Episode #117 – Josh London on Using Magic and PPC to Grow His Clients’ Businesses

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John McIntyre: It’s John McIntyre here, the auto responder guy. I’m here with Josh London. Now Josh came to me through Mic-masters I think, this is first time we started chatting was probably … is if you’ve been in my community probably in the email  … welcome to the family and that goes through everything and it gets people to reply. So, Josh replies says you sales from the work on the and then he asked PayPal or credit finding a bit of an email ping pong back in forth eventually during Mic masters, got some great results with and then we started chatting about some of what he was doing which was pay-per-click advertising which we’re going to talk about today with the other interesting things. He’s a magician and I watched one of his videos and really cool tricks. Maybe he’ll share a bit about that today as well. Josh! How are you man?

Josh London: I am doing fantastic, how’re you doing John?

John McIntyre: Pretty good man! So, let’s before we get into the some of the pay per click stuff because you are advertising guy and you can be original because you, I haven’t done many, I have done a few interviews with traffic guys, Justin Broke is one of them but it hasn’t really been my focus despite the fact that traffic is a huge factor in someone success or failure. So, again to that, before we do that can you give the listener a bit of a background on who you are and what you do?

Josh London: I am actually a magician. That was my first job. When I was 5 my mom got me a magic kit and I learned all the tricks and started charging kids 5 cents to come see a magic show and it grow from there and when I was in high school I get kicked out of class for playing with my cards and gambling and things like that and then when I was 16 I got my first big break with Sony, I did a corporate show for them for their holiday party. Did some… and magic and … of magic and it grew from there and I ended up traveling so much in my twenties and wake up in a hotel room I wouldn’t know what city I was in. I had to look at my antennary and then I just got burned out. I had to stop, I was on the road all the time, never home and I decided to become a paramedic and went to school and became a paramedic. Did that for a few years and got burned out from that again and decided to go back to the magic because I could talk shows on the weekends and make quick money and travel a little bit, so did that and I figured out the unit was much more than it is now and you have to advertise, you have to get your rankings up, you have to get found, you have to take into consideration user experience, convergence, all this stuff I’d no idea what to do? So, I decided to try out Adwords and I tried it out. I think about $1,500 in a couple weeks, like two weeks decided to stay with Adwords because I could see the potential of it and learned how to do. So, I got Perry Marshal’s book. I also got an eBook the definitive guide on Ad Words. Talk myself how to do Adwords. Now, I am a Certified Ad Words professional and now I manage Adwords for people. I also do SEO for people. Build some websites on the side and slowly cutting out the magic shows, but I still perform shows when there is a great opportunity.

John McIntyre: Nice, very cool, so you’re still doing magic now a little bit too.

Josh London: Not so much. It’s the marketing and freelancing is taking over the magic, which is pretty cool because I get to home and play on the computer, play with my daughter and I don’t get to be in…

John McIntyre: So, now you also click and grow profit which is your you know you’re helping business increase revenue online with managing the pay-per-click and tell me bit about that because pay-per-clicks has been around for ten or fifteen years. So, it’s definitely not a new way of generating traffic to a website. So, what are you seeing right now, like what’s pay-per-click and why is it working, like what’s working right now?

Josh London: Well pay per click is you set up an ad and you could do it in Adwords, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest is rolling their program. LinkedIn has theirs, but you set up an ad, you drive traffic to the ad and then you drive traffic to a landing page. What I’m seeing now and the reason that I love pay-per-click so much is that you are able to control your own destiny, if you can create an ad and optimize that ad, so it matches the users intend and it matches exactly what they’re searching for, what they need. It answers all their questions and you deliver it to them, then you buy a … Now, I know you’re in the email marketing and was Mic-masters, I think it’s awesome fact. I made a couple hundred dollars my first day with one of your template email which is pretty awesome. You know one thing that I am finding that works really well for me is especially when I do magic ads. I have a few entertainer clients and also some ecommerce clients, but the customers come … for magicians. They’re not ready to buy right then and there. So, what I do is I do a lot of email marketing. I have the pop up. I use often monster. I have all the strategies; I just got started with drip. I used to be on Mail Chimp, so excited about that but I capture now I dress put it in a funnel and even though they’re not ready to buy now, I know that they’re going to be able to buy in the future and then if they still don’t buy, I’m still remarketing to them so I’m showing that ads as they are browsing on the website. I do retargeting. So, if they’re on Facebook they see my ads, I know that there in the market for a magician or the product or service, so I drive traffic to the landing page and then I’m pretty sure usually they’re not going to buy, sometimes they would, sometimes they won’t, but I bet on them not buying and then that’s where all the magic starts and I re-target re-market and put my brand front of them.

