We just talked about this in a previous section and we kind of combined AdWords and AdSense. AdWords is when you’re going and you’re paying money to Google in order to have your ads appear on their website, on their search engine results, and on the publisher network. The AdSense part of it though, is when you own a website, you can actually put those ads up on your site, and when people click on those ads, you can collect a piece.
Now this was one of the primary ways that I was generating money when we were doing lead generation nationwide. So I told you before, when I first started this particular webinar, that I had started at least two national lead generation businesses where we were doing significant money generating leads. Even before we sold the leads, even before we worked the leads, any type of prospect coming in, as we were building that list, we were generating revenue. And one of the major ways that we were generating revenue was with Google AdSense.
And so we would have these ads on our website and on the website people would come on the site, a certain percentage of them would go and sign up for our mailing list, or request information, or get a special report, or some other way of getting them into our lead funnel, and a certain percentage of them would not do that. And so what we decided to do is, we were doing some testing, and we decided to put up ads on the websites so that if they decided they were not interested in requesting information, they did have an opportunity to leave the site. And they had an opportunity to leave the site by clicking on an ad that may have been a better match for what they were looking for. And what it turned out to be, is that this turned out to be significant revenue across all the different lead generation things that we were doing. Now you could use it on a much smaller scale, if you wanted to, by placing Google AdSense ads on your website that you’re doing lead generation from. Now I’ll give you kind of some pros and cons here.
So, some people will argue, and I’m not saying that they’re wrong, because I think that they’re actually right, but some people would argue that having ads on your website kind of dilutes your credibility to a certain degree, because you’re not actually operating your business without marketing, without advertising on it. You have advertisers on your site. So if somebody sees that you’re running a handyman website, and you’re soliciting people for business, the fact that you have some ads on your website can, in a lot of peoples’ minds, limit your credibility and how serious they are about your business if you put up ads on there. So it’s something to really thing about before you put up ads on your website, as to whether or not the money you would earn from AdSense would be enough to significantly offset the marketing you’re doing in order to generate prospects and leads, or if you wanted to keep the ads off altogether and increase that credibility on your site.
What I might suggest you try, we had this discussion before about whether or not to create multiple websites, multiple domain names, and kind of multiple website hosting accounts – one of the things you could do is you could have your main site, and on your main site you have absolutely no AdSense ads at all. That really is for when somebody is already requested information, they’re already your client, you’re sending out an email to them, you’re sending out your newsletter to them. Whatever it is, you’re getting them to come back to that main site, and the main site has no advertising whatsoever.
But then in your mind, and not that you need to go form separate businesses, but in your mind, maybe you have sub-business within your main business and the sub-business is a lead generation business. And let’s say that business has two, three, four, five different lead generation websites. And the lead generation websites are basically a little bit of content with some ads on it, and you’re going to market to very specific niches to get people to come to that website, and those are lead generation. Once they become a lead generation website, you can have ads on them and you can recoup some of the marketing cost you may spend in order to get traffic there. Now it may just offset it a little bit, it may fully cover your marketing costs, or, like with our model, we were able to generate ad revenue such that it was actually a profit center for us. So it depends on how you want to structure your business. You could have like a little mini – you could almost think of yourself as having your own little lead generation company where you’re generating leads at wholesale cost for yourself. Not for everybody. Not necessarily recommended. But it is one way to do it where you don’t have to have ads on your own website and you can also get all the benefits of having some AdSense revenue coming in to offset that advertising revenue.
So we talked about AdWords versus AdSense, talked about AdSense on your website, or other lead generation websites, and Google AdSense is one of the ways that you can get paid to generate leads. So it is one of three ways, which I’ll talk about later, of getting paid when you’re doing lead generation. Which makes lead generation much more fun and profitable to do. So you may want to consider doing that.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Using Google AdSense on your handyman business website can help lower the cost of your leads. Or, if you work hard at it can completely eliminate the cost of your lead generation efforts. If you really take the time to tweak your marketing and website, it may even be able to provide you a net positive return on your marketing expense even before you convert a single prospect to a handyman client? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
The first one we’re going to talk about, and we mentioned it before when we talked about pay-per-click, is Google AdWords. What Google AdWords is, is the ability for you to buy advertising space on Google’s website for search and also as part of the AdSense or publishers network, where you can have your ads showing up on other people’s websites. So, I have an image on the screen here, and you can see on the image that the areas highlighted in yellow are where Google AdWords ads would appear. Those are the ads where you may be willing to pay Google $.50 for someone to click on your ad and be taken directly to your website on a certain page you designate. It may also be where you can have your ads show up on there for some pay-per-impression, and those are very rare circumstances, most of the stuff on AdWords is pay-per-click.
