Transcript:
Hey folks. My name is Charles Lumpkin. Today I want to talk to you about something that I’ve been working on for quite some time, and it’s really powerful. This is the valuation formula that I’ve derived, so that you can understand—before you get into a transaction—exactly what’s there. It will allow you to pick apart the constituent pieces and parts of an online business. So that you make sure you acquire a site, and that you’re not going to get dealt with.

So, let’s get into the formula. Here’s the whole thing. Now, let’s get into the constituent pieces and parts. Essentially we’ve got the domain value, and the rest of this formula is about the cash flow and understanding the cash flow. Cash flow as you very well know is revenue minus cost. Profit. Then below each of the “Domain Value” and the “Cash Flow” we have the “Discount Value.”

Now we’re going to get into the deeper parts of these, each piece, in later videos, so stay tuned, but I do want to talk very quickly about the time value of money. You probably already know this, but a dollar today is worth more than a year from now. I can take a dollar today and invest it at 10% and have a dollar and ten cents a year from now.

So, understanding this, a dollar and ten cents a year from now is worth a dollar today. When we’re looking at a series of cash flows into the future that a business produces, we have to discount those by a certain rate and take them into present value. This entire formula is a discounted cash flow analysis of a business.

Stay tuned for the rest of the pieces and parts. This is exciting stuff. I love this stuff.

Again, my name is Charles Lumpkin and you can find more of me at CharlesLumpkin.com Thank you.

Transcript:
Hey folks. My name is Charles Lumpkin. Today I want to talk to you about acquiring sites. What I mean by this is how and why you should acquire your competition to increase your market share in the search space and really, REALLY crush it and dominate it online.

This is not for the faint of heart. There’s a couple of ways that you can go about an acquisition strategy. You’ve got one way, which is doing site acquisitions from an investment perspective, but what we’re going to talk about right now is site acquisitions from a marketing perspective. So, gathering more and more market share.

Now, this is not for the faint of heart. You need to have been in paid search, run your tests, gone into SEO, and you’re dominating it there. Now you just want MORE. This is an extremely effective technique at this. Now hopefully over the course of however long you’ve been running your business, you’ve also been running tests on conversion (your shopping cart or your lead funnel process or whatever it is. So that your conversion is better than your competition. So that whenever you take that site and evaluate it (we’re going to talk about ways of evaluating sites in future videos) and you take that traffic and rehab it into something that’s really effective. Then you loop this back around, you get more shelf space on the engines.

So, think about this as a technique. We’ve got some interesting stuff coming ahead.

Again, my name is Charles Lumpkin. You can find more of me at CharlesLumpkin.com Thank you.

Transcript:
Hey folks. My name is Charles Lumpkin. Today we’re going to talk about the Relevancy Spectrum.

The example that I use is with paintings. First, a lot of people just put a bunch of keywords that they think are related into an ad group. Then they’re disappointed with the performance. This is why you should be concerned with the relevancy spectrum.

The example I use all the time is this. You’re trying to sell a painting by Monet. So you may have this specific painting’s name. Then you may have “Paintings by Monet” or “Monet Paintings.” Then you have a little further out, you have “painter” maybe it’s “Monet.” A little further out you have “paint.” Ok, so it’s “paint,” “painter,” “painting,” “Monet painting,” and the specific painting name.

Now the question is, how relevant are each of these things to you. The further out that you get, the less and less relevant it gets. Then, a lot of times you see stuff that’s completely irrelevant out there. It just completely erodes the results of your particular campaign.

When you’re constructing your campaign, if you’re just starting out, you probably want to stay pretty tight around the relevancy spectrum. Just around the product or services that you’re looking for. Then you can start to go a little further out and a little further out testing into them. In fact, the better your conversion gets, the more you can come out in the relevancy spectrum. The more you can eat your competitors’ lunch. Think about the relevancy spectrum and how it applies to you.

My name is Charles Lumpkin. You can find more of me at CharlesLumpkin.com. Thank you.

Transcript:
Hey folks. My name is Charles Lumpkin. I appreciate you spending some time with me today. Today we’re going to talk about shelf space theory.

Ken Robbins, the president of Response Mine, where I used to work, used to always say this: “It’s like you walk into a grocery store. You go down the cereal isle, and there you have all these different cereals. Unbeknownst to you, yes, they look like all these different cereals, but half of them are owned by General Mills.” That’s Shelf Space Theory in the grocery store.

Now let’s talk about that as it relates to the search page. So, the anatomy of the search page, as you know, is that on the left hand side you have all these natural search listings. Across the top and on the right you have the paid listings. The simplest form of shelf spacing is when you know the particular term is very profitable for you, and you’ve been running it in paid search. Now you’re going to optimize for it in SEO, so you have two spaces there on the page. What we’re talking about is taking up more and more screen real estate.

There are more things you can do to improve and get more and more shelf space. Things like down lining deals to affiliates. There’s a whole variety of different ways.

So shelf space theory is that if you have a particularly good pot of gold, mine it more aggressively.