John McIntyre: Okay, because when I think objection that people have especially if they been around, you know they have been in internet games for a while as the pay-per-click because it has been around for ten years or fifteen years, it’s very competitive and because the ads operate on an auction basis they you know when it’s competitive to price it gets higher and higher and higher. So, there are a lot of people I think you can’t make pay-per-click work right now because it’s just too expensive. So, what do you find it?

Josh London: Yeah you know it’s really expensive and when we compare it with Facebook it add crisis to Adwords you’ll find that Facebook is often cheaper, so it all depends on what your customers are and what stage in the buying cycle they’re at? There’s different stages people search for, if someone goes it in types in to Google buy a TV they’re obviously in one of the stage of the buying cycles, so you’re gonna show then more ads, you’re gonna raise your prices, you’re bidding if someone is searching for Samsung TV v/s Sony TV, you are going to show them a different ad and a different landing page because there is different buying cycle, so it all depends on what your goals are and what product and service you’re selling and who your customers are and where they’re at and you could just set up ads and throw money at it, but you land up losing a bunch of money like I did.

John McIntyre: Right, right, so it’s sounds like many answers with lot of stuff is it depends and one thing I have found with I mean in business one of the best things you can do is just make more money per customer and this is what I think Perry Marshal mention that anyone is in advertising will mention this idea of whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins. So, if I spend 10000 thousand you can only spend a thousand … ads spend you on Google Adwords, so people think that the traffic is paying 20 dollars a click but that’s just way too expensive to make it work and the answer is no, it’s that’s not how it works actually because you as the business owner or the entrepreneur you actually have the freedom to create more products and create more expensive products and help your customer even more, because the more you help them the more you can charge, more profit you have which then means more you can afford the advertise and more you can afford and help people. So, one idea that I have been playing with my own head and they are selling … you know the mindset that we go into with paid advertising is that the more money we make, more profit we actually make, gross profit the more we are able to help people, more able to serve people and some people will try and make you know if I charge at least you know it’s more fair or it’s better because more people have access to this and in many cases it’s actually the other way around, if you don’t charge enough you not going to have enough to go and do more advertising to reach more people, but you’re also yourself you going to go out of business and you’re not going to stay in keep doing for very long, so the other … you could have helped if you charge more they are not going to be available, they are not going to be there for you. So, I think this is a bit of a tangency, but it’s just showing to keep in mind when you coming up pay-per-click any kind of advertising especially AdWords because it’s expensive. Is that you need to charge more if you can’t afford it the best thing you can do is not just jumping do some different Facebook method or declare that Adwords doesn’t work for you, a better method would be to figure out how to make more money per person.

Josh London: Yeah, I totally agree and  you know with the way you know all the search engine algorithm changes are growing you know the Google just launched a future unit tomorrow on the 21st of April, the mobile algorithm change and you know I don’t want my web sites to be on top of Google like they are on right now if you’re to Google Josh London magician or San Diego magician, I show up four to five times on the first page of Google and that’s just organic listings, but I really like the fact that I control my own destiny with Adwords and with ads because  I’m not subject to the algorithm changes, I still do SEO stuff. I still try and build quality lanes, great quality content but I’m in this for the long term, the long game and you know if Adwords is right for you, it really could be a game-changer because you get all the benefits driving traffic to your website and even if they bound you still have the opportunity to re-market, re-target to them and it’s a huge advantage for marketers today.

John McIntyre: Okay and it’s as simple you know I think one of the best things if someone wants to get into this, the actual nitty-gritty of setting up a campaign like this is going to be best cover, it’s a one of several of Perry Marshal’s book. So, we don’t need to go too much into the tactical aspects of it, but what are some of the biggest lessons or key insights that you’ve had over the last few years, whether it’s from you know one of Perry’s books or other course of book that you’ve been through or something you’ve learned, what some of the moments when something’s not really working and then something clicks the light bulb goes on and you got oh! Now, I have got it and you try and it works and you sort of have that leveling up the catalyst for and you go from you know you double your results, you triple your future results or something like that.