I was doing a lot of AdSense, which we’re going to talk about here in a minute, and AdSense is the other half of AdWords. AdWords is when you have a business owner come in, and they’re willing to pay Google a certain amount of money in order to have somebody give them the opportunity to click on their ad and go to their website. AdSense is when a publisher of a website has a website and they’re willing to show ads on their site, where if the person clicks on the ad, they are taken away from their website. Google makes a certain amount of money for doing that, whether it’s $.50 or $1, whatever they’re charging for their click, and the publisher of the website gets a part of what Google is collecting. So if Google is collecting $1 for its click on the website, the publisher may get a couple cents on there, $.30, $.50, somewhere around there. It’s not actually disclosed the exact percentage, but then that person actually gets that amount and Google gets the other part of it. And so there’s kind of a sharing.
So AdWords is the part where you go on there and buy the ads, and the AdSense part is the other side. And we’ll talk about AdSense here in a moment. However, the other nice thing that AdWords has is the ability to go do some keyword research. So if you’re considering buying some marketing on Google one of the nice features that AdWords offers is the ability for you to type in a keyword, or a website address, or a group of keywords, and then Google will come back and say, “You picked these keywords. However, realize too that these other keywords may be of interest to you as well,” which can give you different ways or thoughts about how to market your handyman business, because they may – you may go in there and type in “kitchen remodeling” and they may come back and say “upgrading your kitchen” or “redoing countertops,” and they may suggest a whole slew of other keywords that you could then write additional content, additional articles on, or buy those keywords from Google. That’s what their initial interpretation was, of providing that data. But you can also use it as a guide to see what you’d want to write about and what you’d want to provide. So it becomes a really great research tool for you when you’re trying to determine what words to use on your website, and things of that nature, and they’ve got that as a free service on their site.
Now AdWords is one of the only things that we’re going to talk about today from Google where you’re going to be paying money to use it. Almost all the other services we’re going to talk about are free, but AdWords is the only one where you pay money to have your advertising put on their site and their publisher’s website, via AdSense, in order to get some marketing out there. So let’s move onto the next one.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want to learn specific strategies for using Google AdWords in your handyman business to generate more clients? Check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” for more information.
This is just one tiny excerpt from “How To Market Your Mortgage Broker Business” (a 2 hour audio training course) that you can download for free.
Jassen: Right. Alright, now I want to get to the crème de la crème of our presentation tonight. At least in my mind because this is, when I first heard you talk about doing this I looked at you and said, “What!” but this is something that you are probably world renowned for, but that is getting paid to do lead generation. Making lead generation a profitable business activity in and of itself. That is a phenomenal concept, and I am still mind boggled by it, even though I have done it before now. It still boggles my mind, so you have three distinct ways that are kind of your favorite for getting paid to generate leads so could you go into what those methods are and briefly describe how somebody could take advantage of them.
James: Even before I go into the three, I want to set the perspective as to how you need to look at this and if you step back from being a mortgage broker for a minute and you say, “Ok, I really have two businesses here. I have a lead generation business where my focus is to generate as many qualified people that either right now need a loan or very soon will need a loan,” and that is one part of your business and the other part of your business is servicing existing clients and getting loans and brokering the loans and working with them. So if you take it and you say, “Ok, I have got two businesses going there.”
You could say, “In my lead generation business, what are my profit centers? How can I generate money while I am out there generating leads?” and these are the three things that I am going to be talking about because that is how I approached it. When I first did my first lead generation business which was in the late 90’s we started out with real estate, and it soon because apparent that people inquiring about buying or selling a property were more likely to need a loan than other things, and so one of the first profit I centers I thought of was I was going to sell leads, and I started looking at that as a business model and kind of growing it from there and then we starting out into other industries.
