This post is part question, part answer since I didn’t find much on google related to actual cpm per medium.

I’m curious what other business owners see for CPM; that is the advertising cost per thousand listeners / viewers / email recipients / eyeballs / etc.

Here’s my own experience…

Radio = $2 – $4 CPM

Radio has been my “seductive mistress” for the last 5 years.  She whispers messages of hope and the promise of “dedicated listeners who follow the host like a zombie army and buy everything he / she commands.”

I take the plunge into her bedroom once a year or so.  After the unique 800 number I’m spending $200/month on phone rings 20-ish times in a week — after 400,000 zombies with nothing better to do than listen to said host have supposedly heard my unbelievably well-crafted message — I tally up the stats.

About 40% of people buy the product.

20% ask for the price and hang up once they’ve heard it.

And the remaining 40% ask questions for 27 minutes, then ask us to mail them pricing and product brochures because they can’t afford an effing internet connection.

8 orders (40% of 20) at $100 an order is $800 in revenue.

Not profit, people…revenue.

You see, my employees get the idea somehow that I’m obligated to pay them to answer calls from said zombies.  And because I’m nice and I like them, I do.

• Radio Cost Per Spot = The most expensive spot in radio is 60 seconds on The Rush Limbaugh show.  It’s about $14,000 for 60 seconds, host-voiced spot.  I don’t know the CPM off-hand, but he’s number 1 most-listened to radio host by a major landslide.  I’m typically offered around $500 – $700 for a 60 second.  But, if you get on a long-term contract and get bonus spots, I’ve had them as low as $23-ish.

• Radio ROI = For me, it’s been in a range of .18 on the low-end to 1.8 on the high-end.  That’s measuring revenue, not profit.  So when I spend a dollar and get 18 cents in revenue in return, yes, I feel like Zach Galifinakis getting tazered in The Hangover.

Email (to 3rd Party Lists) CPM = $2 – $18

Email to 3rd Party Lists has been really good, and really REALLY bad.  What’s the difference?  If the list owner has a sizable audience of actual zombies that actually do what he recommends, then it works.  Any other message I’ve sent to any other audience has a negative ROI.

So basically, there is one list that works great for me, and all the others suck.

• Cost Per Email = The one that works costs me $3,000 to have sent.  The ones that don’t work don’t matter.
• Email ROI = As low as .05, as high as 4.25.

Print Media CPM = ??

I’ve done so little print media (magazines, journals, newspapers) that I really don’t know the number for this.

I did recently spent $3400 on a very targeted trade journal.  I negotiated from 1 ad for $3400 to 3 ads and a month long banner ad on their website for $3400.

But I don’t know if we had a single click from the banner or a phone call.  I haven’t checked our Google Analytics, and I didn’t use a unique 800 number in the ad.  I was too short on time to meet the deadline.  Shit happens.

Web Banner Ads = ??

I also have very little experience here.  Ever since I read about banner blindness, I just figured it probably wasn’t worth the effort.

However, I did negotiate a very strategic placement in a very relevant directory that is sort of like a banner ad.  They wanted $1500 for the full year, I got them to throw in $2000 worth of other “premium” stuff (which, let’s be honest, cost them nothing), so it seemed like a good deal.

And here’s the real kicker, since this directory has a very professional sounding name, I’m creating a logo to put on my website as a “3rd party trust icon / badge” saying, “Featured in Respected Buyers Guide Directory” to (hopefully) improve my own conversion rate.

Sneaky, eh?  ;-)

No Experience With…

I have zero experience in these areas. Newspaper Ads, White pages, Yellow pages…  Any one care to offer some numbers on

I was curious to see if I could stop paying Verizon $60/month for my Verizon wireless card.  Don’t get me wrong.  I love that little thing because it’s saved me countless dollars at hotels, airports, conferences, etc.

So I googled and found this post: Pair your Bluetooth and Mac to use BlackBerry as a modem

There’s a nice video showing how to connect/pair BB with Mac via bluetooth.

