Why Shoemoney Deserves To Be Rich
October 15, 2007
If you’ve visited Jeremy Schoemaker’s “Shoemoney” blog before, you’ll probably have read that he’s been “lucky” with Google Adwords. And you might be forgiven for thinking he’d stumbled on some Magic Adwords formula. In fact, the truth is, you could be just as successful with Adwords as Shoemoney is.
But, before you go and blow your marketing budget on an Adwords campaign you might want to read this first.
You see, I’ve been messing about with Google Adwords pay per click advertising program for a year or so. And I didn’t think there was much to learn. In fact, I assumed it was just a case of writing some ads, bidding a higher amount than my competition and hoping for the best.
But my results have ranged from mediocre to bad. And the annoying thing is, I felt as though I was putting in a whole heap of work for poor returns. In reality, I was putting in nowhere near enough effort to run a successful campaign.
Then I read this post on Shoemoney’s (Jeremy Schoemaker’s) blog about his $10,000 pay per click experiment. It’s an interesting report on his experiment on pay per click for ringtone affiliate programs, and I found it useful.
So I searched on Shoe’s site for some more posts on pay per click and I discovered that he had a whole heap of Adwords accounts, campaigns and ad groups for ring tones alone. It was then that I realised I’d approached the whole adwords thing completely the wrong way. And here’s what I’ve learned so far:
1) You Can’t Just Cross Your Fingers and Hope For The Best: You need to get yourself a good guide to Adwords and read it twice. Ian Denny recommended – Perry Marshall’s Definitive Guide to Adwords, so I downloaded it. And after the first few pages, I realised I had been getting some things right, but I had been doing most things totally wrong.
2 Anything Worth Doing Takes Time: Setting up a successful Google Adwords campaign is time consuming. Ian Denny suggested that I outsource it. But, I like to know how things work before I hand over the responsibility to someone else. And I didn’t think it would take very long. But after two days (and my days are long) I have only managed to set up about a quarter of what I need to do on Adwords for one website. So, if you can’t afford the time – outsource it to someone who knows what they’re doing.
3 You Will Have Tough Competition: No matter what you do, your competitors are going to compete. That’s why they’re called competitors I suppose. And I knew one of them was using some keyword tool to hack into my site, but I didn’t care. The good news is – the changes they made aren’t that great because I was getting it wrong anyway. But the bad news is – you can bet that as soon as I’ve improved my campaign, so will they.
4 You Can Use Heaps Of Different Keywords But Not In One Adgroup: If you get hundreds of keywords from Wordtracker and put them into one Ad Group, you’ll run into a couple of problems: a) Unless you’ve set a maximum cost per click for each seperate keyword, you’re going to be overpaying for some of them. b) A lot of your traffic won’t be relevant, so your conversion rates will be poor.
5 Quality Is King: It isn’t just the amount you bid that will get your ad a higher position. Google rewards you for good quality. So, the keywords in your ad need to be the same as the ones you use in your keyword list, as do the ones on your landing page.
6 It’s Harder Than It Sounds: Google are really fussy about quality. Over the past couple of days, I’m made landing pages specially for each single keyword I’ve used, and my quality rating is showing as “Ok”. And if you bear in mind that I’m showing number one in their organic results for most of these keywords, you should get some idea on how strict they are.
7 If You’re Careless You Will Lose Money: You need to check that all your links are working, then keep checking them again and again, because if they’re not, you will lose money. Also, it is false economy to use a cheap webhost because you will also lose money if your site is down for any length of time.
8 Shoemoney Deserves To Be Rich: Jeremy Schoemaker deserves every penny he’s made from Adwords, because he must have put in hours and hours of hard work.
So, if you’re serious about running an Adwords campaign on your website, do yourself a favour and do some research first, and realise that there’s a lot of work involved.
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9 Responses to “Why Shoemoney Deserves To Be Rich”
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This is definitely something I need to get into. I know the basics as I’ve used it before, but it’s an art to make money.
Now the question is… the best way to get started learning… or is it just try and fail?
And yeah, Shoemoney deserves every penny. He’s been in the game for awhile now.
I’m thinking of doing this next year. Thanks for overview, it’s more detailed than many I’ve read.
Once you’ve read a good book – and Cath is right, Perry Marshall’s is great, you may think it will be straight forward.
Well it is and it isn’t. I think it takes a little time to get to grips with the various tools and some of the precision that’s required.
But you get what you pay for! It will cost you money if you do it the wrong way and conversely, cost you less and earn you exponentially more by doing it the right way.
I admire and respect Cath for the sheer graft she is putting into this! I’m perhaps doing it the other way around – using a Google AdWords accredited consultant at first and learning by the journey he;s taking me on.
Perhaps I’ll take over the reins once it’s established. However one problem I have is that if it works, I won’t be in the office much! I’ll be out seeing clients and won;t be able to monitor, tweak and improve the campaigns.
Split-testing is an important element. In other words, running two ads side-by-side and comparing the results. The winner lives on, but the loser is ditched and a new one created to compete with the winner.
By eleimination, over time, you can dramatically improve your click-through-rate (CTR) by finding the most effective combination of keyword, adword ad and landing page to get your CTR and conversions sky-high.
P.S. Cath – did you get the email? The contact we were discussing wants you to get in touch.
Hi Catherine,
I haven’t worked with adwords at all yet. I would be interested in reading future posts about your progress though, as I’m always interested in learning more.
Hi Carl – You will have to do a lot of testing, but it is honestly wise to buy a decent guidebook first – I wish I had.
Thanks Mrs Micah – Glad you enjoyed it.
Ian – you are so right. It is very time consuming. I’m planning to systemise the whole process, the either recruit someone to do it or outsource. Got the email, will contact her today.
JoLynn – Glad you liked it, and I will definitely post progress reports.
There is one thing that my 9th grade basketball coach said to our team that I will never forget – “Nothing worthwhile in life is easy.” It really struck me, and it can be applied to all aspects of life – basically just like point #2 on your list.
There is no easy money to be made on the internet. You have to work for it. Other people may make it look easy, but they have really put hours of hard work into it and have undoubtedly failed multiple times.
I did some work with Adwords to drive traffic to affiliate offers. I quit after a couple of weeks because I wasn’t able to put in the amount of effort to get suitable results back. However, one day I would like to get back into PPC.
It takes time to learn Adwords. I too read Perry’s book and I would say it’s a musthave if you want to get in the “game”. My keywords sometimes were rated as poor, but I managed to improve over time by trial and error.
I read many books and did a lot of research before I tried Adword, I didn’t lose anything and gain very little…It was hard to learn it.
Then I found Yahoo PPC and I now use their service only. I might use Adword again in the future.
I agree with both Nick and Cath. There’s so many different ways to do things right. If you can, doing it yourself and building expertise is pretty much always the way to go.
I loved the Perry Marshall book so much I read it twice. Once when I decided it was the way to go. And a second time while I was briefing an expert to do it for me.
I suppose though (through bitter experience!), I spotted a flaw in my desire to rush out and get on with it. The business needs me to go and see clients, network and do the marketing. If I added PPC into the mix, I would have spread myself too thinly.
Because the clients we’re are pursuing become almost part of the family if it’s right for them and us to work together, we need to see them and get to know them.
And I need to balance the marketing and getting to know the customers.
The cost of outsourcing, against the value of the client and the acquisition costs makes sense for me.
If however you have the time and it makes more financial sense, then you should learn. digest and practice it.