The idea of advertising a blog on TV is just plain crazy. Right?

Well, it used to be. But with the introduction of Google TV, that crazy idea isn’t so crazy anymore.

Google TV is part of Google AdWords, and it works much the same way. It’s an auction-based system where you choose the price you want to pay. Obviously, the more you pay, the more people you’re likely to reach. But it’s possible to run an ad on network television for as little as $20.

In the old days (back when I worked as an NBC TV producer), placing TV ads was a big deal. You had to go through individual television stations or hire ad buyers who had special relationships with the networks.

But now with Google TV, just about anyone can create and run TV ads that will air on national TV shows. You can search to find TV programs that match your keywords, target people who are likely to want what your blog offers, and you can even see what ad placements deliver the best results and make adjustments to optimize your strategy.

Why would you even consider advertising your blog on TV?

The average American watches anywhere from 3 to 5 hours of television every day. That means people spend around 13 years of their life in front of the tube.

That sounds a bit sad, but one thing the statistics don’t mention is that more and more people, especially bloggers, spend a lot of that time multitasking. They’re sitting on a couch with the TV on and a laptop open.

You’ve probably noticed that more and more TV ads show web addresses. That’s because advertisers are finding that television is driving people to websites to buy products or find out more about items of interest.

Despite some of the junk, TV is a highly respected medium. It reaches a wide audience. And with more and more cable channels, many shows are now targeted to specific audiences. No matter what your interest, there’s a show about it out there somewhere.

Plus, ads on TV are visual and easy to digest. TV ads work for the same reason that video works online. It’s an effortless way for people to take in information.

So why wouldn’t you at least experiment with TV ads? If you can target the right audience and get the ad fairly cheap, you might find a great payoff. Then again, like anything else, it might flop. You never know until you try it for yourself.

This is a pretty good time to try. Since TV ad buying is down right now, there’s always the chance that your little ad could fill an otherwise empty commercial slot on a major TV show and reach more people than you ever could with the typical promotional tools.

How Google TV works

There’s a lot more to Google TV than I can explain here, but the process is pretty simple.

1. Log into your Google AdWords account and create your campaign. You select the audience size, set your bid, choose your budget, and select a start and end date.
2. Choose the programs, networks, or times of day you want. If you have a blog about pets, maybe you want to run your ad on Animal Planet. If your blog is about the arts, perhaps you want A&E.
3. Upload your TV commercial just like you would upload any other video. There are specifications to follow, but it’s not rocket science.
4. Track your ads and adjust as needed. You can see where your ads run, the estimated number of people seeing it (called impressions), and other statistics.

If all this sounds familiar, it should. It’s almost identical to running a Google AdWords campaign.

How to create effective TV ads

Okay, you’re a blogger, not a TV producer. So you probably don’t know much about advertising.

But let me clue you in on something. A lot of people who create TV ads don’t know squat. So you really can’t go too far wrong if you just follow some simple advice.

If you’re going to promote your blog, and you don’t want to spend a fortune, you need to keep your ad simple and direct. No fancy stuff. Your goal is to get people curious enough to go to your blog. So follow this simple formula . . .

1. Get attention.
2. Present a problem.
3. Offer a solution.
4. Direct people to your blog.

Let’s say you have a blog on amateur photography. Here’s how you might write a script for a TV ad to get people to your blog. You’d have both visuals and audio, but here’s just the audio portion.

Are you an amateur photographer? Are you fed up with blurry photos and poor lighting? Frustrated with those great shots you missed? Now CoolPixBlog.com has released a free report that reveals 101 tricks professional photographers use to snap perfect pictures every time. How to get crisp photos with a cell phone camera. The secret of clear nighttime shots without a tripod. How to be ready and never miss a great picture again. Go to CoolPixBlog.com and download your free report now. That’s CoolPixBlog.com.

Pretty simple, huh? Notice how this script follows the formula to get attention (Are you an amateur photographer . . .), present a problem (Are you fed up with blurry photos . . . ), offer a solution (Now CoolPixBlog.com has release a free report . . .) , and direct people to your blog (Go to CoolPixBlog.com . . .).

Google TV offers a tool called SpotMixer, where you can use a library of images, audio, and video, or you can upload your own materials. There’s also an Ad Creation Marketplace where you can find producers, actors, voice over professionals, and other resources who can help create your ad, depending on your budget.

Frankly, I’d suggest mixing something on your own just for a test. As long as you target your ads and follow that formula I gave you, you don’t need anything fancy to work.

If this all still sounds a little crazy, I don’t blame you. But just to show what’s possible, watch this video on Google TV ads to see how a guy who works for Slate.com created a simple ad and ran it on network TV for about $100. And he did it all from his laptop.

If you like, you can also visit my copywriting blog for more details on writing TV commercials, specifically direct response commercials. The formula is a little more detailed here, but the idea is similar.