But then I noticed a reference to this post How To Tether Your Mac to BB which notes that Verizon customers have to pay $10 a month.

Certainly, that’s cheaper than $60/month.  But I didn’t really want to call and talk to VZ customer service, change up my contract, etc. just to see how fast the connection was going to be.

I also noticed that all those posts were about 2+ years old.  Surely, there’s got to be some newer stuff out there, right?

So I searched Blogs, which sorts results by relevancy AND age.  Nice!

That led me to Using Your Blackberry As A Modem, where I read about an app called Tether.

Tether costs $50 (one time fee), but it uses your existing data plan to connect, so no expenses to VZ.  Cool!

Plus, Tether offers a free 7 day trial and a 30 day money-back guarantee.

So I downloaded Tether, paired my Mac to my BB, turned off Airport, connected Tether on BB to Tether on Mac — AND IT WORKED!

However, it was slow.  Really slow.  Just a little bit faster than a 14.4K modem.  And my BB showed 5 bars of connectivity.  Here’s my speedtest results using Tether via Bluetooth:

Presumably, the USB connection is faster, but according to Tether, you can’t tether in USB mode if you have Blackberry Desktop Manager for Mac.

There are two options available for you:

1. To uninstall BlackBerry Desktop Manager to use the USB Mode
2. Use the Bluetooth Mode.

Tether says they are working on this, but that’s a bummer since I use BB Desktop Manager, I can’t uninstall it.

I was curious what my speedtest would be using my Verizon Wireless card in the same location, and with only two bars of connectivity, it really wasn’t *that* much faster than Tether.

With all 4 bars on the Verizon Wireless Card, I’m usually at about 2.5mbps download speed.  (Compare that to 19mbps on Cox cable.)

Tether claims the following:

How fast is the internet with your software?
Based on customer feedback, we have heard speeds as high as 2,400 kbps.

2,400 kbps = 2.5 mbps…  so…  maybe Tether is a good option for using your Blackberry as a modem for your computer after all, as long as you can uninstall BB Desktop Manager and connect via USB.

I am a fan of wine.  I am a fan of ice cold beer.  I’m also a fan of flip flops, Correct Spelling and Punctuation, and several other random Facebook Fan pages.

So I decided to do a little experiment and build my own mass-appeal fan page: Freckles

Here’s how I did it.

Step 1) Build Your Facebook Fan Page

Start building your Facebook Fan page here.  I chose to build a Community page.

Step 2) Put Some stuff on the page

1. I bought a professional iStockphoto of a woman close-up with freckles.  Cost me $2.
2. I wrote a little blurb on how awesome freckles are.
3. I took a close-up of the freckles on my own nose and encouraged others to do the same.

Step 3) Suggest To Friends

Using Facebook’s “Suggest to Friends” hyperlink (4th link down below the profile picture on the left-hand side), I opened up the following dialog and hand-selected each of my 465 FB friends.  Took me 12 minutes.  Which totally sucks.  And you would think that would cut down on spam, but I get six requests a day to join stupid groups like “Freckles” every day. 

Step 4) Sit back and see what happens

I sent the “Become a Fan of Freckles” notice at 10:13am to my 465 friends.  By 10:45am, the published time of this blog post, Freckles was up to 4 fans.  Hmm…not very impressive.  I’ll update this post in a few hours and let you know where I’m at.

Bonus Tip #1

Create a bookmark to Facebook Pages You Admin so you can jump to any one of the pages you’ve created.

Lastly…

Click here to become a Facebook Fan of Freckles.

Since Lord Google can easily find any needle in any haystack, if you’re brand name gets tarnished and into the cache of the “foreverbot”, you MUST do something about it, or it will negatively effect your ability to land new clients.

This post will use the example of a company that a friend of mine (Adam Phillips) works for, American Business Systems, Medical Billing Business, and what he’s doing to rebuild his online reputation.

Background

Adam was distraught one day when he saw G’s auto-suggest feature included the word “scam” after his company’s name.  WTF?!?!