Again, my name is Charles Lumpkin, and you can find more of me at CharlesLumpkin.com Thank you.

Transcript:
Hey folks. My name is Charles Lumpkin. Today we’re going to talk about Microsoft Bing. I LOVE ME SOME BING.

Bing is one of the most efficient platforms out there right now. It’s so much cheaper than Google. In fact, I want to go so far as to say that, yes, you should start your search marketing efforts with paid search, but you should start your search marketing efforts with Microsoft Bing instead of Google.

Here’s why. Google is crazy expensive these days. I can hardly find a $0.25 click on the whole of Google. You can on Bing, and you can find them in mass in the right campaigns.

So, start your search marketing efforts with Bing. It can be an order of magnitude cheaper. 10x cheaper or 20x cheaper, and a lot of the regulations aren’t so locked down against the advertiser. It’s a great platform to start your efforts with, and I highly recommend Microsoft Bing. If you haven’t opened an account, go there right now and start your search marketing efforts.

Again, I’m Charles Lumpkin, and you can find more of me at charleslumpkin.com. Thanks for your time.

Transcript:
Hey folks. My name is Charles Lumpkin. Today we’re talking about “Match Typing.” Match typing is a further segmentation. Believe it or not, a keyword is not the end all be all. There are different ways to split it up.

The three common match types on both Google and MSN are “broad,” “phrase,” and “exact” match types. “Broad” means that if you advertise on a keyword like “photo” it will show up for stuff like “photo umbrellas,” “blue photo” “red photo” and “photo of a girl.” Then you have “phrase matching. Phrase matching is denoted with double quotes. So if you have “photo umbrella” what it’s looking for is the phrase “photo umbrella” anywhere contiguously in the search. You might show up for a key term like “The little girl carried a photo umbrella” and that would be awesome. You wouldn’t show up for just “photo” and you certainly wouldn’t show up for “black umbrella.” The third type is an “exact match” and is denoted with brackets around it. This says show me only when someone searches for “photo umbrella” and nothing else. Not “red photo umbrella” not “blue photo umbrella” and not “umbrella photo” only “photo umbrella” exactly.

On Google you can choose which of these you’d like to show up on. You can do the same on MSN as well. On Google what you should actually do is that it allows you to put in a destination URL in for each match type for each particular keyword. What that allows you to do is actually optimize not just on the keyword level, but on the match type level. You can get tremendous efficiency out of this. So, if you’re only advertising on one match type, what I encourage you to try is to go out and advertise on all three match types, track them separately, and bid each to its wherewithal to provide conversion to your site. Ok, that’s Google. Now let’s talk about Yahoo.

Yahoo’s match types are “Standard” and “Advanced.” You can think of it as advanced is sort of like broad, and standard is sort of like exact. On Yahoo, you have to pick either one or the other. I start off with “standard” matches and if the keyword is performing pretty well for me, then I’ll flip that keyword onto “advanced” match. Now let’s move on to MSN.

On MSN again you have “broad” “phrase” and “exact.” Here on MSN you don’t have the ability to split out the traffic and segment it further. You can bid on one of them for a particular keyword, but you only get one destination URL for that keyword. So it’s not destination URL at the match type. It’s destination URL at the keyword. So what I generally do is turn on all three match types and put the destination URL in there. Then you’re copasetic.

I hope that helps you out. Again my name is Charles Lumpkin. You can find more of me at CharlesLumpkin.com Thank you.

Transcript:
Hey folks. My name is Charles Lumpkin. I appreciate you spending some time with me today. We’re going to talk about common landing page test types. Now, why even test landing pages? What we’re talking about is trying to get the conversion rate up on our pages. More conversion equals more money in the bank, which is what we’re looking for in online marketing.

So, what are the common landing page test types? The two most common are split testing and multi-variant testing. I’m going to get deep into split testing right now and save multi-variant testing for a later video.

In a split test, you have two or more versions of a particular landing page. When you’re initially starting out with a new campaign or a new test you want to make sure that these different variations are as different as possible, as they can be from one another. You really want to go as far out as you can with different ideas. So brainstorm and think of some really cool stuff, but when you put them out there, what you’re going to do is run half the traffic through each lander.

One of those is going to produce results that are better than the others. Again, you need to be tracking this stuff and have the proper analytics in place. At the end of the day, one is going to work better than the other. From that point on, that becomes your control. Then if you want to continue to do more split tests, you bring in more variations. Does this control continue to win? Who knows, you’ve got to do the tests.

Thanks for spending some time with me today. Again, my name is Charles Lumpkin. You can find more of me at CharlesLumpkin.com. Thank you.

Transcript:
Hey folks. My name is Charles Lumpkin. Today we’re talking about social proof and social easing, but before we get started, there are some plumbers that have been watching the videos. They’ve told me that my “Google Toilet Bowl Plumb” is in fact the “Google Toilet Ball Float.” So to be precise and correct, that’s what it is. I appreciate that, guys.