If anyone has the guts and initiative to try Google TV, please let me know. I’d love to hear your story.

About the Author: Dean Rieck is a recovering NBC TV producer who now writes copy for direct marketing clients coast-to-coast. He shares copywriting tips for smart copywriters like you at Pro Copy Tips.

“I think you really ought to consider advertising on Google,” she said.

The year was 2003, business was really slow and I was about to plunk big dollars into a trade publication ad. I had never heard of paying to have someone come to my website.

But, on the advice of a peer, I took the leap of faith.

With great skepticism, I opened an AdWords account and started driving traffic to a landing page that taught people how to write white papers.

To my great shock, the first day four people registered. By the end of the first week, there were 40. Before I knew it, the year was up and 4000 people had registered, ALL coming from one little ad that I paid next to nothing for on Google.

I spent a whopping $127 per month for those thousands of leads.

I’m here to tell you, if you want to drive more traffic to your blog, add people to your lists or just test out some new ideas, consider search advertising.

Search advertising, also known as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising or paid search, essentially involves paying for small ads that appear on a search engine. The ads only appear when folks type in keywords you are paying for. The beauty of these ads is that you only pay if someone clicks.

Andrew Goodman, widely considered the world’s leading authority on search advertising, explains, “Paid search is classic direct marketing in the sense that you narrow your market down to a very specific subset (in this case, those typing specific keywords into a search engine out of curiosity).”

Goodman also explains, “The beauty of PPC ads that appear near search results (i.e., on an engine like Google) is that they show up when someone may be in active research mode. If you intercept professionals early in their sales cycles, while they are still thinking about pertinent issues, you actually position yourself very well.”

Blogger’s Thoughts on Search Advertising

New media blogger Chris Garrett says, “Pay-per-click advertising gets almost immediate results, either for traffic or for just testing ideas. All it takes is some well-chosen words and a credit card. While a perfect campaign takes time, money and experimentation, PPC is the best way to get instant and highly targeted leads.”

Tom Chandler, owner of one of the top ten blogs for writers explains, “For a freelancer, pay-per-click advertising can be a flexible, effective, affordable marketing tool. I’ve used it several times over the years to quickly generate leads during slow periods, though I’ve discovered — as my blog-driven organic search results improved — that I don’t need it running all the time.”

Chandler adds, “In fact, your ability to switch your ad campaigns on and off is one of PPC’s handiest features. Another is the instant feedback; your ability to test different ads should warm the heart of any copywriter.”

Goodman echo’s Chandler’s testing statement, “You get rapid feedback about what people do in response to certain offers, for a very low cost, in a highly structured format. It’s the world’s cheapest market research.”

Google is King of the Hill

According to the New York Times, Google’s market share topped 65 percent at the end of 2007 and will continue to grow!

That means that 65 out of 100 Internet searches take place on Google.

If you want to begin a search advertising campaign, it makes sense to check out Google AdWords.

For literally pennies, your ads can show up on Google and on partner sites like Ask.com and AOL.

A small example: My daughter goes to a new private school in Southern California. We setup a quick Google campaign that was focused only on the San Diego metropolitan area. So far we have had more than 300,000 ad impressions in one month, more than 120 people have clicked on the ad and multiple families will be attending the schools info night this week. The total cost for all of the exposure: Less than $100!

Five Things You Must Know Before Going Nuts

When I first began search advertising I was clueless. However, I quickly found Andrew Goodman’s work and here’s what he taught me. Consider the following important points:

• Why are you advertising? Determine what your goals are before you start. Do you want to push an event, promote an ebook, add more signups to your list or gain exposure for your blog?
• Your landing page is critical. Think about where you want visitors to end up after clicking on an ad. The best performing ads drive people to very specific landing pages the deliver on the promise of the ad.
• Spend to Earn. Unlike social marketing techniques, search advertising will take bills from your wallet (and if done well, put more than that back in). Think about how much you are willing to part with. The good news is that you can set spending caps with Google, and you can easily determine the return on investment your advertising is bringing.
• Good headlines outperform. Take all the headline tips Brian keeps talking about and apply them to your ad campaigns. A well-written ad will outperform the more costly, poorly crafted ones. Your writing skills can pay off big time with paid search.
• Track your conversions. Google gives you a little piece of code that you can place on a page. For example, if you are aiming for newsletter signups, you can plant this code on the “Thanks for registering page.” This allows you to track how many visitors are actually taking the action you hoped would be achieved.

A Quick Video

Here is an excellent video from Andrew Goodman on the latest state of paid search. It’s worth a look.

Want to Learn More?

Andrew Goodman will be teaching a teleclass this week called Navigating the Search Advertising Frontier (How to Outsmart the Competition). Be sure to check it out.

I would love to hear from those of you who have found success with search advertising. How has it helped you grow your business?

If so, you can participate in an analytics experiment that might just bring you a ton of exposure that won’t cost you by the click.