Step 1) Assess the Situation

Clicking to see the results, he found several negative sites, starting with a post on the Rip-Off report.  Crap!

He also found a handful of angry posts on blogs.

Step 2) Make Amends

On the blogs, Adam started leaving comments (like the one below) that politely & directly addressed the statements made by the blog authors and other commenters.  When his company screwed up (negative interaction with customer service personnel, out-of-date materials, etc.), he admitted it and talked about what they had done to fix it.

For RipOffReport, Adam joined the Corporate Advocacy Program and had them do an investigation, which led to the following update on the page:

Brief sidenote: Adam figured out that the author of this RipOff report was a disgruntled *prospect* (ie. not a customer) who just didn’t like the franchised medical billing system they were selling.  She didn’t like the product, the price of the system, or basically anything else about them.  In fact, Adam remembers personally speaking to this woman on the phone and her being very mad-at-the-world.  He basically had to tell her, “I’m sorry, I don’t think we should be in business together.  Best of luck to you.” and ended the discussion.

Step 3) Fight Back With The Facts

Realizing there was probably no way to ever get american business systems llc scam removed from G’s auto-suggest, he figured he’d better get his own version of the story to rank as highly as he could.

So he…

1. Bought the domain name absystemsllcscam.com. (the domain with the exact words was already taken by someone else…bummer.)
2. Signed up for a Weebly account. (Weebly, as you may recall, is my favorite tool for non-geeks to quickly and easily build simple websites.)
3. Put up a homepage that presented his side of the story using a “What They Say”, “What We Say” format which presents both sides of the argument.
4. Used the exact keyword phrase several times throughout the page, including (and most importantly) the Page Title and <h1> tags to rank as highly as he could.

In just a few weeks, this new site was listed 7th.

In Summary…

It stands to reason that if your company sells a crap product, you will eventually be found out and there will be basically zero way to rebuild your online reputation because so many of your customers will be talking about how full of crap you are and warning prospects away.

But in Adam’s case, I know what they sell, I know it’s expensive (about $20K), and I know clients don’t fall into your lap the day after you complete training.  It is HARD WORK to land a doctor as a client. Does that mean that everyone who attempts their own medical billing business in the future will fail?  Of course not!

Therefore, it’s NOT a crap product.

And these handful of disgruntled *prospects* that have been scaring off legitimate future customers.  Painful!

So I’m glad to see Adam actively working to rebuild his online reputation in an honest, authentic, and effective way.

What Else Can Be Done?

Do you have any other tips for helping to rebuild one’s online reputation?

PS – Fun with Google Autocomplete.

There are probably 500 other good posts on the topic of keyword research and keyword analysis.  But here’s how I do it.

This post was prompted by a discussion of how to improve the rank of skipmoen.com, so here’s some…

Background

Skip Moen writes a daily devotional that looks at one word of scripture each day, focusing on the original Hebrew or Greek text and what it likely meant to the original audience who would have read it 2000 or more years ago.  Each day, approximately 600 people receive something like this via email:

All of these 600 people made a donation of some sort (as little as $1, as much as $10,000) to Skip’s non-profit ministry, At God’s Table.  The bulk of the donations go directly to back to those in his Today’s Word community and numerous other charities around the world.

Skip is a close friend of mine.  I helped him put this system into place using WordPress, Mailchimp, PayPal, and some secure web hosting generously donated by my good friends at Firehost.

It’s important to note that SkipMoen.com is already ranked #1 for the site’s most important keyword phrase: “Skip Moen”  (Someone searching for “Skip Moen” knows exactly what they are looking for, and the first result is thankfully, SkipMoen.com.  Perfect. 

But how does Skip grow his readership by ways other than word-of-mouth / Forward-To-A-Friend?

He needs to start ranking for generic phrases that are relevant to his content.  Which leads me to How I Do Keyword Research For SEO…

Step 1) What Do I Offer That Is Being Searched For Generically?