We went to attorneys. We then started doing other services and sales industries to the point where eventually we got to the point where we were doing 1,200 different industries with lead generation. And then it occurred to me that if there is a large percentage of people leaving the website without inquiring about our product or service, what if we provided some type of advertising or some type of revenue generating mechanism so that if they decided to leave the website we were still compensated, and I realize that I was going to lose some inquiries from the business because having that type of advertising or site is going to, in some people’s minds, is going to devalue your business, and it is going to make you look less professional, but it will also take some people away from your website that might otherwise have said, “I am going to fill out this form, because I can’t find anything better any way.” So you are going to lose a couple of those guys. What I found out was that it was worth it for me to generate the revenue up front so that I had what ultimately became an unlimited advertising budget. If you are bringing in more money than you are spending in marketing in order to get people to come to your website, you have a virtually unlimited advertising budget. You can keep going and doing it more and more and more and it keeps feeding on itself, right?
Jassen: Right.
James: So I was willing to accept a lower perception of our business in the marketplace because we had ads on our website, and I was also willing to accept that a certain percentage of the people that might otherwise have inquired were going to walk away. I was ok with that in order to make the money up front and have that business model. That is a decision for you to make as to whether or not you want to take that approach. However, putting advertisements on your website like Google AdSense as an example can be, if you really work your number and you know what you are doing, be a profit center. For the overwhelming majority of you, it will help to reduce your lead costs. It could even make your lead costs a break even proposition, but for some of you who are really willing to tweak and test and do things like that, I will tell you to the tune of six figures you can make it profitable. Now in order to get to the six figure level, you need to be doing this on a very large scale. So if you are doing it just in your local city, the chance of you making six figures on your lead generation efforts is pretty small. Could it be done? I think there is a possibility but it is a long shot. However, can you make it so that your cost per lead goes way down because you are being reimbursed. Can you make it so that your costs per lead is zero? I think that you can do both of those pretty easily. If you are talking about making a profit, you would need to tweak some things, be testing placement of your ads, how you are getting people to your website, what the effectiveness of people on your website is once they get there, testing a lot of these things to make it so that you are either maximizing profitability or you are maximizing people inquiring about getting a loan, and that is a fine line by the way.
Jassen: I do want to point out that you mentioned some people might say it, you’ll lose some people that might have opted in or requested information or signed up for your free report because of the presence of the advertising. But the way I look at it is that the people that do stick around and do request information in my mind they are more qualified prospects, because if you look at the advertising as clutter, if you look at it as unprofessional or what not, the people that are still going to slug through that and sign up for your offer, they are self-selecting in a way that somebody else isn’t, if the advertising wasn’t there. And so in my mind I think they are more qualified prospects.
James: Can I point out something else to you?
Jassen: Sure.
James: If you have ever been a mortgage broker that bought mortgage leads, people that were interested in getting a loan, you may have bought mine so if you were buying mine, the quality of the leads you would get from buying leads from a lead broker are the same ones that if you had ads on your website yourself.
Jassen: Right.
James: Think about it that way. So almost imagine you bought yourself a lead generation business. You are getting your leads at whatever it costs to generate those.
Jassen: Right. You know I remember when I was a mortgage broker, our company was paying, I want to say somewhere around $30 or $40 per web generated lead from a lead generation vendor and they were selling them to three or four different companies and then we had to scramble to compete on that where as you could be doing this on your own and competing against nobody for that lead.
James: Right. Yes, we were selling ours for considerably less than that, but I was doing volume. I mean I was generating 100 plus of these things per day.
