The Transcript

How to Do Simple PPC Advertising for Your Online Business

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You are listening to The Digital Entrepreneur, the show for folks who want to discover smarter ways to create and sell profitable digital goods and services. This podcast is a production of Digital Commerce Institute, the place to be for digital entrepreneurs. For more information, go to Rainmaker.FM/DigitalCommerce. That’s Rainmaker.FM/DigitalCommerce.

Sean Jackson: Welcome to The Digital Entrepreneur, everyone. I’m your host Sean Jackson. I’m joined, as always, by the analytical Jessica Frick. Jessica, how the Frick are you?

Jessica Frick: I am still deciding. How the Jackson are you, Sean?

Sean Jackson: Always well. I am excited to continue our debate from last week about PPC. In fact, the whole show is about PPC, so we might as well put it at the top — our question — which was: is PPC for everyone? You say?

Jessica Frick: I say that it’s not.

Sean Jackson: Okay, tell me why.

Jessica Frick: I think that digital entrepreneurs should have a varied marketing mix, but I don’t think pay-per-click is for everyone. I think it’s certainly a good idea for most people, but I don’t know that it’s going to be the right play for everyone. Now, I think there’s some validity in saying you don’t know until you try it, but that’s not what we asked.

Sean Jackson: Right.

Jessica Frick: What we asked is, “Is it for everyone?” and I don’t know that it’s going to pay off for everyone. I don’t know that everyone’s business is the right model for that kind of conversion.

Sean Jackson: Yeah, I think that’s an important point to make, is that you really have to look at how your business operates. When we say PPC, we of course mean pay-per-click online advertising, etc. I would say, Jess, in support of your argument, if you were selling something very inexpensive, you may not have the margin to actually afford to advertise that way, with PPC. You may not even have the margin to do an experimentation, especially if you’re strapped for cash. Would you say that’s an accurate statement?

Jessica Frick: Absolutely.

Sean Jackson: But those cases, I think, are far and few between. I’ll let you have that argument in very niche cases. I’m going to give the affirmative. What I’m going to tell you folks is this: I think you do yourself a disservice if you don’t at least test things out. Now, it could be that PPC is not right for you because of you. You may be the actual problem. So, while others may see success in it — you, your business, how things are run, how you operate — you may not actually be ready for it.

But, if you can do the basics of online marketing, which you probably do today. You have a website. You’re selling something online. You are out there communicating to social media. You’re looking at search engines and how to improve your placement in there. Then you’re going to have to, at some point, put PPC in the mix. Because you’ve done everything else. I think that for most online businesses, they do a disservice if they don’t test it out to start with and then — I’ll caveat it this way — give yourself permission to fail at it.

Jessica Frick: Now, Sean, when you fail at a normal thing it’s really not so bad, but when you fail at paid placement, you’re losing money. Why is that okay?

Sean Jackson: Because we spend all sorts of money to fail. How many times have you gone on a new business pitch, and you spent the time and money to do the pitch and you never got the business? We, as entrepreneurs and online people, constantly do things that fail. We take the time to write a post that we think is going to be a hit, and it fails. Failure is, I think, a very important part of success, because it means you’re trying new things. Yes, it can be painful when you’re spending money in the hope that it comes back to you in something. But we do that all the time. We just don’t have that actual moment where it’s, “Put in your credit card and keep your fingers crossed.”

Jessica Frick: True.

Sean Jackson: I would argue that PPC is for everyone. If you’re of the mindset of continuous improvement, knowing that you don’t know what you don’t know, and you can’t know something until you try it. How’s that as the good compromise between?

Jessica Frick: I think that’s a good one. You don’t know it until you try it.

Sean Jackson: That’s right. In this episode of The Digital Entrepreneur, we actually have a very special guest on who is truly a master of PPC for a variety of different industries. When we get back from the break, we are going to interview Sean Dolan of PushFire, who not only is a great, awesome human being, he’s also done work for our company. So we’re definitely talking to someone who we believe and trust, and has helped us. He also has some really unique insight into not only how to start doing advertising, but also some of the things you should be looking for once you get good at the basics. So make sure you stay tuned, and we’ll be right back.

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Sean Jackson: Welcome back from the break, everyone. Jessica, this may actually be the most confusing interview we’ve ever done, given the fact that we’re about to interview our very special guest who happens to share my name. Please introduce our guest, and make sure when we’re talking to him, we direct it to the right Sean, not to me.

Jessica Frick: Yeah, that’s a good point. Sean, I’m excited to introduce Sean. But Sean Dolan, who is president and COO of PushFire. Sean is a recognized name in the paid placement industry, and he is a keynote speaker and an all-around great guy. He’s actually done work for us here, so I can think of no one better to talk to about paid placement than Dolan.

Sean Jackson: Mr. Dolan, welcome to the show.

Sean Dolan: Thanks for having me, Mr. Jackson.

Sean Jackson: Exactly. Our poor audience is going to be like, “Which Sean are they talking about?”

Sean Dolan: You guys can call me Dolan.

Sean Jackson: I’ll just call you Dolan, exactly.

Sean Dolan: I’ll roll with whatever.

Is PPC Right for Every Type of Business?

Sean Jackson: Well, the good news is you actually spell your name correctly, so I’m happy about that. Sean, we have been debating — Jess and I — about the role of PPC. Is it for every business online, or is it for only certain types of businesses online? Please answer the question for us. Is PPC for everyone?

Sean Dolan: Yeah, when Jessica actually reached out and asked me that in setting up this interview — she asked me that question — I said that PPC is not for everyone, it’s just for winners.

Sean Jackson: Ooh.

