The Clean and Green Club

Shel Horowitz’s Frugal Marketing Tip – October 2007

Mark Twain once apologized to one of his correspondents for writing a very long letter, noting that he didn’t have time to write a short one.. Anyone who’s had to write copy for a very tiny format such as pay-per-click ads can certainly relate.

Pay-per-click offers one of the smallest workspaces of any advertising medium. It’s like a small classified ad. You get a headline, a few words of text, and a web address (which I’ve left out of the examples). Yet fortunes have been made with pay-per-click campaigns.

I went to a random page on one of my own sites to grab the largest and smallest ads I saw. It happened to be the page on the speeches I have available; these are two of the four ads shown at that moment (they will rotate as Google’s inventory and displaying formulas dictate).

Effective Presentations
Learn How To Overcome The Ten Myths Of Public Speaking. 1 Day Seminar.

The body text is just 13 words (the first two words are a headline, in bigger type).

Speeches
Looking for speeches? Find exactly what you want today.

That’s a one-word headline, nine words of body copy.

Is that enough to say *anything* useful?

Yes, actually. This ad showed up on my frugal fun ideas page:

Creative Romantic Ideas
New Romantic Ideas Added Weekly. Easy To Search And Completely Free!

It’s easy to see where someone who was surfing around looking for something different than the usual dinner-and-a-movie might be curious enough to click. And it’s only 11 words.

In my case, I didn’t click because I didn’t want Google to think I was pumping up my commissions (grounds for terminating the program). But Google ads always display the URL, so I simply typed it into my menu bar.

Just as in writing any short-form copy, your goal is to grab the reader’s attention and pull that person to take an action–in this case, the action you want is a click on the link.

Let’s say I wanted to write an ad for my sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First. The book is about the idea that ethical businesses are well placed on the road to success, if they understand how to harness the marketing advantages that this position opens up.

I might start with a grabber headline like
Ethics Equals Profits
Ethical Biz is Profitable
Ethics Equals Success
Forget Market Share–It’s Profit You Want

The nice thing about PPC is that I could test each of those before settling on one. And some researchers report that something as simple as changing one word, or flipping the position of a word, can make enormous differences in the return. If you authorize enough clicks, you can have meaningful results in hours. Also, nothing prevents you from running several different ads if they all pull well.

Similarly, I’d test variations on the body copy. But you want to measure not only clicks but also conversions: people who take the next desired action once they get to your landing page. An ad that pulls a lot of clicks but few conversions will waste vast sums of your money very quickly, whereas an ad that gets clicked enough to stay prominent in Google’s rotation but attracts a much greater percentage of actual prospects could be one of the most effective forms of paid advertising you can create.

In my case, the first thing I want to do is discourage non-readers. So I say right in the body copy that it’s a book. So these are some variations I might test:

Award-winning 160-page book, Principled Profit, shows how. (seven words)

Chicken Soup Co-Creator Jack Canfield praises Principled Profit book. (nine words)

Chicken Soup Co-Creator Jack Canfield praises Principled Profit book. Find out why. (twelve words)

Jack Canfield, Jay Levinson, Mark Joyner, 76 others all say, read this book. (fourteen words–but at 76 characters, it might be over Google’s character limit. If it is, I could change “all say,” to a colon.)

The last headline above is going for a different market segment than the others, so for that variation, my copy might read:

Profit when customers just have to tell friends. Award-winning book explains. (11 words)

As you might guess from a careful reading of this article, I haven’t actually tried PPC ads for this book. In fact, I’m kind of a greenhorn at the whole thing. I did a PPC campaign many years ago on GoTo, now known as Yahoo–before Google even took ads.

But it’s something I’ve wanted to try for PrinProfit for a while, and writing this series will move me closer to it. It takes time that I don’t have at the moment–to write the ads and landing pages, test, track the results, and analyze what’s working, and then repeat the cycle as you refine your campaign–but when I get caught up, I’ll experiment–and I’ll let you know the results. I’m planning to redesign the Principled Profit website, and as I do this, I’ll be looking at how to set it up so it’s friendly to PPC campaigns.

Of course, you do have the option to pay an expert to run your PPC campaign for you–but that’s more than I want to invest.