Jassen: And that is incredible. Who on the call wouldn’t want one or two, three, four, maybe even 100 qualified leads just showing up in your inbox throughout the day of people that came to your website, and they filled out a form requesting more information. I mean they raised their hand, they slugged through the swamp of the internet to do that on your website. Who wouldn’t want that happening and then for the people that aren’t going to self-select into your lead funnel there and add themselves to your list, maybe you will make 25 or 50 cents or who knows what from Google AdSense when they click off of you. That is such an incredible way to go and again I always like to be the guy that says, but the way for those people that don’t believe this, for people that are hearing this and going what you are crazy, I received my 1099 from Google a few days ago and that 1099 was for one of my companies. I also have 1099s for one of my other companies but that particular 1099 was in excess of $11,000.00 for the Ad Sense ads that I had on three of my lead generation sites for the first half of last year.
James: How much did you spend on marketing in order to generate that $11,000.00 approximately?
Jassen: I didn’t spend a dime.
James: Because you were doing a lot of the stuff we were talking about, the free methods or very low cost methods in order to do lead generation.
Jassen: I didn’t spend a penny on AdWords or a penny on MSN or Yahoo search. I didn’t buy any advertising anywhere. I was using all free methods that anybody could do.
James: I mean I talk a lot about these strategies in the week long mortgage broker marketing course about how to do this, but the model is really simple guys, if you need to have 100 visitors, and I am just picking that number out of the air because your website is going to be different from my website and so on, but if you need 100 visitors in order to come to your website to have somebody inquire via your web form and say, “Yes, I am interested in a loan,” or “I am interested in the free special report” which I will talk about here in a minute or, “I am interested in the video on how to do this” or whatever it is that you are trying to get them to raise their hand about becoming a potential prospect for you, well if you know you need 100, and you know that on average on your website your articles get 10 per month per article, well how many articles do you need in order to generate 1 per month? Well you need 10 articles in order to generate one inquiry per month. If you know you want to have five inquiries per month or 5 inquiries per week because you know that for every 5 people that inquire on your website you are converting one to an actual closed commissionable check in your hand as a mortgage broker, well then do the math. Work backwords, so ok, well my goal now is I need to create whatever that number is. I don’t even know, I didn’t do the math in my head. Let’s say it is 50 articles or something like that in order to get to that point, then go ahead and make 50 articles, and if you have to go take an afternoon to do that, well if you have a client you are busy, great then work with the client. If you don’t have anything to do and you have to do marketing anyway write the articles. One of the things people don’t realize is that right now you and I talking on the phone, we are creating articles.
Jassen: Right, you want to explain?
James: Yes, basically, you and I are recording this webinar and then we will go back through and we will have the entire webinar transcribed… so we will pay somebody. I will go onto one of these websites, and we are going to talk about outsourcing in a minute, I will go onto one of those websites, and I will pay someone a flat fee in order to go transcribe the entire hour or two hour webinar for us, and then I will take those, and I will put those up as content on the website. So you could as the mortgage broker go and interview a real estate agent or go interview a real estate investor or someone else in your industry, home inspector, insurance agent, anyone who deals with the home buying process, the financing process, whatever it is and then have that information put as articles on the website in the interview format for the benefit of your visitors and then those become popular and people come to your website to read those and learn and then they will say, “Oh, this guy is a mortgage broker. He can help me with the loan,” because you are going to have your information at the bottom and that is going to be prospects for you.
Jassen: Correct. Alright we have been talking about the AdSense side of the getting paid for lead generation model, but there are two other ways that you also do this. Could you just briefly go into those.
James: Sure, the two other ways are selling information and products directly as a lead generation strategy and the last one is recommending products and services once the prospect has inquired and they are on your client and prospect list.
So let’s talk about quickly selling information products. Let’s say you have a three hour course you put together on financing secrets for real estate investors. You could go and sell that course for $49.00 for whatever price you set for it and actually make money to have people raise their hand and say, “I am a real estate investor interested in getting loans and learning these secrets, go ahead and send me your product for $49.00,” but then you can go and follow up with them and say, “Hey, did you get the CD’s I sent over, have you had a chance to listen to them. If you need a loan, let me know, and I will follow up with you and if you ever need anything, I am your mortgage broker guy so I can help you implement the strategies I talked about in that course. So now you have made money during the lead generation process and now you also have a potential client. So that is a second way to do it.