Sean Dolan: While it’s funny, I often find people that are asking the question of whether they should do PPC. To me, it’s so self-serving and testable, that the time you spend thinking about it, you could have just tested it and figured out if it works for you. I’m a big fan of “shoot and then recalibrate,” so I always tell people, “At least rule it out. Rule it out and then tell me it doesn’t work.”

If you haven’t tried it, the billions of dollars being spent on it … There’s some bad advertisers out there and big corporations that waste a lot of money, but I don’t think they’re wasting billions of dollars and not getting returns. That’s the argument I usually make to people. We do PPC for our own company, for obvious reasons, and it’s money in, money out. At the end of the day, it works or it doesn’t.

Jessica Frick: That actually brings up one of my questions to you, because as you know, I actually took the negative. I don’t think PPC is for everyone. I know that it works, but I also know that there are a million other ways you can get business. Didn’t you get business off a bathroom wall?

Sean Dolan: Yeah, we did. We had a guy call us — and we ignored him, we didn’t understand the lead. If someone fills out a lead and they don’t know how to fill out lead forms, then we rule them out as potential clients. There was something weird about it and suspicious. Anyway, we actually finally … He was very aggressive and got a hold of us. He’s like, “You guys aren’t going to believe this, but I saw PushFire in a bathroom stall in Sugar Land.”

I still don’t quite know how that came about. I’m not complaining, but I’m also not pursuing that either. Yeah, they come from everywhere. One of my clients teaches real estate investing, and something that he always says … We generate the PPC leads for him, motivated seller leads for his real estate flips, and people always ask him, “What’s the magic marketing? What works? What’s the best?” His answer is, “Everything works. Everything. All of it works. Some better than others, but sitting around not doing it definitely doesn’t work.” That’s where I try to get people, is just try it. Just do it.

Jessica Frick: How do you generate leads for PushFire?

A Super Simple Way to Generate $100,000s of Dollars of Business with Just a Few Hours of Work

Sean Dolan: Over the last three or four years, we’ve been fortunate enough that Ray is good at SEO. We rank one or two for PPC management on Google, depending on the day. It’s us and WordStream, neck and neck. That generated a lot. The problem with that is we would get leads from various sources. We would get a lead for women’s underwear, and then we’d get a lead for trailer hitches. My team is mastering and understanding the landscape of two completely different industries, so the scalability there is weak. We did that for a long time, and we were very successful at it. We have clients from all different industries.

I was spoiled that we were getting all these leads coming in through SEO. I decided that I wanted to take control of that and actually go out and acquire a specific type of lead. I went for the investors. I have a lot of investors we work with that are very successful. I’ve been doing this for over eight years in the real estate space, doing advertising. I get that space. I went online and I Googled “real estate forums.” I recommend, if somebody is trying to generate leads — find that water cooler. Find out where everyone is. If you think there’s not a water cooler for your industry, Google “chewing ice forum,” because there’s a forum for people that like to chew ice.

Jessica Frick: Dude.

Sean Dolan: Yeah. It’s real, look it up.

Jessica Frick: They talk about chewing ice.

Sean Dolan: Yeah, just a group of people that just enjoy chewing ice. That’s their thing. There’s plumbers forums, there’s attorney forums. Whatever is your market, there is a place online those people go. If there’s a website, that means there’s AdSense. That website has to generate money. If there’s AdSense, that’s your in.

I found this online real estate forum. They had three ad sizes across their website. I created three ads while sitting in Starbucks. They were not fantastic ads. I wanted to do all of it myself because I’m putting together a case study on how anyone can do this. I threw the ads together and I put together a landing page. It was very in your face. I understand the real estate investors enough to know how they speak and how to get their attention. I threw it up. I spent about $2000.

Actually, in four days, I got 20 leads at about $50 a lead. Right out of the gate, I was generating leads. I closed 10 of those lands, and I will probably close another five. This is just two or three weeks ago that we ran this. I had to pause it because I couldn’t take all the calls. Even at the 10 leads that we closed, the minimum revenue for that is $120,000 a year, assuming those 10 stay with us, which they tend to do. A third of those tend to spend more than the minimum. As their business grows, they’re spending $3000 to $5000 a month. Conservatively, from a few hours at Starbucks, I generated $200,000 a year in revenue.

If you do the math on that, 10 minutes of Googling the forum niche and finding out where the water cooler is, four hours at Starbucks creating the landing page, 20 minutes setting up ads in AdWords, 20 hours doing calls and sending contracts — that’s about 24 hours and 30 minutes to generate $200,000, or $8,163 per hour in revenue generated. This is literally overnight. There’s certain variables, like I had to be able to sell them. But when it comes to generating the leads …

Why Even a Failed PPC Test Is Better than No Testing

Sean Dolan: People dismiss display because the intent’s not there. “I have to figure out the intent based on the website they’re on.” With search, it’s very easy. People that are looking for PPC links for real estate, they’ll Google that. Through display, I have to identify where those people are. But it’s so easy to do. To me, if you have $1000 that you wanted to test — even if PPC fails, you have purchased data.

If you spend that on radio or TV, the data you get back is very weak. If you spend it on PPC, the data you get back is very specific. You know exactly what doesn’t work, and you can move forward from that. Obviously I’m biased. I’m in the world. I’m in it every day. But when I’m working with companies and they have other marketing channels … Man, I constantly feel like we outperform all the other channels.

Sean Jackson: Isn’t that part of the scary part? If I’m just doing this, if I’m just starting out, I don’t know if it’s going to work. And even if I think it may work, isn’t it too hard to put together? You gave a very specific example, but again, isn’t it just … I think there’s a lot of fear from the potential complexity of it. “I’m not a designer, I’m not a copywriter, etc.”

Sean Dolan: Yeah, and I don’t want to downplay my Photoshop skills that much. If we’re talking about just an average person, I definitely understand Photoshop enough to create an ad. It’s not a spectacular ad, but it’s...