OK, now that you read the July main article and understand the concept of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, the next step is figuring out what keywords to bid on.

Your goal: very affordable but very targeted traffic, and enough of it to keep your ads active (and your cash registers humming).

The way to get it: highly specific keywords–or, more accurately, key phrases.

Let’s take an example: I’m a copywriter. If I bid on writing, an extremely general term, I discover on Google that there are 319,000,000 results–yikes! Changing “writing” to “copywriting” brings it down to a still-unmanageable 11,600,000 results, and there are so many sponsored ads that they don’t even fit on one page! There are eight sponsored listings on the first page, and ten more on the second page (two form the same companies). You can guess that a top five position is going to cost several dollars per click.

But the more specific we make it, the better we’ll do. If I type in “book jacket copywriting” (in quotes, for an exact match), Google only finds 49 pages in natural search–quite a difference from the 11 and a half million for just plain copywriting. And only five paid ads show up–of which three are about securing copyright (a completely different animal), one is one of the general copywriting ads from the previous example, and one is four a copywriting course.  So I could absolutely own this category with a carefully worded ad about book jacket copywriting.

But we’re not done yet. We’ve got to find out if anyone is actually searching for this phrase. So I sign in to my Google Adwords account, and I discover that yes, I could dominate this category, and pay just pennies–four to ten cents per click. But there’s only one problem: This phrase gets so little traffic that Google can’t even estimate the volume, placement, or cost per click! Same thing if I just search for “book copywriting.”

So I wouldn’t get enough clicks to keep my ad active, and there’s no point. I decide not to buy the ad (as usual when I play with this stuff), and am out nothing except a few moments of my time. Isn’t this better than running a pricy magazine ad that turns out to be a lead balloon?

And you? What key phrase can you find that meets these criteria?
* Low cost to bid and get decent placement
* Enough people searching that you get at least a few clicks per day
* Key phrases targeted to attract buyers, and not tire-kickers (very important when you pay every time someone clicks)–and that’s what we’ll talk about next month

Recommended book to supplement this article: Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World, which has nine full chapters on Internet/online marketing, with lots of cost-effective strategies you may not have come across elsewhere.

Coming in parts 3 & 4:

October: PPC Copywriting

November: Fast And Effective PPC Testing Strategies

Book Marketing Tip, August ’07–Volume 1, No. 2
Never Stop Chasing Coverage

If you talk to big publishers, you’ll hear a lot of malarkey about the brief, tiny window for news coverage on a new book–measured in months.

This is absolute garbage, and they should know better. After all, they’ve invested many thousands of dollars in each book. It’s in their interest to succeed, although sometimes it seems they don’t realize this. What it does mean is that if you’re a big-publisher author who believes in your own book, you can continue to breathe life into it long after the publisher’s publicity department has given up.

Several of my books have gotten significant coverage long after publication. In one case, a book I published in 1995 (on having fun cheaply) was mentioned in both Reader’s Digest and the MSN home page in one month–eight years after publication and after the book was already out of print and converted to an e-book! Four years later–12 years after publication–that book still gets me print, radio, blog, and other coverage. I do get a kick when radio hosts introduce me as “author of the new book” (and yes, I correct them, quickly and gently: “the book’s actually been out for some time”–I don’t want to mislead people).

In another case, Bottom Line (an extremely popular newsletter) did an extended three-page feature on my marketing methods, featuring the marketing book I had published with Simon & Schuster six years earlier. No help from S&S’s publicity department on that one, of course, but I just follow the methods I discuss in Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers.

And I don’t have some kind of magic secret sauce; I’ve heard from many other authors who routinely get publicity for books that are five, ten, even fifteen years old. Of course if your book is something like “How to Survive the Coming Y2K Crisis,” you’re out of luck. But for most of the rest of us, there will always be topical angles, fresh pitches, perennial tie-ins, and plenty of publicity if we just reach out for it.

Next month: why publicity builds legitimacy.

Book marketing consultant and copywriter Shel Horowitz is the author of Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers and six other books.

