How To Invest In Google AdWords With Perry Marshall
There are a lot of benefits for your business if you decide to invest in Google AdWords. It works faster than SEO, it increases your brand awareness and you can retarget visitors of your website. Google AdWords helps you generate more leads and revenue. However, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can quickly end up investing a lot of money you will never see again.
Perry Marshall’s book on Google AdWords is the world’s best selling book on internet advertising. He helps his clients integrate technology, sales, art and psychology into their advertising and is one of the most expensive business consultants in the world. Here, he talks about how he wrote his bestselling book and how to invest in Google AdWords if you’re a newbie.
Becoming the Expert
When Perry was a marketing manager at a small hardware-software company selling industrial equipment, his boss got an opportunity to write an article for a trade magazine. “We had a marketing consultant called Mike and my boss told him to write the article. To place an ad in these magazines cost about $5,000 a page. We got three pages for free, so it was a golden opportunity.” Only when the article came out, his boss wasn’t very happy with it. Mike wasn’t a writer, and on one occasion, he asked Perry if he wanted to write a magazine article. He would pay him $500. “I’ve always liked to write. I was a 30 year old guy with two kids and a load of diapers. Writing a magazine article every month for an extra $500 was like a relief fund, a boost for my family finances.”
Perry started writing articles and one day got a call from a publisher of one of the few trade magazines in his niche. “He said he needed a book on industrial Ethernet, that he liked my articles and that if I wanted to, I could write it. I said that I didn’t know a lot about Ethernet, and the publisher said that he still liked my writing, so if I wanted the book, it was mine to write.”
Perry knew that this was a hot and growing topic, that so far, there wasn’t a book on this narrow subject, and that if he wrote it, he would become the de facto expert on it. “I decided to write the book that I would have wanted to teach me about this. That was 15 years ago, and the book is now in its third edition.”
A book is not just a bunch of information, says Perry. “A book is a whole mindset on how you approach a problem and how you frame the problem. If you want to be successful, it’s important that you write about something that nobody else is writing about. Ask yourself: What part of my life story and my expertise is an unmet need in the marketplace?”
Writing a book on industrial Ethernet was going deep into a sub topic of a sub topic. “But even if you’re the number one person on a narrow sub topic, it’s amazing how much success you can have in that tiny little niche.”
How to Get to the Top of the Heap
Perry had that same feeling when it came to Google AdWords. “This was back in 2003, Google AdWords was exploding and I knew that being that guy who wrote the book on Google AdWords would be a huge advantage.” However, there were already a lot of books about the topic. “But a friend of mine said that none of them write the way I do, that they weren’t approaching the topic in the way I would. I thought about this and realized that I really did have a whole other perspective on it.” That’s when Perry started writing his book. There was a new Google AdWords ebook coming out every three days, and he knew that it was his job to get more testimonials, more credibility and more proof than anyone else. He had to write the best written, clearest and most transparent book on the market.
The fact that he always had been an obsessive student of marketing helped him do this. “I wanted to know everything about marketing, even the things that didn’t seem to have any use to me at the time. I would listen to Dan Kennedy telling stories about infomercials in the 1980s. And I realized that there was this cycle when the infomercials were quite new and what happened when they got common. It was exactly the same with Google AdWords. So I included all the marketing tricks I’ve accumulated consuming everything related to marketing in my book, and that’s what made it become the top of the heap,” Perry remembers.
How to Start Using Google AdWords
Google AdWords has been around since 2002 and it has become very competitive. “People sometimes ask me if they should be using Google AdWords. We actually have a tool called IsAWforMe.com which stands for ‘Is AdWords for me’. It will give you a score for Google Search, Google Display Network and for something we call a competitive index. That’s how you find out if it’s for you.”
In any market, there’s a lot of people bidding on the top keywords. The highest bidder wins. Two percent of all advertisers get half of all the traffic. “Remember than when Google gets your money, you’re never getting it back in. So many people tell me ‘My goodness, Perry. I just spent $3,000 on a bunch of Google ads and I didn’t get any sales and I can’t get my money back in it, and it only took like 48 hours.’ That’s why you need to know what you’re doing.”
But how do you know? Do research before you spend money. Perry advises to pick a narrow niche without too many competitors. “Your keyword research will tell you if there’s a market in that niche, so start there. Then remarket and retarget, don’t start with cold traffic.” This means putting your Google or Facebook pixels on your website. They tag the people who visit your website, and after a few weeks you can start advertising to the people who actually already have been on your website. “Those people will buy up to five times more easily than people coming from cold traffic. Test your ads, spend little amounts. And only then you move on to slowly buy cold traffic.”
Don’t Be the One Paying the Stupidity Tax
It’s tempting to outsource this kind of work. There are a lot of Google AdWords experts out there. But Perry insists that it’s important you learn how to do it yourself first. “If you haven’t done it yourself, you can’t tell if the person you hired is doing a good job or telling you the truth. Even if you just do the stuff I said before, you know how to make a sale and how it feeds back to Google or Facebook. After that, you can start hiring people to do it for you.”
Watch out for who you hire to do your work. “Most people learn Google AdWords by spending someone else’s money. But when it’s your own money, when you know that you have to decide to either sell these bars of soap or pay your rent, that’s when people get really smart and good at it. So hiring someone who has actually learned how to use Google AdWords using his own money is worth a lot.”
Today, anyone with a credit card can advertise on Google or Facebook, and the competition is high. But there is a chance of making it work, Perry says. Google and Facebook combined are worth over 100 billion dollars. “Two thirds of that money comes from people spending money on ads without knowing what their doing and therefore not getting any results. It’s just stupidity tax, two thirds of it! It gives Google beautiful buildings and great food at the cafeteria, health plans and self driving cars. But you shouldn’t be paying for that, should you?”
Whatever niche you’re in, Perry says, you have to be in the top three percent of advertisers to stand a chance. “That’s the bad news. The good news is that if you can master that, define your niche correctly and build a great sales funnel, it becomes a magic carpet ride. When your Google and Facebook campaigns are fine tuned and customers buy 24/7 … it’s awesome.”
[tweetshareinline tweet=”“Google and Facebook combined are more than $100-Billion. Two-thirds of that money is ‘stupidity tax.’” – Perry Marshall” username=”sigruncom”]
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