The third way to do it is recommending products and services once they become a prospect on your client list. So maybe you have a credit repair program that you also sell. Once somebody has inquired about being a potential loan client for you, maybe part of your newsletter is to send them a flyer that says, “Hey, if you need help improving your credit, here is a credit repair company that I recommend that costs $500,” or whatever it is, and maybe you get a commission on that. Well, if you are getting a certain percentage of the people that inquire about being a prospect to take your credit repair course, and you are receiving a commission on that credit repair course, you could be recouping some all or more than what it costs in order to generate prospects on your list. That is just one example and buy the way, make sure you are complying with RESPA and doing everything according to what your broker says and your state laws and your laws about being paid and recommending things.
Jassen: Right. The obligatory disclosure — we are not attorneys and this is not legal advice so speak with counsel regarding anything, especially with RESPA. If someone doesn’t want, if someone wants to take some of these strategies and run with them, but let’s say they don’t want to create any information products or they don’t know how or they just don’t want to but they like the idea of the strategy, what can they do if they are in that boat?
James: Well, they can sell someone else’s information product. That is one way to do it. There is lots of ways you can outsource the creation of the information product. You can pay someone to go put together a two hour course or three hour course or full day seminar. There are lots of different ways to attack it. If someone needs particular help, because they are having a problem with it, and they see the benefit of it, just paying someone to have it done, just contact me directly. I make information products all the time, it is really easy to do once you know what you are doing, but it takes a certain personality type to be able to get on the phone and have an outline and do what you need to do in order to get it done. They can contact me on the website LearnToBeRich.com.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. This is just a small part of what you’ll learn in the full training: “The World’s Greatest Mortgage Broker Marketing Course”.
The following is an excerpt from “How To Market Your Handyman Business” (a 1 hour and 41 minute free training course download available to our visitors).
James: Is that kind of what you’re looking for?
Jassen: Yeah, and what you just said, keeping in touch with people that really is the key to the whole thing is keeping in touch, keeping top of mind awareness so that when they think about a project that they need a handyman for you’re the person that they are going to call so – man we are really running on the time clock here do you mind if I run through the Google tools real quick?
James: I’d love you to.
Jassen: OK, I’ve done a couple webinars myself over the past year or so about how to set up you know a home based internet businesses using nothing but Google tools and there’s some Google tools you use that I’m just now starting to use that you’re obviously more of an expert on then I am but you can literally set up all these tech-y things that we’ve been talking about using nothing but free tools that are provided by Google.
The one that’s not free you have already briefly mentioned as a lead generation method is Google AdWords, If you’ve ever done a Google search and you see the ads that show up at the top or on the right hand side those are Google AdWords, people put together an ad and they say I will pay so much per click for my ads to appear and based on how much you bid is where or what position your ad appears in and people can see your ad as you click on that and you know you’ll get traffic to your website and help build your list that way.
You also talked about getting paid to do your lead generation by having ads from Google on your own web page so that you can get paid for people clicking on those ads when they come to your website and that again is called Google AdSense.
Another really important tool and personally I think that this is – out of all the Google tools I think that this is personally the most important but that’s Google Analytics, you talked earlier about tracking and measuring your marketing well, Google Analytics allows you to track and measure who’s coming to your website, how long they are sticking around, where they’re coming from and the where they’re coming from I think is the most important aspect there and so it really allows you to target and prove your marketing efforts that you’re doing online.
The next thing is Google Feedburner, you just mentioned the RSS feed thing and that is what Feedburner does it is an RSS aggregator tool and it allows people to subscribe to your website content and get notified of updates it is also a tool to use as your electronic list so you can actually use Feedburner as your email list it’s not ideal for that solution but it is a free and effective method for building an email list if that’s part of your marketing plan.
James: Yeah, I don’t recommend using it for that but it can be used.
Jassen: It can be done for that. Google Groups is a tool on Google that I think has two uses one – and you and I have both done this actually is you can use this as your email list central place, you can do that you can also find other Google Groups that are where people get together and talk about different topics so maybe you find a Google Group about people that are finishing their basement or people that have older homes of a certain style and they’re looking for tips and hardware and whatnot for maintain their home you can become an expert in those groups and people will get to know you as an expert by you participating and you can build business that way.
