent neighborhood but one that is full of gyms, training studios, and other independent trainers.
I used the Adwords program to bid for variations on the term Personal Training in this neighborhood. If anyone entered a term such as “Personal Training” or “Personal Training, Long Island”, which are the most likely search terms for someone to use, I wanted my ad to show up. I chose to include the more broad and competitive term “Personal Training” because I wanted my ad to be seen by as many people as possible in this area. As I mentioned, this term is highly competitive and even in Long Island costs more than $7 per click to reach the top spot. In a traditional advertising sense, paying a lot to reach high value clients is a part of doing business and is considered a worth- geted client base (I of course taught the technique to other Personal Trainers and helped them get great results as well) .
car off the lot (you of course pay them back for this when you buy the car). But in my case, I didn’t want my advertising costs to spiral out of control. The low budget also makes these techniques effective for the new Personal Trainer who has a limited budget to work with.
So here’s what I did:
Remember when I said that you could chose the words that appear in your ad? I chose my ads to show the word “Long Island” in the ad re- sult whenever anyone searched for Personal Training. What that means is if someone in Long Island searched the term Personal Train- ing, my ad appeared among the paid ads, except I was the only one with a targeted ad saying Long Island. Here’s an example:
Usual ad result in Google -
Personal Training For You Get Great Personal Training From Me, GUARANTEED.
www.averagepersonaltrainer.com
Here’s how my ad looked -
Long Island Personal Training Top-Level Personal Training Comes To Long Island.
www.gohardfitness.com
Notice how I used the term Long Island twice in the text of my ad. This is a huge advantage because when someone from Long Island scanned the ad results for their search, mine was the only one that ac- tually had those words appearing in the ad text. That means my ad stood out and probably had a good chance of getting clicked. In this way, I didn’t even have to bid the most money for the top spot, which
Another uncommon technique in choosing text for ads is to write something really out of left field and uncommon. For example, I could create an ad like this:
Don’t Hire A Personal Trainer Don’t Even Think Of Hiring A Trainer Until You Read This. www.slickpersonaltrainer.com
This is inevitably shocking and makes the prospect want to click the ad to find out what it means. If once they click the ad and visit your site they get caught up in the content, they’ll completely forget that they were ever “tricked” into visiting your site in the first place. This technique as well will get you a better than aver- age click through without paying for the highest bid on Google.
Landing Pages
The use of specialized ads can be stacked with another technique, the use of land- ing pages. This is where you create a separate home page to correspond to each different type of ad.
For example, my Personal Training practice was based mainly in Queens, but for my Long Island ads I had them directed to a landing page that had the words Long Island all over it. This way, when a person clicked on my ad talking about Long Island, they were taken to a page that corresponded to that ad. To the prospect living in Long Island searching for a Personal Trainer, it appears to them in this case was $7. I was able to bid about $2.50 per ad, enough to keep the ad on the first page, and still get a great results. Even though my ad wasn’t at the top spot, a prospect quickly searching which ads to click will likely choose mine. That’s all I want, because using the web design techniques we discussed already, I can let my web-site text do the rest of the work.
Almost no one else knows about this technique of targeting your ad results, but when you use it your ads will have a higher chance of get-
targeted specifically to their location.
If setting up these landing pages and Adsense campaigns sound like rocket science, you can either have a web-designer or a friend familiar with the Internet take care of it for you. To a web-designer setting this up is extremely easy and should cost you very little, and even a friend may be able to create a separate landing page for you and direct your Adsense campaign to it.
I
n summary, these Adsense techniques cost money but can prove to be a worth- while investment. If you find that you’ve spent a couple of hundred dollars on your Adsense campaign and have hardly got a call or received a strong lead, you need to pull the campaign and reevaluate what could be going wrong. Maybe your web-site’s look or message is losing out to one of your competitors; or it could be the call to action on your site isn’t compelling enough or your customers can’t find your phone-number or email address on the site. Whatever it is, there’s got to be a reason.In my case, when I first started using Adsense, I first brain-stormed the places I would want to train and then directed my campaign only to those areas. I received the strongest and highest profit clients of my career from this method and highly recommend it to anyone that is slowly trying to transition into a progres- sively higher level clientele. It won’t pay dividends over-night and will be the most expensive form of online advertising you do, but over a few weeks it will give you exactly the strong leads you’re looking for.