The other day I read a story about boxing that reminded me of a winning combination to turn your PPC traffic into money…

I read that former heavyweight-boxing champion, Evander Holyfield, is hoping to line up a world championship fight.

During an interview he said, “Back then when I was young, I made a lot mistakes. But… I had the stamina and all that to overcome. Today, you have less stamina but more focus. Either way you go, if you play with what you have, you win.”

Similar to Holyfield, “back then” when businesses were first using the Internet to sell products, you could put out a bunch of ads, mistakes and all, and still win.

However, today consumers are faced with thousands of messages on the Internet every day. Which means, like Holyfield, in order to win you have to be more focused with how you approach your campaigns.

For example, the other day I was looking at a Pay-per-Click (PPC) campaign. A decent amount of traffic was being driven to this site.

But once these prospects landed on the site, they died.  A stream of hot prospects landed there and quickly clicked away—wallet in hand.

The mistake this client made?

He didn’t  test dedicated pages for his traffic to land on. Plus, he had no way to capture his traffic’s names and email addresses so he could market to them in the future and keep his product top of mind.

Years ago, when starting out on the Internet, marketers, like Holyfield, had lots of enthusiasm. Not knowing any better, they directed their traffic to a general sales page or to their home page.

They often got lucky and made sales despite this mistake because there wasn’t a lot of competition—however, now there is.

To compete in today’s market, you’ve not only got to be able to deliver a winning campaign to beat the competition, but you have to get them into the “ring” to compete in the first place.

Today I want to show you how to collect names and emails from the traffic that lands on your site from a known source (like your PPC campaign) and then deliver a one-two combination that will result in more sales. (If you are already familiar with this strategy, you can see how I do it by clicking the link here: http://ppcforsmallbiz.com/Unpublished_PPC_Secrets.html.)

But first I want to define the elements you’ll use so you’ll have a better understanding:

A landing page is a page on your website written and designed with a specific source of traffic in mind. Once there, your prospect is prompted to complete a precise action, such as sign up for a free sample, get a free report or request your top tips for solving their problem. It’s different from a sales page because the traffic arriving there comes from a known source such as a PPC ad, an email or banner ad. In many cases, you can’t even get to the landing page through regular navigation and can only arrive from that original source (such as your PPC ad or a radio spot). The page is clean and focused—clearly written, strategically laid out and designed and optimized using best practices to guide your prospect to take the one action you desire.

An autoresponder campaign is a series of strategically written emails that drives traffic back to your sales page and increases profits.

A sales page sits permanently on your site and is usually two or three levels down from your home page. People will arrive from a variety of different pages on your site and a well-optimized sales page will also attract traffic from search engines and inbound links.

Combining these elements together can provide superior sales results and turn your PPC traffic (and other sources) into money in the bank.

Here’s how it works:

Like Holyfield you need to make focused strategic moves…

Step one: First you send the people who click on your PPC ad to a dedicated landing page not a general sales page or your home page.

You should have one and only one action for them to take with no distractions that could tempt them to click away.

This one action could be a variety of things such as to sign up for a free report, register for a free event or receive a series of tips.

To get this information, your prospects will provide you with their email address. This gets your prospects into the ring when they aren’t ready to buy and keeps them from disappearing from your prospect list forever.

Your goal is not to go for the knockout punch prematurely, but to pace yourself and pepper your prospect with strategic marketing jabs. This is where the autoresponder series comes in.

Step two: Now that you’ve captured your prospect’s email address, you can begin sending him a series of emails. These are designed to get your prospect in the right frame of mind and help him overcome his objections before he is sent to your sales page.

Like the left jab to a right cross, the better your message is in these emails, the more likely the right cross (your sales page) will score a knockout punch and win the sale.

Step three: There will be a series of links in your autoresponder emails perfectly placed where your reader considers finding out more. These links will go to your sales page where you will deliver your winning sales message, make your offer and ask them to make a purchase.

This is one of the most effective ways to increase your sales because it doesn’t just wait for your prospect’s level of interest to pique, instead it helps speed up the sales cycle by addressing different objections they have before delivering them to your sales page. This puts them in a frame of mind to buy instead of arriving already resistant to your sales message.

In fact, this technique often doubles, triples and has even quadrupled response.

See how I do this here: http://ppcforsmallbiz.com/Unpublished_PPC_Secrets.html

So even if you have no control over the exact timing of when your prospect is ready to buy, you can control your ability to keep your product or services in front of prospective customers and help them overcome objections they have to buying.

This will not only make your product or service visible when your prospect is ready to buy, but will help speed up the sales cycle as well. Nothing will get qualified, targeted prospects into your sales ring better and achieve this one-two knockout punch as effectively as the landing page to autoresponder series to sales page campaign.

To your online success,

John Pfeiffer

P.S. For more information on how you can get this set up, email me at john@onlinepromarketing.com.  If you’d like to see an example of how this works, check out my sample by entering your name and email into the boxes on the landing page located here:  http://ppcforsmallbiz.com/Unpublished_PPC_Secrets.html