Josh London: Yeah you know oftentimes people will hire me to manage their AdWords accounts because they don’t know what they’re doing or they have an idea of what they’re doing but they’re not doing it right and when I take over their accounts that I manage it for him, the first thing I do is I look at their settings in their AdWords campaigns and oftentimes what I’ll see is that there’s two types of settings when you first start a campaign. There is a standard setting which Google recommends and then there is enable all features settings. A lot of people just go with the standard settings because it has parentheses Google recommends this right after that and they don’t know that there are a lot of other options available to them when they choose all features. So, one of the big things that I see in the whole features that really worked well is testing ads and that’s not available in the standard features, so when you scroll down after you click all feature enable features is rotate ads indefinitely and what this means is that instead of Google showing what they think to be your top performing ad, they show all of your ads evenly. So, if one person goes to Google on searches for your product or service they see ad (A) and then another person goes they see ad (B) and then  back to ad (A) and that back and forth back and this is so beneficial to advertisers, because you get to create two ads and then you get to test them head-to-head which one is the winner which one is the loser after you correct the right amount of data you pick a winner to loser and then you create an even better ad to try and beat the winner. What this ends up doing is bringing your quality score down, here click through rate increases your cost per click goes down, because you’re telling Google and you’re proving to Google that your keywords matches your ads and your ads matches your landing pages because you’re answering the searchers question and that’s the real goal is to answer the questions of the user. That’s one thing I’m seeing a lot of people don’t view and it’s a simple setting up a new campaign or adjusting their campaign.

John McIntyre: Okay interesting, interesting. I mean this is such a huge thing with one aspect appeal about you know traffic paid, paid basic paid advertising campaigns is that you typically go and spend it could be you know one thousand dollars or five thousand dollars or in some cases I am sure people will spending you know 10-20-50 thousand dollars before they even breaking even, but it’s the process of investing that money and testing where you actually find out what works and that you know when I tell clients when I work with them is that you know most campaigns than very rarely does a campaign you know hit by you know profitable out of the gate you know the day you set it up. What typically has to happen is you test a new test, a new test, so you know you run the campaign, you spent $1000 and you try to results and then you run again and again and again, so what you talking about with the split testing is we can just automate this inside of Adwords, right.

Josh London: Yeah exactly!

John McIntyre: And that’s the useful … and then so where this gets interesting then you can use software like something like vwr.com and then you can split test every other page in your funnel as well and then what you find is the ideal pot, the ideal ad, the ideal landing page, the ideal thank you page, the ideal sales page for the product and the different up sales pages that you have, so you’re actually tracking five different split test at once and then once you find out the ideal combination of those it can you know you can go from you know losing fifty percent of the money every time, you spend the $100 and you lose 50 to you know doubling or tripling your money.

Josh London: Yeah!

John McIntyre: And the other thing to notice with this is, I don’t know if you’ve played around much with this, but the paid traffic is very much typically what you want to do is when you going you know buy the traffic you want to monetize that traffic usually as quickly as possible, not necessarily be profitable with it but … products straightaway to recoup at least some or ideally most of your Ad spend, right.

Josh London: Yeah, you know when I think of the word buy, I don’t always think about you know money, money in exchange for something. I like to think of buying something as … to my email list.  You know I think that’s use the money is in the list as you know and to get them into my voice and be able to target markets further that’s way more valuable. I’ve had people opting to all kinds of lists, not only for my magic stuff, but also my other clients. It’s in ecommerce stuff and you know they don’t buy anything right now, but I’ve had people a year away, two years away hire me for a show and it’s all because they’ve been on my email list, they get my monthly emails and you know they know me, they like me, they trust me and when the time comes and some one of their friends is all we need a magician and we need some entertainment we are whom they are going to think of me, because I’m top of money and that’s more valuable and that’s you know it cost me a dollar and half for that click. So, was it worth it, yeah because I make $1,500 from it.

John McIntyre: That’s interesting too. I think when you can buy like advertising … do that much. When you can buy like you know emails marketing just … someone for you know permanently. It really gets half when this brings up another thing that I have noticed with people is that they everything that ask about how many email should you have auto responder and it’s a valid question people want to know what do I have … or weeks worth or a month worth and the answer is you know when I look at like this is certain point where people start opening your email probably one on one subscribe after 6 months. This is something like that, but genuinely speaking the way need to look at it, the way I tell people they need to look at their list and their email marketing is that it’s an ongoing. It’s not that you if you haven’t heard from you know one of your friends for 6 months you don’t you know … try to call few times then have an answer to your phone, you don’t just drop them completely and it’s a case of yeah you might call them up again you know some point of future hit them up on Face book and say you know Join a hang out to dinner, I am in town again let’s go out and watch a movie and I like you having this attitude teaching you would have this attitude where you have your auto responder you know ten days or thirty days or something like that, but you also do is you have this mindset that any of these people could buy today or in a month or in six months or in two years or in five years or in 10 years and that’s literally how to get you know some people will buy in six months. The majority will buy early, but over time it’s sort of the email can become this thing when you’re building a dynamic relations back and forth that’s right find out the … because I get people to reply to my emails and then I reply to them and then so they feel like that when they’re getting my emails they’re engaging and writing with a real person, this isn’t just a company’s blasting ad emails, they’re engaging with someone who’s one of their friends, their buddy, something like that.

