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Internet Marketing for Lifestyle Entrepreneurs - Case Study

My Internet Marketing campaigns became incredibly expensive and were often interrupted.

Marius Tesselar

February 15, 2007

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This is a small case study with input from leading professionals in this industry. Take advantage of the information, I did a lot of the grunt-work myself and will be happy if I can help you avoid it.

What Happened?

Last year was great. I had a couple of very simply marketing pages and the only thing I worried about was keyword marketing using Google's pay per click system. On a daily basis, I got over 400 clicks on my pages, good for between 8-10 qualified leads per day. Keywords included 'home business', 'money', 'million' etcetera.

Life was good!

Until November... Because it was then that I learned that the cost per click had skyrocketed from about $0.10 per click to $5.00, $10.00 and in some cases even $25.00 per click... Given the fact that about 30 clicks generate one lead, I was looking at a cost per lead going from 3.00 to anywhere between USD 150 to USD 750 PER LEAD!

I was dead.

I needed some serious time to rethink my options and strategy. Not willing to give up my business, I was forced to think outside the box again and restart my marketing efforts.

The 'Be-Do-Have Principle' in Action

If you have read my previous articles about Lifestyle Entrepreneurship, you probably know that I am a great believer in the Be-Do-Have principle.

In short: it requires that you concentrate on who you really are in business and let the actions (Do) and the results (Have) follow logically. This eliminates a constant feeling of 'lacking' that tends to blocks positive action. It also eliminates endless analysis and procrastination, which is another sure cause of failure.

BE - My Target Situation

I asked myself 2 questions:

1- Imagine that I am already in the top-10 of Google for all my keywords, then who are the other 9 leaders here?

2- Imagine that I am one of these 9 leaders. What should I be doing that I haven't been doing up till now?

Very quickly I learned that the top rankers all have the following things in common:
- they seem to operate in some kind of 'keyword niche' they occupy and keep
- they have a lot of reciprocal links but not excessive
- they do have good textual content that is very much in accordance with the keywords

DO - Action Plan

By constantly reminding me of my purpose: I am in the top-10, I started to carry out the following actions:

Step 1 - Define Niche

I chose 'balanced lifestyle entrepreneur' as this is something I could identify myself with and it is still a niche area that I can defend.

A keyword niche is hard to find nowadays. Try 'Home Based Business' or 'Money' for example and there are over 700 million pages awaiting your attention... But if you try 'Vip Entrepreneur', you are looking at about 650 thousand pages. This is a number you can work with.

Step 2 - Relevant Content

I did a lot of reading, educated myself and discussed topics with other leaders.
Balanced content on a site is something search engines like. Everything on the page has to be in accordance with the keywords so the reader gets what he was looking for is the underlying concept apparently.

Step 3 - Links

Here's what I did. I created links with the sites similarly to whatever the other 9 people in the top-10 created. Using a free tool from the Internet, it was easy to figure out who is linking to whom.
It's a well known fact by now that you need to have links to your site from relevant other sites. Not too many too quickly as it makes the search engines suspicious, resulting in a lower ranking.

Step 4 - Clean up

Finally, I cleaned up my sites, restructured the content and the code.
Search engines tend to look beyond the surface as well so make sure your page is 'clean' and optimized somehow, it loads quickly and all links are working. Use code validators (W3C.org offers a free service) and use your keywords in different phrases. Again, don't exaggerate.

HAVE - Intermediate Results

After about 4 weeks, entries of mine started to appear in the top-20 of Google, one week later I was in the top-10 of Google. These were mostly blogs and articles I wrote with links to my sites. After that, one of my own sites started to appear in the top-10 which was really exciting. Another thing happened as a nice surprise: one of my sites suddenly got a PR of 3.

A huge improvement from the PR=0 that it had up till now.

A 3-Month Objective

My three month objective is to start generating all my leads 'organically' again rather than from banners. These leads really are the best leads you can get as they represent people looking exactly for what you are offering.

I will simply keep doing what I am doing now and get better at it.

Key Lessons

I want to conclude this short case study with some of the things you may find useful as well:

1. Define what exactly you want your niche to be. If up till now you used keywords like 'make money' as your main theme, get creative and use something else for example 'happy money maker'.

2. Design your theme around this topic using stories, content related to this. Get educated again if necessary.

3. Figure out who else in the top-10 is using your theme and figure out to whom they are linking. Create similar links as well.

4. Start writing blogs and articles. Make sure the content is again relevant to your main theme.

5. Keep it up. It is important to keep the effort going or you may experience a drop back again. Stay motivated and keep improving as you go.

For me, the Be-Do-Have principle works. Instead of time-consuming analysis and procrastination I started to work immediately and took actions in line with my goals.

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