My Experiment - How To Get Subscribers And Sales TODAY
Hi Guys,
The last few days I’ve been experimenting with a new method of getting subscribers and more importantly sales. In fact, it’s not a new method. It’s one of the oldest and most talked about method of traffic generation, but not many people use it, and it was one of the first time’s I’ve used this method on any scale before.
This method is pay-per-click marketing, and especially Google Adwords. This blog post will reveal my Adwords experiment and how you can start getting subscribers and sales TODAY. In fact, in just a few hours.
Here’s what I did the other day that turned an old website generating just three or four subscribers per day into a feast of activity.
The site in question was a very simple three page website. There was a squeeze page, a confirmation page and a download page.
The squeeze page offered a free report in exchange for their email address. They were then instantly redirected to a confirmation page encouraging them to confirm their email address. On this page they were also encouraged to check out an affiliate offer I was promoting. Once a prospect confirmed their email address they were instantly taken to the download page where they downloaded the free report they subscribed for and then were again presented with the affiliate product. I also had only ONE message in my auto-responder sequence to go out 24 hours after a prospect subscribed.
This is a VERY simple site that any one of you could set up TODAY, and get your first subscriber just a few hours later. Plus, put some affiliate offers in place and you could have your first sale by the end of the day, too.
Anyway, back to my experiment.
The last few weeks I’ve been learning about Google Adwords as it’s a traffic generation tactic I’d like to add to my arsenal. I learned from a ton of free resources and many paid. By far the best was this inexpensive course from Perry Marshall. I’d heard everyone rave about Perry and his stuff so I got myself a copy and it’s already paid for itself in saved expenses and sales and subscribers generated. Plus, if you’re a new Adwords user you can get a coupon for $75 worth of free advertising. This enables you to test the ideas without risking your own money. Get all the details here.
Plus, Perry has a great free five day training course that you can get here.
So now I had a few ideas about to run a successful advertising campaign with Google Adwords so I set up my campaign with my keywords, my budget and my highest bid. And then I waited…
I was refreshing my Adwords interface every fifteen minutes. My ads were approved within about half an hour. My impressions were going up by hundreds – even thousands – every time and my clicks were steadily rising. My costs were accumulating too. I decided that as my ads were getting so many clicks that I’d reduce my bids. I also changed my targeting from “All countries and territories” to: USA, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand. I did this because I started to get a lot of subscribers from India and the Philippines and I doubted whether subscribers from these areas would have the funds to purchase the affiliate offers I recommend. The number of clicks I received started to dwindle, so I raised my bids again as the quality of traffic was much better. My clicks started to rise again.
I did this campaign as a three day test. I’ll activate it again, but I only wanted to do it for three days so that I could work out all my numbers and decide whether or not it has been profitable.
The campaign ended over 24 hours ago, so that means every single person who has subscribed now has received the first and only message in the follow up sequence. This was important for me so I can track the profit from each subscriber as they go through the opt-in process and from just the first message. It enables me to work out the average revenue generated from each visitor in the first 24 hours. Then I can set my ad bids to be lower or equal to this number and know that any money a subscriber generates me after the first 24 hours will be pure profit.
Here are the stats of my campaign.
Number of clicks: 2743
Total Cost: £164.58 ($245.63)
Cost Per Click: £0.06 (About $0.10)
Here are the stats of my opt-in process.
Number of form submits: 768 (28% conversion)
Number of confirmed opt-ins: 330 (43% confirmed)
Cost per confirmed subscriber: £0.49 ($0.73)
Total sales revenue: $202.61 (7 sales at approximately $26.36, plus three customers took an upsell for a further $6.03 commission each.)
In total I spent $245.63 and generated $202.61. That may not sound great, but remember this is from only the first 24 hours of having a subscriber.
There’s no doubt I’d now be able to turn this venture into a profit. If I added one more autoresponder message promoting a product, then I’d instantly have a profitable campaign. Imagine what would happen if I had 50 messages in my autoresponder sequence. I’d have a completely auto-pilot income stream.
Plus, let’s now analyse how I could optimize the entire process and how TINY changes will make huge differences to my total profit.
- I could increase my ads click-thru rate. This will in turn lower my cost per click (CPC) so I’ll be paying even less for my traffic.
- I could increase my squeeze page conversion. Using a split testing tool such as Google Website Optimizer I could create a number of different versions of my squeeze page and gradually up my conversion rate. Let’s assume I can reach a 40% conversion rate from my current 28%.
- I can increase my confirmation rate. At the moment, only 43% of my subscribers are confirming their subscription. This is fairly low. Let’s assume that by rewording my confirmation page and including further instructions I can reach a 60% confirmation rate.
- I can increase the click-thru rate of the first email in the auto-responder. It’s currently at 18%. With a better email subject and better email copy I could easily bump this to 25%.
Now let’s work out the new estimated number of subscribers using the estimated data above assuming that the number of clicks and cost remains the same.
Number of clicks: 2743
Total Cost: £164.58 ($245.63)
Cost Per Click: £0.06 (About $0.10)
Number of form submits: 1097 (40% conversion)
Number of confirmed opt-ins: 658 (60% confirmed)
By making only small changes at each step, we’ve DOUBLED the number of subscribers we receive and therefore potentially doubled, or tripled our income. Now we would be making a profit for each subscriber after only 24 hours. Everything we generate after that is PURE profit.
I’m going to re-enable my campaign now and work to increase my click-thru rates, conversions, confirmations and sales.
Adwords is an incredible way to drive insanely targeted floods of traffic to your website. Do you know of any other methods that could enable you to build a list of hundreds of subscribers in only a few days?
I strongly recommend you pick up a good Adwords guide and start to test with this powerful marketing resource and you could be getting subscribers and sales TODAY!
There are plenty of great Adwords guides out there, but also plenty of bad ones. If you want a guaranteed good one, then pick up a copy of Perry Marshall’s The Definitive Guide To Google Adwords.
Plus, get a copy of his freebie course “5 Days To Success With Google Adwords”.
I hope you enjoyed reading the results of my experiment as much as I enjoyed carrying it out. Go and try it for yourself and let me know how you get on.
Talk soon,
James Penn