Josh London: Yeah true your emails when I signed up and they worked on me and I know what I’m doing you know I know about email marketing, I don’t know obviously as much as you do that’s why I signed up for Mic-master’s and I’ve been a member now for 10 months and have already made money, I mean come on that’s amazing you know your emails and the way craft them is fantastic and they do they work and you got me in your funnel and good to know now I am a customer, I’m talking to you on this podcast. We’re having an awesome time, you going to come down to San Diego for a beer and you know it’s awesome and now you are going to create new products and hey! John got a new product out, I’m probably going to buy, because I know what stuff works and that’s what this is all about and you know if you’re thinking about starting an AdWords and you know starting your own advertising campaign whether on Face book Twitter whatever you know the main thing that keep in mind is that you will see results right away almost immediately, like your long-term benefits of doing it the right way and combining all these different marketing methods with email marketing, auto responders, product launches, AdWords, retargeting, remarketing, combining all of those things together is where the real magic happens and that’s where you really start to see your ROI, your revenue increase.

John McIntyre: Alright about pay-per-click as well as someone who just started like straight away like you said you can set up a campaign and you are getting traffic immediately, which you know it’s a great thing if you want to get started quickly, but a lot of people you know if they want to start and never done this before, they want to start blog in two years later finally stopped making some money problem is though it happens very quickly which also means you can lose money very quickly. So, if someone helps you, if someone … you know I am going to typically get a funnel, I have got a blog, I have got stuff like that, but never really played around with pay-per-click. What sort of you know genuinely words or warning or tips that you would give them.

Josh London: I will say try it. First of all try the whole thing about Adwords is they bill you every, I think when you first start out they bill you every two hundred and fifty dollars. So, you have to spend $250 in clicks or 30 days whichever comes sooner. So, when you start advertising more your billing rate increases, so that it increases like $500 and then a thousand or something like that, so it’s not like you’re going to set up a campaign and you know get a bill for $3000 a week later. What will happen is you’ll set up a campaign and I always suggest that if you’re getting to do these yourselves, start slow. Know that this is a long-term learning process where you are learning the ins and outs of the very intricate and complex system that’s constantly moving and changing, so start out with one campaign. Set up one Ad group, make it super focused Ad group, super focus keywords and really focus that and start out with exact matches. You can get into phrase matching or you’ve been broad match modifiers if you, so broad match modifiers are: we have a keyword like let’s say San Diego magician and you put a plus sign in front of magician that means that my Ad is going to be shown to a broader spectrum of people that are searching for like a magician has to begin the search terms, so it could be someone puts in like corporate magician or birthday party magician, my ad will show. So, I recommend when you first start out, try and make your targeting as targeted as possible, as precise as possible and then what you do is you start the broader now and you brought it out with your keywords, you make them more broad and then you make your ads more broad as you start to get data and conversions and never make a change on your AdWords account unless the data tells you to. If you are seeing that one ad is performing really well, one ad isn’t then you change your ad if keywords isn’t working create a new campaign, create a new ad group, stay very targeted and very precise and what that does is that it keep your costs down. It keeps your cost per click down and your budget down and it keeps your quality score up and who will reward you for all of that. So, when you’re first starting out just stay really targeted, keep it small and then increase your budget, increase your keyword bids and go on from there.

John McIntyre: Absolutely, I think it’s cool, I mean it’s really important that while you can lose money quickly you can set a daily budget $10 or $20 unless you make a mistake and set it up wrong, you’re not going to go into you know wake up one morning to a $10,000 bill, but it does, you really need to see, really you need to make sure when you set up the campaign that you haven’t, but you’ve got that … So, then you wake up you find $50 and another time $10 or whatever it is you come to with another time, if you are spending …it’s just going to take longer to get results to find out what tests. So, cool! Alright so we’re coming on right on time, but before we go can you know if someone wants to get in touch with you, if they want to talk about some pay-per-click tips and strategies, may be even higher you or may be looking at a magician stuff, where’s the best place and to do all that?

Josh London: Yeah, you can go to clickconvertprofit.com and I have a weekly Sunday dispatch email where I send out weekly tips and tricks and strategies, SEO’s stuff, pay per click stuff and you can sign up there to get those weekly tips. You can learn more about my products and services. There I have an eBook called flying solo that I work for solo premieres on how to get started with making sense of the internet and building your brand online. For my magic stuff you can visit Joshmagic.com and also for San Diego I have a San Diego website called thesandiegomagician.com.

John McIntyre: Very cool! Josh Thanks for coming on the show man.

Josh London: Hey! Thanks John