Some phrases that immediately come to mind for SkipMoen.com are “Bible studies” and “daily devotionals”.

I use Google’s Keyword Analysis tool to search both those phrases.  It shows me derivatives and the number of searches each month for each phrase.  This helps me gauge which phrase I want to target.

Step 2) Analyze The Phrases

Sorting by keyword phrases with the most traffic, my instinct is that SkipMoen.com is not a great landing site for “study bible”, “devotional”, or even “bible verses”.

I spend about 15 minutes going through the list and decide to search google for “daily devotionals” to see what other sites are listed.

Looks like we’re in the right place.  But, my gut tells me that this phrase has a lot of competition and the top 3 sites likely have many, many inbound links.  Therefore, my likelihood of being able to displace them is very, very low.  So it’s time to look at the keyword list again.

Step 3) The Goal Is To Pick One Phrase

I’m finding picking just one phrase to be difficult as I scroll through over 300 keyword suggestions.  It helps me to take a step back and reflect on what makes SkipMoen.com special…

Skip has built his teaching around what should be an obvious insight: The Bible, both Old & New Testament, is a thoroughly Jewish document written by Jewish authors, primarily to a Jewish audience, who lived in a 1st century Jewish culture.  When we study the Bible, we must first attempt to understand what the original language would have meant to the original audience before attempting to apply it to ourselves in today’s culture. Therefore, when Skip analyzes Greek words found in the New Testament, he looks for their Hebrew equivalent.

So maybe “hebrew word study” is a better phrase?  Here’s the traffic and search engine results:

These sites are VERY similar to SkipMoen.com.  In fact, I know that Skip uses BlueLetterBible.org and recommends products from Hebrew4Christians.com.  So someone searching for “hebrew word study” is VERY likely to want what SkipMoen.com has to offer.

You see, it’s not about raw traffic, it’s about ranking for the right traffic.

Step 3b) Test Your Idea Using Adwords

At this point, it would probably be a good idea to validate my assumption that “hebrew word study” traffic results in new subscribers.  To do this, I would run a few Google Adwords campaigns.  But measuring conversion could be difficult, and quite frankly, I feel like skipping this step right now. 

Step 4) Modify The Page

This is where I’m going to resist the urge to go after both “Hebrew Word Study” and “Daily Devotionals”.  I may eventually add “Daily Devotionals”, but first I want to see if I can get to #1, #2, or #3 for “Hebrew Word Study”.

Following my 5 steps to SEO Dominance, I change:

1. The name of the blog, which changed the title of the page (and all pages throughout the site).
2. The name of the page, which changed the very important <h1> tag.
3. And I sprinkled in a few different variations of “Hebrew Word Studies” on the homepage copy.

Here’s my before and after:

Step 4) Begin Tracking My Results Using Authority Labs

Now that I’ve got the most important on-page optimization changes done, I start tracking the domain and several other relevant keywords in my favorite website ranking reports tool, AuthorityLabs.  (Note: It’ll populate Global Volume and Ranking data by tomorrow.)

Step 5) Start Getting Inbound Links

Ultimately, it’s important for SkipMoen.com to receive inbound links with the phrase “Hebrew Word Study“…which is what I just did.  But inbound link building is no trivial task.

I’ve been experimenting with five different types of inbound link techniques for various sites.  It’s been time-consuming and expensive.  But the lessons learned have been very valuable.  I’ll save those for a future post when I feel like I’m on stronger, more authoritative footing.

Update

After posting this, my buddy John Thorman, who originally asked this question, replied back with two questions of his own:

Question 1) Patrick, I noticed you used the plural on the site but your example was with the singular.  Does that matter?

I know that G’s results take into account plural and singular and you can optimize for both.  But I searched both and the obvious winner is the singular.  And I’m not sure exactly how G does this.  So…I went back and changed the site to optimize for the singular, just in case.

Question 2) Patrick, why not optimize for “bible study lessons” since it has 49,500 searches a month.