Eric of Stone Temple Consulting and Jonah of Alchimist Media are seeking additional participants for their Comparative Analytics Study. Basically these guys are trying to determine which website metric analysis tools work best, and they will publish the results to an eager SEO and online marketing crowd.

Here’s what’s in it for you and the requirements for participation:

1. Data on how the various analytics packages performed on their site. This may help the participant better understand the best analytics vendor(s) for their needs.

2. Detailed analysis of your site metrics by veteran SEM consultants using a variety of analytic tools. Our efforts to normalize data across these tools may also help you better quantify your ROI and understand current analytic issues.

3. Credit and acknowledgement for participation in the project. While we cannot quantify the word of mouth benefits or guarantee a number of backlinks, we anticipate that this study will be widely discussed in the press, in the blogosphere and at conferences.

The types of participants we are looking for will have a PPC spend of at least $10K per month. In order to conduct this study, we will need to analyze performance data outlined below. We recognize that some of this is sensitive and confidential information. The confidential specifics of your campaign are not pertinent to the study, and will not be published. What is important to us is the relative data, information such as the differences in conversion data between analytics vendors, for purposes of evaluating the
performance of the vendors.

We will mask all specifics, such as keywords, products, campaigns, the categories that the campaigns relate to, etc. In order to guarantee participants that we do not reveal sensitive information, we will allow each participant the opportunity to review our intended publication prior to releasing our results.

If you are interested in participating, shoot an email to eenge [at] stonetemple [dot] com.

What a terrible morning it was last week when many Google AdWords advertisers woke up to find that many (if not all) of their sweet low-cost-per-click bids had been disabled, and minimum bid requirements enacted that killed any chance for a return on investment. Turns out Google tweaked its landing page relevancy algorithm, with disastrous results for many big-spending AdWords players.

Scott Karp has been on top of this issue, mainly from an affiliate marketing standpoint, and I agree with him that a transition from pay-per-click to cost-per-action is beneficial to both Google and advertisers. But the reasons for the recent trauma may not be all that nefarious, and instead simply a reflection of the way Google tends to evaluate relevancy.

Other than affiliate marketing, landing pages are employed as lead generation tools. Sometimes called “squeeze pages,” these landing pages are laser-focused on one thing — obtaining opt-in permission from the visitor so that repeat contact can be made via email. This follow-up, whether by an autoresponder sequence or your regular blog posts, is crucial to higher sales conversion rates. I discussed this strategy previously here.

I personally wasn’t affected by the changes, and I was a bit puzzled as to why. Word around the campfire from the Perry Marshall private brain trust seems to provide a plausible explanation.

You Need Content… The More the Better

The advertisers that got nuked seem to have shared two criteria:

1. The keywords were very low cost; and
2. The landing page domain had very little available content.

Let me explain. The ideal lead generation landing page, as mentioned above, is focused on one thing only — getting the opt-in via email. You offer a valuable free incentive, plus a subscription to your regularly-published content in trade for the sign-up.

So, many people use single-page “mini-sites” for this purpose. They literally have a single page on a domain, with no links to other site content (there isn’t any), and of course no outbound links.

What people are finding is that landing pages on domains with other available content were not hit, especially if there were a few visible links at the bottom of the opt-in pitch. Further, single-page domain landing pages that have been moved to content-populated domains have seen the original low-cost bids reinstated.

It’s my guess that the new Google landing page algorithm evaluates relevancy in part by not only how much content can be crawled on the landing page domain, but also by how many people end up hitting the “back” button on the browser. It’s not that the subject matter of the affected landing pages is necessarily irrelevant, it’s that about 80% of clickers will not opt-in, and their only option is to go back to the search results and try again.

A 20% opt-in rate for advertisers using this strategy is perfectly fine with low-cost clicks. But Google sees things differently, and Google makes the rules.

What’s This Got to Do With Blogs?

As you might have guessed, I use blogs for most of my online marketing projects. I still use landing pages, but I employ them within the blog content architecture. My overall opt-in rates have remained steady even though visitors are allowed the opportunity to click around a bit, although the path by which they opt-in sometimes varies.

I didn’t know that Google was going to do this, so in that regard I’m an “accidental genius.” But I am even further convinced (if not completely sold already) on the benefits of having a blog as your “command center” for all of your Internet marketing efforts.

The real lesson to take away from this Google shake-up (which will be simply one in a long series, I promise you that) is diversification. Blog content brings in traffic naturally from search engines and from other blogs, helps you generate content for article marketing, and now it seems blogs are a great place to direct PPC traffic as long as you stick with the general pay per click landing page copywriting strategy.

You can offer mini-courses, free reports, teleseminars, podcasts and video from your blog in order to nudge people along the sales process. But the blog is central, and that won’t change even when we just start calling them websites.

For more tips for affiliate marketing under the new AdWords rules, click here.

Recommended Resource:

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