Shel Horowitz’s Book Marketing Tip of the Month
Volume 1, Number 1, July, 2007

Welcome to the first edition of this newsletter and thanks for being one of my very first subscribers We’ve reached our minimum number of subscribers and we’re ready to go. I will publish every month on or about the 25th of the month, either with a tip of my own or guest tip. Sometimes it’ll be just a couple of paragraphs sometimes a full-length article.

This Month’s Tip: Treat Fiction as News

Since book marketers are often accused of neglecting fiction, let me start with a tip that especially applies to novelists and short story writers:

When you publicize your book, you can find a number of news angles to focus that can help you get coverage in the media. Here are three to start:

1. The situation or problem your protagonist faces. As an example, I know a novelist who wrote a book featuring a woman who discovers her husband is gay. She gets tons of media coverage, positioning herself as an expert on the issues that straight spouses of gays face.
2. The place where you the author live–but also the places your characters live in or travel to in your book.
3. Any charitable connection or cause. I’ve done a couple of press releases for Imaginator Press, highlighting the funds its young adult fantasy novels raise for butterfly protection and research.

Shel Horowitz’s award-winning seventh book, Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers, offers 280 pages of great book marketing advice. Click here for a detailed preview.

In 2004 alone, 181,189 books were published just in the US. But only 10 percent of those sold even 1000 copies; many didn’t even reach 100 copies. My goal is to help you get those books out of your garage/attic/basement and into the market. For 2006, the number of titles published was around 272,000–that’s about 150% as much as just two years earlier. We are drowning in books! Just because you build it doesn’t mean they’ll come.

So my seventh book, Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers, explains…

Concepts and Strategies for Success

• Seven different types of book-promotion websites, with pluses and minus of each (and several examples)
• Three strategies to set your book apart from the pack and greatly increase the likelihood that your book will be taken seriously
• Twelve ways to promote your book on Google, above and beyond basic search
• Another twelve ways to get the most out of amazon.com
• Two entire chapters on understanding bookstores and making them work
• Four excellent tools to get coverage in the mainstream media

Tactics and Examples
But that wouldn’t be enough–you want hands-on examples. And as you may know from my other books, I’m a strong believer in specific examples that you can learn from and work into your own marketing, so you also get…

• Two complete, full-length marketing plans actually prepared for paying customers–and another one available as a downloadable no-charge bonus for anyone who purchases the book through me
• Eight actual press releases and six media pitches that got attention for books–including one that got coverage in 63 national and international newspapers and other news outlets, among them The Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, UPI, Reuters, the news services of Google, Yahoo, and Netscape, and news media in eight foreign countries–and another that was only sent to 12 trade journals and got coverage in seven of them (including three major feature stories)
• Success stories from at least 41 ordinary authors and publishers and a dozen or so industry experts, highlighting the methods they used to get their books noticed–and sold
• An extensive 17-page resource appendix listing dozens of useful books, websites, publications, book coaches, organizations, etc.
• Five additional chapters in a supplementary e-book that provide extra advice for those publishing their own books–included at no extra charge with every direct-from-me order

And far more success tools than I can tell you about without making this waaay too long.

Why a Grassroots Book Just for Book People
I originally thought this would be a quick and easy book–that I could just recycle and tweak some of the stuff in my existing Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World.

But a funny thing happened: as soon as I started working with it, I realized that after eleven years promoting my clients’ books, I know far too much about book marketing and how it’s different from marketing other products and services, and that I wouldn’t begin to do it justice if I merely worked with what I already had.

Besides, things change rapidly in marketing. As just one example, Google didn’t even exist when I wrote the original Grassroots. And then there’s a whole lot of stuff in the original Grassroots book that aims at marketers in general, and isn’t specifically directed to book marketers.

So I ended up writing an entirely different book–and taking the better part of a year to do it. In fact, Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers and Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World  are really companion books that work very well as a pair.

Is there some overlap? Yes. Certainly some of the overall strategies and concepts are in both books, though with a different spin for the book audience. As far as specifics–as far as I can tell, the only examples repeated in both books are one press release and one letter to the editor.