Let’s run through some numbers that I forgot to include because I skipped over analyzing backlinks, which is a measure of competitiveness.  I use the not-free “backlink analyzer” tool from SEOmoz.org. 

Here’s the backlinks for the #1 and #2 site for “bible study lessons”

Number 1 is really strong on that exact anchor text.  Very difficult to displace.  But #2 looks like it could be conquered, but only after getting at least 20 decent links with that anchor text.  And that’s not trivial.

Compare that to the backlinks for the #1 and #2 sites for “Hebrew word study”.  Both have a ton of inbound links, but none that explicitly say, “Hebrew word study”.

This tells me we’ve got a good chance to get to the #1 ranking.

It also tells me there are 6600 people per month searching for Hebrew Word Studies, and if they click the first two links, they are going to pages that have weak relevance.

Which means, we should be able to get our homepage up to #1 for that phrase easier than breaking into the top #3 of “bible study lessons”.

What Percentage Of Searchers Click On The #1 Googe Link?

I pulled this screenshot from a presentation by Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz.  I’m not sure where he got it, but he’s smarter than me at this stuff, and he did draw it, so I’ll use it.

Essentially, 70% of all clicks go to the first 4 positions.

So getting to #1 for “hebrew word study” = 2772 visits per month (42% of 6600)

Versus, getting to #3 for “bible study lessons” = 3960 visits per month (8% of 49,500)

“Bible study lessons” visits could yield about 40% more traffic.  But, I estimate the competition to be much more difficult to get into #3 spot than #1 for “hebrew word study”.

Secondly, a “hebrew word study” visitor is more likely to be at home on SkipMoen.com than a “bible study lessons” visitor.

This is where it be good to revisit step 3b and do some PPC testing I guess.  More to come…

Your Comments Welcome!

Which would you choose?  Please leave a comment and help me figure this out.  Cheers

Update

I haven’t looked at this in like a year, but I decided to check the results.  SkipMoen.com has been ranking in the top 5 on G for “hebrew word studies” for the past 6 months.

Mission semi-accomplished.  The real question is, do those searchers do anything?

Well, according the the Analytics snapshot for the past 30 days, google.com is only the 5th highest referrer, and none of the keyword search terms are “hebrew word study.”

Meanwhile, Facebook sends ~6 times the amount of traffic than google.com.  (That’s likely to be friends sharing Today’s Word on their wall, and their friends finding it interesting, and clicking through to read the whole article.)

Which leads me to my next point, would everyone please STFU about SEO and focus more on “persuasive momentum” — that being, create an insanely great “product” that consumers will love so much, they’ll share / recommend it to their friends.

Btw, please read my update to the end of this post regarding my experience with ThinkBigSites where I decided to stop chasing the golden goose.

This is a follow up post to my 5 Steps to SEO Domination…

Well, we’ve been doing some ninja things behind the scenes to get magnesium supplements to the top of Lord Google.  (Not quite ready to unveil my secrets, but I will soon.)

Checking my Authority Labs website ranking reports this afternoon, I noticed for the first time that we’re at #1 on Yahoo.

Certainly not the traffic monster that Lord G is, but great to see the progress!

Kudos to Authority Labs for making it VERY simple to focus on keywords for a domain, and then chart the progress.  Thanks guys!!

I just put together a website for The Desert Party Band.  (This is a live band in Scottsdale Arizona that Ashley and I started.)

When I bought the desertpartyband.com domain initially, I figured I would use WordPress since that’s what I was most familiar with.  (I used Page.ly, the easiest wordpress webhost of all times…OF ALL TIMES…and documented Page.ly’s super simple setup process.)

But then my new site sat stale for 3 months because I couldn’t find a “band” template that I liked.  And of course, there’s always other things to get done.

Along the way, I realized a blog content management system (CMS) isn’t really what I wanted anyways, because DesertPartyBand.com isn’t meant to be a blog.

I realized what I really wanted was a “billboard” website.