Google Website Optimizer, this is a tool for tracking – not tracking but for testing conversion items you talked earlier about pressing your headline, Google Website Optimizer will do what are called split tests for you so you can for example pit two headlines head to head on an opt in page for people to sign up to your list and you can track whether you know headline A or headline B perform better or which special report is going to get you more subscribers you can do that kind of stuff with Google Website Optimizer.
Google Webmaster Tools this is actually something that you have definitely played with a lot more than I have, it’s only something that I’ve been looking at literally over the past few weeks but it’s got some cool stuff it can help you generate a site map for your website which Google can use to kind of track where everything is on your website it can help improve your search engine optimization. I think the coolest thing in there is something that you actually showed me that I didn’t even know existed until like I said a couple weeks ago but you can actually see what keywords Google is ranking you for and you can see some numerical statistics on how you’re performing with those keywords, that’s really, really cool from kind of an internet geek perspective like I am so.
Google Trends this is – can kind of be looked at as a research tool and I think where this can be most important for our handyman audience tonight is they can go to you know trends.google.com and they can type in a comma separated list of things to see what people are looking for so if they’re trying to decide whether they should niche into you know basement remodeling or kitchen remodeling or electrical work you know some of these sub-niches that we’ve talked about tonight they can go to Google Trends and type those things in and they can see what people are searching for more of so maybe basement remodeling is being searched for you know ten times as often as exterior painting and so that gives you a clue of kind of what you need to focus on it’s a really, really neat tool.
Lastly Google Alerts I use this extensively it is a spy tool, I use it alert me I get an email, several emails a day I do – I’ve got it set up for my own name, my business name, I actually have it set up for your name James and also some things that are important to me for example I’m big into figure skating and so I’ve got several Google Alerts set up about particular figure skaters and also since I’m a judge things related to the International judging system within your handyman business you can use it to look for what people are writing about you online for your own name, your business name, your competitors names I think it’s also a cool little tool to use to find you know news groups and discussion boards and things like that and so you can be notified if anybody you know asks a question on a blog for example and they say “Hey, I live in Miami and I’m thinking about getting my house resided you know anybody got any tips on that?” and so if you have a Google Alert set up for Miami, home residing and you get a Google Alert telling you that somebody asked that question then bam you can go to that blog or that forum and engage in that conversation and perhaps get a prospect or multiple out of that so that was my not quite so short rundown of Google Tools.
James: I was just thinking to myself you did such an awesome job that next time I think I’m just going to stick around for the introduction and I’m going to say Jassen why don’t you handle the first couple ones and I’m going to go away and take a break I’m just going to let you finish the whole thing because you did an awesome job, you went through them really well so yeah, that’s great.
Jassen: It still took two minutes longer than I wanted it to but-
James: That’s alright we’ll get through the rest of this information so-
Jassen: OK.
James: We’ve only got about four more to go.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want access to our full 7 hour training course? Upgrade to “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” today to get instant access and take your handyman business to the next level.
Jassen: Alright, that’s great. Now the next thing here is a lot of people look at a lot of these marketing stuff and they immediately think, “Oh, that’s going to cost me all kinds of money.”
James: Right.
Jassen: But here you have three ways to get paid to actually get your lead generation.
James: Yes this is kind of a foreign concept to a lot of business owners. They look at advertising and marketing as an expense on their books. I built several business models where I’ve generated six figure incomes from doing the lead generation side.
Jassen: Right.
James: So what I want to point out to you is that I know… like deep down in my bones know…
Jassen: [laughter]
James: …I know there are a lot of people out there that don’t believe me. They’re like, “No, you’re not going to be able to make your money back through lead generations.” I’m telling you I’ve done it, okay. I have done lead generations on the scale that I was able to generate six figures net revenue from doing lead generations. So you can build a list of potential clients and make money doing it. Here are the three ways that I recommend you do it.
Number one is if you’re willing to put advertisements on your website, you could put Adsense or Yahoo’s equivalent on your website so that when people come to your website, some of them may click on ads that are for maybe even competing products or services and you’ll get paid $0.50, $0.10, $0.20, a $1.00, $1.20, $1.50… whatever it is that that ad is paying. When they click on that site you can actually make money by having people come to your website clicking on ads. So if you have a ton of content – remember you’re doing articles – and people were coming to your website?