The Experts Love It
Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers won Honorable Mention in the Indie Excellence Awards, and has gotten praises from Dan Poynter (author of the Self-Publishing Manual), John Kremer (author of 1001 Ways to Market Your Books), Fern Reiss (The Publishing Game), Rick Frishman (Author 101, Guerrilla Publicity), Marilyn Ross (The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing, Jump-start Your Book Sales), Joan Stewart (https://www.PublicityHound.com), Marisa D’Vari (Building Buzz), and others. It’s also been favorably reviewed in Midwest Book Review, Heartland Reviews, the Small Press Blog, and elsewhere.

Publisher Dawson Church of Elite Books (a very experienced guy in the book biz) said,

“If you retained the top three consultants in book publishing, and picked their brains at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars, this book is what your notes would look like after a week. I plan to give a copy to all authors, and make reading this book a requirement for any prospective author who submits a proposal to Elite Books in the future.”

The paperback edition is just $24.95 before shipping, and the electronic edition is only $19.95. Any one of the hundreds of ideas in the book can quickly recoup this small cost.

Plus, if you order directly from me, I’m throwing in a bunch of bonuses–including a five-chapter e-book aimed specifically at publishing and marketing a successful book, as well as informative rports from some of the top names in small-press publishing.

Rather than expand this already-long post, I’ll let you read all about them at the Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers website, https://www.grassrootsmarketingforauthors.com

Among the many sweeping changes the Internet has brought in the last decade is a powerful reinvention of the centuries-old marketing form of classified ads. Popularized by Google and its amazing ability to match the content of a page with (mostly) appropriate ads, pay-per-click advertising (PPC) has completely changed the advertising world. And somehow, I haven’t talked about PPC before in my newsletter. For the next four months, we’ll fix that.

In the old days, classifieds were much-loved by direct marketers because they were trackable. You could easily use a department number or other device to find out how many people responded to the ad. If you were lucky, you might have been able to negotiate payment based on the number of inquiries or orders. Otherwise, you had to pay based on circulation.

But…back then, there was a long learning curve. In some cases, you had to place your insertion order months in advance, and results would trickle in for weeks after publication. If you committed to three months in a row, you wouldn’t know if you were wasting your money or making a fortune–and you also would either have to recommit to the ad before the results were in, or wait another several months to reinsert on the basis of meaningful data. And even if you were doing an “A/B split”–testing different versions in different parts of the print run, it was a long time before you really had the data.

The first attempts to bring the classified model to the Web were horrible: pages and pages of un-classified (or very loosely organized, at best) ads thrown up on a web page with no other content; the only people who saw them were other entrepreneurs placing their own ads. Yuck!

Pay-per-click on the Web changed all that. It combined the strengths of the print model–careful classification by subject, targeting to specific audiences–with the strengths of the Web: searchability, quick response. And it added something from the model of print display ads: the classifieds were right up next to relevant editorial content. Even better, most websites using classifieds quickly went to PPC, so that marketers only paid for results.

Google is not the only player (there are hundreds, including Yahoo and MSN)–but Google did a few things that were very, very smart:

• Created algorithms to automatically analyze a page’s content and retrieve very appropriate, relevant ads that people would actually click on; though sometimes you can search for a term and get ads that are waaay off base, overall, its accuracy is astonishing.
• Made partners of hundreds of thousands of websites that could monetize their own content by letting Google automatically display ads–thus providing far more “eyeballs” for the ads!
• And of course, thoroughly integrated PPC results into its own search results pages, as did the other PPC engines.
• Fine-tuned the process so that the most popular ads get displayed more frequently, even if they aren’t the highest bidder
• Allowed advertisers to participate at a very low entry cost, test extensively, and refine their ad strategies on the fly.

So now, a marketer can roll out a new website, start PPC campaigns for carefully targeted keywords, and if the budget is high enough and the search terms popular enough, measure the results within hours, change some elements, and test again.

Recommended book to supplement this article: Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World, which has nine full chapters on Internet/online marketing, with lots of cost-effective strategies you may not have come across elsewhere.

Coming in parts 2, 3 & 4:
August: Keyword Analysis

September: PPC Copywriting

October: Fast And Effective PPC Testing Strategies

Fabulous article at Grok.com on how a buyer’s state of mind may be different when considering a purchase than his or her normal personality.