Now, let’s talk about social proof and social easing. First, “social proof” is one of the most effective things to improve conversion that you can possibly do. Social proof is stuff like testimonials. So it gives… You have great products and services, and you have people who will want to be evangelists for you. They do it sometimes without you knowing, and they’ll be happy to give you testimonials. These kinds of testimonials give people an anchor point through which they can relate to your products and services. “Hey, this guy is just like me. Has the same problems, and hopefully this is the right solution for me. He says so, and I believe him.” So it’s not just coming from you, but it’s coming from a third party who likes your products and services, rightfully so.

Now, social easing is taking social proof and massaging it in a different way. Social easing has to do with taking people from social networks and getting them into a conversion mindset. So, if you’ve got someone who is on a social network—We’ll talk in later videos about using Facebook PPC and other media platforms. If you take someone form a social network then they’re in a social mindset. Someone on a search engine is not always, but they’re definitely more inclined to be in a commercial mindset, ready to buy something.

If you’re going to take someone from a social network, you’ve got to take them and convert them from a social mindset into a commercial mindset, and you do that through a process I call “social easing.”

You see this done a lot in the affiliate world. It’s taking someone and putting them on a page that is laden with social proof about your particular product. You want this to be valid stuff from your valid customers. You take it and you show them “Hey, it’s not me saying it. It’s my customers.” When you present that in that type of mind frame, it’s that process of easing someone from a social-mindset into a commercial-mindset. It can be a powerful aid to conversion.

So again, my name is Charles Lumpkin. You can find more of me at CharlesLumpkin.com. Thanks for your time.

Transcript:
Hey folks. My name is Charles Lumpkin. I appreciate you spending some time with me today. I want to talk to you about “Google and the Toilet Plumb Theory.” Ok?

I’m not sure if it’s called a “plumb” but it’s the thing that’s in the back of the toilet tank that goes up as the water rises. So essentially, if you’re new to the search engine game, over the last couple of years, we’ve seen prices—CPC prices—increase at a rate of 25% per year for the last couple of years. In a lot of markets, Google has sucked up the profit out of them. So a lot of the profit that’s going into those markets is going in fact to the Big G.

It used to be back in the day that you had no trouble going out there and finding ten cent, fifteen cent, twenty-five cent, thirty-five cent clicks to go out and run tests with. It was great. You could run tests. You could make sure things are working. You can amp it up. Maybe you might even pay a dollar or two dollars if it’s worth it.

Over the last couple of years Google has done things in their algorithm that has raised the water level in that tank. There’s nothing, in a lot of regards, that we can do except to be that bulb on the top, the plumb that just rises with the water. So, it’s something that you need to watch out for. It’s a lot of the reason why I encourage people to try other channels as a primary channel of entry now.

So, that’s a tip. I hope you found it useful. My name is Charles Lumpkin and you can find more of me at CharlesLumpkin.com. Thank you.

Transcript:
Hey folks. My name is Charles Lumpkin. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Today I want to talk about Facebook’s pay-per-click platform. It is really good. If you haven’t tried it yet, it’s pretty phenomenal in some markets. Let me tell you some of the common mistakes that people make. The most common mistake that people make is that they start up a campaign and do some targeting, then they do one ad, and a lot of times they don’t even put an image in that ad. That’s the mistake that you’re making… Starting with a single ad.

Let me tell you the correct procedure to enter the market. I call this the “Ngo Method” because I learned this from a guy, Charles Ngo who is a good friend of mine and an amazing ninja-marketer online. So here’s the “Ngo Method.” You start out with not one, but ten ads, and it’s the same headline and ad text on every single ad, but you have 10 different images. So what you’re doing is a 10-way creative split on the image. At the end of that test, and it won’t take long to do because there’s a lot of volume on Facebook. It will probably take a day or two in earnest. One of these ads is going to perform precipitously better than the others. From that point on, this is the “Control-Creative.”

Now you take that control-creative and do another 10 ads based on that. This time you’re going change out the headline based on that. This time you’re going to change out the headline. Keep the image and the ad-text the same and change out the headline. At the end of that test you’ll have a new control, or maybe the same control, but you’ll do the same thing, but instead of the ad headline, you’re going to test ad text.

So you’ve gone through 30 split variations over a very short period of time. At the end of this, you’re going to have a really efficient creative. It’s called a super-creative because it’s so efficient, and it’s gone through so much testing. So you take that super-creative and you scale it back out to all the different targets and segments that you’re trying to experiment with. This is a really efficient way. So, instead of starting off with one little ad that might get a 0.03 to a 0.06 percent click through rate. You might end up with something that has a greater than 1 percent click through rate. Why is that important? The clicks are cheap! I mean it is amazingly related to the higher the click through rate, definitely, the cheaper the clicks. I mean you can drain $0.03 and $0.05 clicks in mass, which is awesome.

So, I hope you like that tip. My name is Charles Lumpkin, and you can find more of me at CharlesLumpkin.com. Thank you.