Jassen: Yes.
James: Only a small percentage of those guys are actually going to request information from you. But if you have ads on your website, that percentage may go down a little bit but you’re also going to have some people clicking off your website by clicking on those ads. So you’re going to recoup some of your expense by doing it that way. So that’s way number one, it is having ads on your website and do lead generation.
I want to point out that maybe you don’t do your lead generation on your main blog. Maybe you create a new separate website that’s more of a lead generation type website specifically for each niche. So you could have a website of the accounting for real estate investor website where all the website is is a request for special report specifically for real estate investors from you as the accountant or CPA and you have ads on that site. Maybe you don’t have ads on your normal blog website. So you do marketing directly to get people to go to the lead generation site… what we would call in the website business a squeeze page where you have them fill-out a form and once they fill-out the form they’re on your mailing list and they get the report automatically. Then you can have ads on the squeeze page itself or maybe on the thank you part of the squeeze page after they enter their contact information. You can make some money back on that. So you don’t have to do it on your main site if that’s a concern with you.
Jassen: Exactly.
James: By the way I did it on my main site. In case people are wondering whether I only did it on squeeze pages or if I did allow my main site or both. I did it on my squeeze pages and also on my main site.
Jassen: Okay.
James: Second way to make money when you’re doing lead generation is you can sell information products as a lead generation strategy. One of the things we are going to talk about here is the idea of selling products that are specifically for a niche on how to solve a problem or how to deal with certain issues. For instance, one of the things you do as an enrolled agent is you help people negotiate their tax liabilities, correct?
Jassen: Correct.
James: So you could have a information product and so could other CPA’s that happened to be enrolled agents as well. You can have an information product on there where you actually say, “Negotiate your own tax with the IRS. Here’s a one hour audio CD and we’re going to charge $24.95 for the audio CD. It talks about how to do it yourself.” Then you walk them through the steps. Now a certain number of people are going to order that and they’re going to want to do it themselves but they’re still going to want to hire a professional for assistance.
That could definitely be a lead generation tool for your business or for other CPA or accountants who want to do that. So you could be teaching people how to do what you do – certain strategies and things that you use but then there is a certain number of people that they want to know the information because they want to understand the process but they’re not willing to do it themselves. They want to hire a professional or maybe their situation is more complicated than they originally anticipated and then they still need your help as a CPA or an accountant and they’re willing to do that. Who are they going to go to? You’ve established yourself as the expert. You’ve established that you’ve got information and you know how to do it. You do it for clients all the time. This is how you do it. So they’re going to call you and they’re going to say, “Look I know I can trust you,” they’re not going to say that specifically probably but they’re going to think that, “I know I can trust you. I want to hire you to do this for me.” So selling information and products is a way to either completely eliminate or reduce significantly your cost of getting people to your website in order to do that and there are some great places to go and do that which we’ll talk about later too.
Jassen: Okay. So what’s the third strategy?
James: The third strategy is you can also – when you have your internal list – recommend products and services that you wholeheartedly endorse that can also pay you a referral fee. So for instance, there are plenty of affiliate programs out there where you can make money by recommending products and services to. Just an example, there are companies out there that will pay you commission for referring someone for business cards. I know a lot of CPA’s is going to be like, “You know what I don’t feel very comfortable recommending someone to get business cards.” Well, you’re doing a favor to a lot of new businesses who don’t have access to these resources.
So if you order your business cards from this company, you really like them, you have a lot of other people that have done and you’re very satisfied, you could put a link at your electronic newsletter or you put a special page on your website and have a link to that page in you physical newsletter. Then the people who need business cards they go to your website and they’re like, “You know, my CPA recommended these guys for business cards.” When they use your link you may get 20% of the sale or something like that. So you can use that as a way to either increase the value of your existing clients or get some value from prospects who haven’t actually started using your service yet.
Jassen: Right.
James: So a lot of people will discount that as, “How much money can you really make?” You can make a lot.