Enter Weebly, The Easiest Way to Web

I first heard about Weebly about 2 years ago.  I saw it and thought, “Wow, that sure is simple.”  And then I never thought about it again.

Being in a hurry to get a site and some basic content online for The Desert Party Band’s first gig on New Year’s Eve, I flew through grabbing a template, uploading a logo/header, and writing some basic content.

Screen Shots of Weebly

Here’s a few screen shots for another work-in-progress idea — ForkMeDaily.com — that I put together while writing this post.  Killed two birds with one stone.

Sign Up For Weebly Free

Free accounts get 2 sites for free and have to keep the “This site hosted for free by Weebly” footer tag.  But if you go Pro for ONLY $28 for 6 months, you get up  to 10 websites and can remove the footer tag.  There’s a couple other nifty things as well.

My Verdict

Weebly is the perfect low-tech solution for people like me who used to buy domains for so called *brilliant* ideas, and then do nothing with them.  Now at least I can put up a simple landing page. Easy, easy, EASY!

Jigsaw Health — superior proprietor of magnesium supplements — just launched a new campaign for busy customers; Text Us Your Order.  Here’s how we used Google Voice to make this work.

Step 1 – Get an invite & sign up.

My friend Bryan Eisenberg sent me his very last Google Voice invite.  I signed up and chose a local phone number so I could get a dedicated phone line for customers to text us their order.

Btw, my “invite a friend” link hasn’t appeared in my Google Voice account yet, so you’re on your own.  Request a Google Voice invite here.

Step 2 – Forward SMS to Email

We chose to forward text messages to help@jigsawhealth.com, our catch-all inbox that several people monitor.

Step 3 – Forward the Phone to our Work Phone

We chose to forward the Google Voice number to our main work number which rings to a “hunt group” so any number of us could answer the phone if a customer chose to call instead of text their order.

Step 4 – Receive Text Orders

Step 5 – Reply to Text Using Google Voice!

This was probably my favorite part.  It allows any one of my employees to interact with customers via text, using the Google Voice web interface, instead of your cell phone!

One downside…

…is that everyone has to login to a single Google account.  That means they have to log out of their own Google account first.  It’s sort of inconvenient.  I would love to see Google add a feature for adding different accounts, similar to Google Analytics, Adwords, etc.

But it’s free, so I ain’t gonna complain!

Announce To Our Customers

We put together this video and a page explaining how returning Jigsaw Health customers can text their order to us.

In the middle of this article about How Jason Fried Works, I read the best summary ever about why software and websites tend to get worse over time as they gain more customers…

I spend another good portion of my day thinking about how to make things less complicated. [You could sum up Jason Fried's philosophy as "less is more." Except that he hates that expression, because, he says, it still "implies that more is better." Fried prefers "less is less."] In the software world, the first, second, and third versions of any product are really pretty good, because everyone can use them. Then companies start adding more and more stuff to keep their existing customers happy. But you end up dying with your customer base, because the software is too complicated for a newcomer. We keep our products simple. I’d rather have people grow out of our products, as long as more people are growing into them.

Jason, you’d rather have people “grow out” of your products rather than keep them prisoner for life?  Brilliant design principle methinks.

Jason Fried started 37 Signals, a company of radical bad-assery.  I’ve been using Basecamp, their flaghsip project management software, a ton lately.  And just stumbled upon Haystack yesterday.  What will these dudes think of next?

There I was, minding my own business on woot.com and I saw a banner ad for PennyPurses.com with the caption, “Designer handbags for pennies. Really.” (paraphrased)

Even though I’m all filled up on man bags at the moment, curiosity got the best of me and I clicked through to check it out.  After reading a few pages, I decided I would sign up and try it out because it just seemed too damn good to be true!

Well, in summary, it pretty much is.

Here’s the review I posted to their Facebook Fan page:

The item I’m bidding on, and will surely lose.

Comments are now open for jokes about me bidding on purses.  But you have to buy a package of “100 Comment Credits” for $65 for me to publish them.