Jassen: [laughter] You know there are affiliates out there that that’s their entire business. It’s all they do. They make millions of dollars a year just recommending other people’s products.
James: I don’t think that most people are going to make millions of dollars a year but yes there are exceptions out there. People do it extremely well. What I’m hoping you’ll do is this – I don’t think you should go start a new business through affiliate marketing. But you should be able to significantly reduce your lead generation cost or eliminate it completely and maybe make it profitable doing lead generation when you’re marketing for your accounting or CPA business.
Jassen: You know I want to go back to the Adsense thing real quick. You and I have talked extensively about this over the past month or two in particular the issue of deciding whether or not to place Adsense ads on your primary website. There are pros and cons to that and you touched on it a little bit but what do you think are the biggest two or three factors that somebody needs to take into account when they’re trying to make that decision?
James: You know, for me I would rather have the upfront revenue and have all of the other stuff be the back end. For someone who’s a CPA or an accountant and their primary business is doing accounting, I don’t see it being as strong an argument. So what I would actually do if I were the CPA and that was my primary business is, I would test it for awhile without having any ads on that at all. Then what I would do is I would measure the difference in response, the difference in the people that are signing-up and what I perceived to be my loss for having ads on there when I do my test and then make that a very logical decision saying, “Okay I dropped from 20% opt-in rate on my website of people that actually sign-up for my newsletter or sign-up to request my special report when I added the ads to it, it went down to 18%. For me I’m okay with that.”
Jassen: Okay.
James: Maybe the number for you is any drop is too much or maybe you’re like, “Whoa, I dropped from 20% to 10%.” I don’t want to do that. So you definitely want to take that into account. The other thing some people will argue if there is a credibility factor and that some people see AdSense on your website and they don’t think it’s nearly as credible type of a website. I disagree but there is probably certain percentage of the population that believes that. So just take that into account. Just like I said, you don’t have to put that on your main site. If you’re concerned about that go ahead and make 10 websites. Nine lead generations websites that are basically just request a special report type sites or request the article or request to download and then have your main blog have no ads on it at all.
Jassen: Right.
James: You can almost look at it, Jassen, as if you’re starting a lead generation company that generated leads for accounting services and then you’re buying your own leads at cost.
Jassen: Right, exactly.
James: That’s one way to look at it. So you’re starting up another business that does lead generation for accountants and you happen to do it yourself. In fact, if you get really good at this you could spread out nationwide and do lead generation for accountants nationwide. Then only take the ones that are like the best for you or in your local market if that’s you want to do.
Jassen: Exactly. So for anybody listening there’s a business opportunity right there for you, right?
James: Yes. No extra charge. [laughter]
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Are you interested in The World’s Greatest CPA Marketing Book?
I was about to take an hour to go workout at the gym, but before I left I decided to check some statistics on traffic to my website since I had not done so recently and discovered something very interesting.
Apparently, earning six figures with google adsense is a big deal… at least according to my website traffic stats.
Popularity of my 90 minute video explaining how I earned six figures from Google AdSense not once but twice is growing rapidly according to my stats.
I guess I should not have been surprised and I guess that is why two weekends ago on Friday I decided to challenge myself to see if I could take the outline I had for the 90 minute webinar (linked above) and expand on it to fill an entire book called “How to Earn Six Figures with AdSense”. Turns out, I was able to write the book between Friday and Sunday of that weekend, but it was significantly shorter than my target of 150 pages coming in at 109 pages.
While I have not yet gone back and even read the first draft of the book (or started to edit it), one interesting thing occurred to me as the popularity of the video is spreading rapidly and that is that the book and the webinar are more about business models and how to expand them to the point where you can earn a significant amount of advertising revenue rather focusing on AdSense revenue itself.
And that sort of makes sense if you think about it. Building a business large enough to generate six figures in revenue from AdSense alone needs to be a business that can generate enough interest and provide enough value to the marketplace that AdSense really is NOT the only source of revenue. Just something to think about.
In any event, it is off to the gym for me before I record our webinar tonight on Joint Ventures For Profit.
Until my next post,
James
